The Guide to Getting It On (38 page)

To this day, you can still find Prostateus, who the Romans called Prostate, by sticking a finger about two inches up the male rectum. He’ll be sitting just below the bladder, right where Hera put him. If you reach up a little farther, you will find the two bota bags that Prostateus used to carry his wine in. They are now called the seminal vesicles.

From Marbles to Golf

Take any fourth-grade boy, and you can be pretty sure that his prostate is the size of a marble. If you take his dad, you’re dealing with a prostate the size of a walnut, a small plum, or a golf ball.

If a fourth-grade boy jerks off, he’ll produce only a drop or two of clear sticky fluid. While he can still enjoy the nice feeling of an orgasm, he won’t start to ejaculate until puberty begins. Until then, his small prostate and sleepy seminal vesicles are just a twinkle in the eye of his older, semen-producing self. It will take a jolt of juice from the teenage testicles to make his marble morph into a man-sized gland.

Geography of the Glands

The prostate is located between the bottom of the bladder and the start of the penis. The urethra (tube you pee through) runs through the prostate like the Mississippi runs through the heartland. The prostate wraps around the urethra like a donut around a straw, or your hand around your penis when your partner says, “Not tonight, dear.”

The prostate is made up of smooth muscle fibers, connective tissue, small tubes, and clusters of glands that produce a clear fluid. If you find fruit metaphors helpful, the prostate is like an orange, with a tough skin and pulpy insides. The fluid from the prostate makes up around 30% of each ejaculation. As a guy is starting to ejaculate, the muscle fibers in the prostate squeeze the fluid from the tiny glands into the urethra.

The seminal vesicles are about two inches long. They sit above the prostate on the side of the bladder where the foul winds blow. They are long and narrow like a pair of puffy rabbit ears. The seminal vesicles have special cells that make a gelatin-type of juice that puts the “thick” in semen. The seminal vesicles manufacture about 70% of the volume that’s in each and every wad.

Note:
While the testicles are the master glands of the male pelvis, they contribute no more than 2% to 4% of each ejaculation. The testicles are hugely important when it comes to keeping a male looking like a man, but they don’t produce much of his ejaculate.

Why Girls Drip after Intercourse without a Condom

Did you ever wonder why ejaculate shoots out of the penis thick, but ends up dripping out of a woman’s vagina as she tears out of bed and tries to get to work or class on time? The easiest way to find out why is to have a guy come in a glass. Then sit around and watch. In a few minutes, the thick whitish cum in the glass will start changing into a thin watery fluid. If a woman who’s had intercourse stands up when the ejaculate is in its thin-as-water state, it will drip. And drip.

How come? To find the answer, we’ll need to explore what happens when a man has an ejaculation. When a man is about to come and he reaches the point of no return, a couple of different things happen in his pelvis. It’s like when you pour lime juice, tequila and triple sec into a blender.

There’s a collector part of the urethra that’s located at the base of the penis. It is called the bulbus urethra. When a man is about to have an orgasm, the ingredients that make up semen collect in the bulbus urethra. These ingredients include a tiny squirt of sperm, a big squirt of gelatin juice from the seminal vesicles, and a medium-sized squirt of prostate fluid that contains an enzyme called PSA. (All in all, semen has more than 300 ingredients.)

When the bulbus urethra fills with the different ingredients that make up semen, the pressure seems to trigger the muscles around it to convulse. This sends the wad flying through the penis and out the end: “Houston, we have an ejaculation.”

As for explaining the trick in the glass, the key is the PSA from the prostate: when it mixes with the thick gelatin juice from the seminal vesicles it causes the gelatin juice to change its state from thick to thin. This makes the semen get watery. Scientists think this happens so the semen can more easily be sucked up into the woman’s cervix. Evolutionists will say it’s so other males will smell her dripping vagina and realize that their sperm has been out-competed. Socialists will complain that it’s a capitalist plot to sell more tissue.

Prostate Has the Right Name, But Not the Seminal Vesicles

The prostate was named around 300 B.C. by Herophilus, the father of anatomy. The word prostate supposedly means “guard of the bladder.” The prostate glands that Herophilus studied were fresh and in working order, as he was allowed to do dissections on criminals who were being put to death. Herophilus deserves credit for disseminating correct information about the prostate. This was not the case for those who eventually found and named the seminal vesicles.

The name “seminal vesicles” implies that they are containers that hold the semen. But the seminal vesicles aren’t containers. They manufacture several ingredients that go into semen, but the seminal vesicles never see fully-mixed semen any more than an ice-cream machine sees a hot-fudge sundae.

