To ejaculate or not
The male human form does not come with a switch to shut off the production of semen. As soon as puberty starts, the testes and the prostate begin filling up with the precious bodily fluid responsible for all human life on earth. A human female on the other hands comes equipped with sacks of eggs. She makes no new ones during her lifetime.
Having no off switch means that the sticky white stuff is made all day, every day and it's something very hard to ignore when you are young. As you get older, it's also still very hard to ignore, but is nothing like the hormonally-fueled madness of say, 16.
The one blessing (for some) is the nocturnal emission. For unmarried religious men who refuse to clean out the pipes manually on spiritual grounds, this is a sweet albeit messy release. I remember being in college at a small religious liberal arts school and waking up with my boxers thoroughly creamed from a sweet release. Always awkward if the roomie was around since our room was small. When you are young and remaining chaste, the amount of spunk that comes out of your penis can be impressive. And semen smells, so the more of it, the stronger the smell. Again, problematic when you have a roommate and suite mates sharing a bathroom.
Semen that has been inside of you for months will come out thick, looking darker. Men who are getting laid or masturbating will have a white semen that is more translucent. Obviously, the quantities will vary.
The build up of semen in the plumbing can be especially problematic later in life. I drink a lot of decaf tea and some juices, so I have issues where the bladder fills up overnight. If I were disciplined, I'd stop drinking liquids at 6:00 PM and just try to get everything emptied out of my bladder by bedtime. Then, when the succubus showed up, she wouldn't leave empty handed.
When I was younger, the bladder's behavior was less of an issue. If I needed to release my man essence in sleep, I would. A succubus would show up, ride me like a cowgirl and BOOM!, a nice big wad of spooge would wake me after it had become cold and clammy. Think chilled bowl of oatmeal dumped in your briefs. Didn't matter if I drank a gallon of water before bed, the sexy cowgirl with horns and a tail could still get business done, full bladder or not.
The stories about succubi and so on are found in nocturnal emissions although I've no scholarship to point to on the topic and am not interested in looking it up. Ajahn Martin had a question come up from a young man as I recall and he mentioned the succubus or something like it. He didn't use the word, but we all know the sisterhood, as their handiwork has touched every single man bent on chastity. I could see how celibate communities would be intimately familiar with these little tarts and their wanton invasion of young men's dreams.
Anyway, a full bladder can ruin the ability to ejaculate during sleep. This is a challenge of middle age especially. Having gone three or four months at a time or even much longer without masturbating – and finding no relief from a succubus – it sometimes becomes necessary to do a manual override. I say necessary because the prostate can become so filled with goo that it becomes a real nuisance to sit down. It can be especially uncomfortable to sit on a meditation cushion. I've actually had a succubus show up to drain me of my vital essence but, because of my bladder, she would do her business and nothing would happen. It's not a case of erectile dysfunction and no, I will not be needing viagra for the night sisters.
Giving up masturbation can be challenging, but the big hurdle to cross is around the first ten day mark. If you are committed to living in a non-sensual way, you will need to fight against lust hard during this period. This figure depends on age as well, so younger men may need more days before they notice that their body calms down and becomes less sensitive to internal sensual suggestions. One way to view your body is as sleeping dog. Let sleeping dogs lie and all that jazz. The mind/brain becomes accustomed to certain patterns so whether it's alcohol, swearing and masturbating, the first period of withdrawal can be hardest.
While passing the milestone sounds good, the body will still demand a release and at some point, it will wear you down by injecting naughty thoughts into your mind. Now, if you are a full on Idealist, then everything is ultimately mind-created including the body, so it seems like there would be a technique one could master for just shutting off the torrent of beautiful naked women and their body parts which litter the thought stream. The purpose behind all of this of course is to trick you into reproducing and your defilements don't care about the lucky lady who will receive your seed.
Sexual longing can be an opening into self-reconception. You were conceived and are now a "conception." If you are a practitioner, you may accept responsibility in some way for this since it's really your craving that is the vehicle which brings you back again, but from our ordinary experience, it doesn't feel this way at all.
Some people have filed lawsuits against their parents for having brought them into the world against their will. Or something. These are flamboyant statements more than anything else, a futile protest against existence which misses its cause completely unless you are a strict materialist, in which case you chalk up life to a lot of randomness that ended up producing incredibly intricate information systems.
Obviously, using porn is a no-no if establishing mental balance is a goal in your life. I had an on-and-off use of porn in the past, but never really got it into as much as some men. I saw enough of it to be damaged by it however and there will always be particular scenes that stick in my head for the rest of my life. On the other hand, the mind has a way of detoxing, so if you are struggling, just be aware that it gets better if you can break the habit. Everything is impermanent but the negative karmic effects can manifest in other ways later on down the road.
