Booze bravery can lead to a limp show
Dr. Kunio Kitamura is head of the Japan Family Planning Association. He specializes in dealing with issues such as sex, birth control, abortion, puberty worries, sexually transmitted diseases, child-raising (he is a father of five), general gynecology and domestic violence. If he cannot handle directly a problem he has been presented with, he will draw on a wide variety of specialists to provide assistance.
"Before having sex, I'm always so worried that I won't be able to get it up that I have a drink to steady my nerves. But what always started with the intention of being a small tipple ends up being a binge and I drop off into a deep slumber. It either ends up with my girlfriend giving me a hard time, or me getting racked with guilt," a 23-year-old man wrote to me.
Many men use alcohol to either alleviate their anxieties or guilt about sex, or otherwise to boost their libido. Small quantities of alcohol may work wonderfully, but liquor also dulls a variety of sexual abilities.
Drinking alcohol does limit the effect of the cerebral neocortex, the part of the brain that controls rational actions. Booze is also known to activate the limbic cortex, which is where the brain controls emotions and instincts, and makes it easier to become sexually aroused. But how much alcohol does it actually take before sexual performance is affected?
There has been a study on the relationship between blood alcohol content (BAC) and sexual response. It was carried out on male university students who were asked to consume liquor while watching a dirty movie.
Researchers calculated how long it took for the men to become erect and how hard they became. They discovered most penises functioned reasonably well if the BAC was around 0.025 percent, but when the BAC went to 0.05 percent or higher, there was a dramatic decline in the functionality of penises. Men still wanted to have sex, but their bodies weren't responding properly. When the BAC became high -- a figure in the range of 0.03 percent to 0.09 percent -- it took longer to ejaculate through masturbation.
When the amount of alcohol in the blood became too high, it became impossible to achieve an erection. This trend really stands out among men in their late 40s to 50s. There's an interesting study about women's sexuality and alcohol, too. Measuring equipment was inserted into subjects' vagina to see how it responded to sexual arousal before they had been drinking. At the same time, women were asked to watch sexually explicit videos.
Researchers expected the women to become more turned-on the more they drank.This proved to be the case until the subjects' BAC reached a level of about 0.04 percent, when the women became sleepy in addition to their arousal. About two hours after drinking, women also saw an increase of male hormones in their bloodstream. Male hormones accelerate sexual arousal in women.
Booze, therefore, makes women horny, but it also puts them on the way to falling asleep, creating an imbalance between the mind and body. This tendency is most pronounced among ovulating women. Interestingly, the faster a man's BAC rises, the less male hormones he emits.
Male alcoholics destroy the cells in their testes whenever they drink, weakening the flow of male hormones into their bodies. At the same time, the amount of female hormones flowing through them also increases and these men physically become more feminine.
Alcohol can produce secondary feminine sex characteristics like decline of body hair, weaker muscles, atrophy of the testicles, development of women's breasts and, of course, lost libido and impotence.
While I acknowledge alcohol has an effect in relieving stress and aiding recovery from fatigue, I'd like those gentlemen popping in for a quick drink on the way home from work to think about what their drinking may be doing to their sexual performance. (By Dr. Kunio Kitamura, Special to the Mainichi)