(About penises and nipples, in plain talk. Not for kids or the sexually modest.)
The original spur for this posting was a magazine piece (which I can no longer locate) by a woman complaining about guys getting visible hard-ons in everyday contexts. Why, the writer wondered, can’t men control their hormones in public? Are they just uncivilized beasts?
The fact is that almost all men experience spontaneous, or random, erections, often to their great embarrassment. The triggers are many and complex. When I was a horny teenager (and masturbating, mostly swiftly, around six times a day, to sexual fantasies of my own devising), riding on a bus produced a motion that provoked gigantic unwelcome hard-ons that were very hard to conceal. Other young men get intractable hard-ons in situations of great social anxiety — such as, alas, speaking in public in front of an audience. (There’s more; see below.)
What’s more, an enormous number of people, female as well as male, get spontaneous nipple erections in all sorts of non-sexual situations. Our bodies do a lot of this on their own, without any input from our thoughts. Yes, sexual thoughts and images can trigger these stiffenings, but a lot of it happens out of our consciousness.
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