Giving yourself over to sensuality repeatedly creates the kind of karmic formations that make future existence more difficult. Most people think rebirth is a little far fetched and this is understandable, so there's no need to extend this concept into a future existence. Just think of it as self-improvement for your current life through the thoughtful removal of bad habits.
Even without porn, the male mind has an impressive palette from which to paint very erotic scenes. Key thing though is that the mind has to actively draw those out so it requires a kind of mindfulness. Watching porn however is a different bear because it is way easier to get lost in it. Graphic hardcore porn – like the terabytes of free, high definition stuff floating around on the Internet thanks to Western oligarchy/USAID – is way more damaging. You can become completely mindless through the assault on the senses of vision and hearing. The mind is still the substratum of everything, but it will gladly checkout if the senses are being fed sensual objects in high definition images and spatial audio. That's work it doesn't have to do so even more concentrated focus can be devoted to masturbating and becoming engrossed in the material.
The holy grail for many men is probably a pure virtual reality in which the body is hooked into sensors and is able to exhaust itself by having sex with every kind of woman, in every kind of setting. The fact that this happens in a virtual setting would not cancel out the karmic effects of acting upon lustful impulses. Framed this way, how real is the real world then? In both, karma drives personality and direction, so the distinction between the virtual and real causes becomes immaterial so to speak. If you could live in a hyper-realistic virtual reality, your actions there would shape your character in meat space.
The mindless state in which no awareness is present is an ideal condition for TPTB. Men who are self-habituated to becoming completely heedless several times a week find out the hard way that this creates a powerful form of bad karma. Karma refers to action or volition, but in another sense, it describes the habit of choosing certain things over and over again and becoming, in the process, the thing chosen. What you keep choosing becomes a groove that only grows deeper overtime through repeated actions. If you roll a metal ball down that groove after it is deep and well formed, the ball has a harder time jumping the rails and escaping its "pre-destined" path. Think of the citta as the metal ball stuck in a groove, but please, do not think the metal ball is your indestructible immortal soul. Everything is impermanent. The rail will wear out and the ball will jump the track and become something else entirely.
Lately, I try to find things that are impermanent as a mental exercise. Will all beings become liberated eventually? We don't know. Does that make them impermanent because one or more could potentially go on forever? Good question, but no, because the mindstream passing through lives for all eternity would itself be constantly changing and besides, we don't know if there is an eternity, nor should we care. Mental activities like this are engaging but I've not the stamina to dig too much into any one topic. The soul in the Western religious mind is some perfect pearl that at some future point, is perfectly polished and rounded and remains so for eternity, completely incapable of ever backsliding into its former state.
Being in committed relationship with a woman does not mean you will never have blue balls. However, a good young woman will take care of her man's needs even when she is menstruating; and will do so voluntarily and without any prompting. They will understand enough about men and their anatomies to want to keep them calm and free of any urge to have a roaming eye. Lower quality women are less sexual, less playful and certainly not interested in lightening their man's load. Many of them have mental and emotional issues in addition to having naturally lower sex drives, or maybe the mental health problems are an expression of sexual dysfunction. Men should not expect their wives who've been taking care of the kids all day and night to have the same energy level when it comes to their maintenance. Asceticism has its place in marriage as well.
I would guess that many marriages are sexless based on the data I've seen, where the woman cannot even be bothered to do an old fashioned to keep the pipes clean. This to say, most women now are low quality as the result of bad breeding, bad role models, social media and all the other problems which come with life in an advanced civilization. Men are not exactly up to the standards of their grandfathers of course, so don't let this sound like I'm picking on women. I'm not. I feel badly for women and men equally now, but this blog post is about men and their sexual burdens.
Some people counsel vegetarianism as one way to reduce concupiscence. Fasting is another, but this kind of falls under the vegetarianism category since it involves being hungry a lot. I kid, but traditionally vegetarianism has been seen as a form of abstinence among Christians. Hardcore Seventh Day Adventists practice this diet along a few other sects.
Strictly speaking, avoiding animal protein tends to reduce the body's ability to produce reproductive fluids, at least in my experience. I have zero science to back this up. I was a vegan for 2+ years and did yoga frequently in my thirties. I would say that the volume of semen was reduced during this period because meat, poultry and fish are rich in vitamins and minerals that make sperm production easier and with those out of the picture, the body has less material to work with. Tofu does not make up for meat and no amount of fruits and vegetables will get you there. Ergo, you end up carrying more spunk around if you include animal protein in your diet. This has been my personal experience. YMMV.