Curiosity Will Not Kill the Prostate

Some people can read about the prostate and be perfectly content leaving well enough alone. Others will want to reach out and touch one. It probably depends on whether you view the prostate as a lump in a landfill or a diamond in the rough.

There are two ways to feel a prostate: one is by doing the type of prostate exam that a healthcare professional does. We advise against this, but if your goal is only curiosity instead of providing pleasure, go ahead. The other method is by doing a pleasurable prostate massage. There’s an entire section on prostate pleasure at the end of this chapter.

If you are doing a DRE (digital rectal exam) like the one shown in the following illustration, be sure to trim the nail on the finger you are using. Put on latex exam gloves (without powder), and slather a generous amount of lube like KY Jelly on your finger. Have the man bend over.

You don’t want your finger to enter his anus at the same angle that an arrow does when you’ve shot it at a bull’s eye. Instead, You want your finger to be against his anus like it is when your are putting it against your lips and going “Shhhhh!” This means the pad of your finger will be laying flat against his anus and your wrist will be against his balls, or in that general area between his thighs.

Eventually, as you are pushing the pad of your finger against his anus, it will momentarily relax. This is your opportunity to ease the pad of your well-lubed finger farther into the opening. Simply flick the tip around and in. During the flicking process, your finger will suddenly go from the “Shhhhh” direction to the arrow in the bull’s eye. The quick flick can’t really be seen because it happens as your finger is pushing into the anal opening. As long as you are gentle but firm there shouldn’t be any need to peel the man off the ceiling or call an ambulance.

Slowly push your finger in a couple of inches and start to explore the neighborhood. The illustration on the prior page should be an adequate guide. While the prostate will be a lot bigger than the tip of your nose, the surface will probably feel a bit like it or like the padded part of your thumb as it meets your wrist.

If you explore the entire surface of the prostate from side to side, you might discover that it has an indentation running down the center. Also, experiment with different levels of pressure. Be sure to get lots of feedback.

If a man is sufficiently able to contort himself, he should be able to feel his prostate with his own finger. But the notion of a man being able to do an accurate exam on his own prostate is kind of silly.

Prostate Play for Lovers vs. Prostate Treatment

It’s one thing when you are exploring a lover’s prostate. It’s quite another when a guy is having prostate problems and a health care professional tries to do a prostate massage or milks fluid from it to study under a microscope. Looking at what causes prostate problems might help explain why.

One theory says that some types of prostate problems are caused by small pockets of infection that get trapped inside the gland. These pockets become surrounded with a hard material that encapsulates the infection. The purpose of a prostate massage is to push hard enough to burst these pockets of infection open. This requires a good deal of pressure that’s not any more sexually arousing than getting breasts squeezed during a mammogram.

However, when you are stimulating a man’s prostate in a sexually exciting way, you are pushing only as firmly as he tells you to. There is no agenda, and the motions are based on your mutual pleasure.

See the end of this chapter for information about prostate massage.

Getting a Good Prostate Exam

Feeling a man’s prostate will help you appreciate what an art it is to do a good prostate exam. A lot of physicians who are too embarrassed to do a good exam tend to stick a finger up a guy’s rear with lightning speed, touch it long enough to say, “Tag, you’re it,” and yank their finger out. It’s a wonder why they even bother; they aren’t doing the patient any good. This is the same thing as waving a wand over a woman’s crotch and telling her she’s had a pap smear.

One of the reasons why a “Tag, you’re it” type of exam is useless is because on a really good day, the examiner is able to feel along the surface of only one-third of the entire prostate gland. He or she is trying to get a lot of information without being able to put a finger on most of it. Some of the things they are trying to determine are the size and symmetry of the gland, if there are lumps in it that might raise suspicions about cancer, and if it is spongy or hard.

Our medical consultant on this chapter estimates he has done more than 35,000 prostate exams during his career in urology. He says a thorough prostate exam takes time and concentration. He tends to close his eyes once his finger reaches gland zero so he can focus better on the limited amount of information he is receiving. For him to feel like he’s done a good job, he has the man stand or kneel square with his butt pointing up in the air.

So here you’ve got two grown ups, one with his finger up the other’s butt, both have their eyes closed, and each is hoping that when it’s over, the one with the finger can give the one with the prostate a big thumbs-up.

While a DRE isn’t going to provide any answers by itself, it is one piece of information that might be helpful in ruling out conditions like BPH, prostatitis, and cancer. Yikes — BPH, prostatitis and cancer?