It goes without saying, taking vitamin supplements, especially high quality, third party lab tested varieties will lead to larger semen volumes and faster replenishment rates. This is great if you are trying to get your lady friend pregnant, but not so good if you are celibate, voluntary or not. I never found the use of vitamins to have much compensatory power for the missing meat in my vegan diet. I eventually gave up on veganism because it isn't natural and just leads to health problems. It's also an expensive lifestyle if you are trying to eat whenever you want as the elders counseled when I was doing it.
I had a colleague many years ago who mentioned that he was having a hard time getting an erection. I suggested taking some ginger and a multi-vitamin. He reported not long after that he was back to normal and the wife was happy again. Point being that basic vitamins and simple fresh herbs can often times restore a man's body. For married men who want to keep the peace, vitamins are the way to go not only for spunk production but for overall energy and mental focus.
Many spiritual traditions encourage vegetarianism and fasting. Prior to Vatican II, the number of fast and abstinence days on the calendar was higher for Catholics; in Orthodoxy, the number now is even higher. If you study the Eastern fasting calendar, it becomes pretty evident that even laymen will probably have an easier time controlling their libido because their bodies will not have an extra-abundance of nutrients to convert into semen. This leads to Eastern Christians being more compassionate, more focused, more spiritual. I think of all the varieties of Christianity, Orthodoxy is the most humane, the most spiritual.
For the record, I doubt more than 5% of the laity in Orthodoxy stick to the calendar. Catholics and other Christians can of course choose to keep the old fasting calendars if they are struggling with sexual desire. Pope Francis will call you names of course since it doesn't fit with the whole NGO vibe of the post-conciliar culture.
Certain types of exercise are a big no-no if you are dealing with excess reproductive fluids and in need of respite. Lifting weights is awesome, but in my experience, it also jacks up testosterone and causes the production of more spunk. You can drown in your own spunk if you are doing crazy stuff like eating only steaks, eggs and taking high quality supplements, protein shakes and getting plenty of rest. I was not surprised to learn that Buddhist monks are forbidden exercise. Light stretching is allowed, but going for a run or, worse, lifting weights is verboten. The beautification of the body is a side effect of weight lifting and exercise. Yeah, you'll feel great, more focused and centered, less temperamental, but you will also be reinforcing the sense of self.
I've written before about vegetarianism not being part of early Buddhism, of it in fact being pushed by the Buddha's villainous cousin as a way to divide the sangha. Spiritual people are compassionate and would never eat the flesh of another animal! Of course, the Buddha ate whatever was dropped into his bowl and did not require vegetarianism of his disciples. If my claim that animal protein increases libido was true, would it not have been a better choice to embrace vegetarianism and require it as part of the sangha's practice?
No. The Buddha laid down the one meal per day rule; moreover, overeating was strictly forbidden. This to say that monks in the East have an easier job managing their libidos because they are not consuming extra nutrients which can be funneled into semen making. Of course, they still get visits from succubi and there are scholastic questions concerning whether arahants still experience nocturnal emissions. In addition to a strictly regulated way of life, the monks practice corpse meditation and learn to see the body in different ways. Also, I incline to view first jhana as a more than adequate compensation for giving up the male orgasm. The higher jhanas are just gravy on top, so once a monk has established proficiency in these, it's unlikely that a woman is going to be a big draw.
Horny men don't think of a woman bleeding out her front while having especially foul smelling diarrhea, toe cheese, bad breath and oily hair. It's a fact that women have animal bodies and after two days without bathing, begin to emit strange new vapors which only worsen the longer they avoid bathing. Their bowels are filled with shit – the Buddha was famous for telling a brahmin that his beautiful daughter was a literal sack of shit – and if you mentally peal away a woman's skin and look underneath, it's just grossness.
Or ponder that all of us humans float in our feces for months on end in a womb, separated only inches from our mother's feces. When we exit this foul pool of blood, feces, urine and so on, it's out through a hole that is only inch or so from an asshole. I've seen a live birth on film and it's disgusting. In fact, probably the most disgusting thing I've ever seen. The creation of this scene over and over again throughout vast stretches of time is the end result of male libido. Knowing this will not cool it down. Women are just that enchanting.
The point in this is not to denigrate women or men. Far from it. It is however to stop the cycle of fraud and deception caused by a mind that is influenced by the kilesas into concocting enchanting scenes in a magical forest. Monks knows this danger and, in certain parts of the world, will sit with a fresh or not so fresh corpse in the hot sun and ponder what it is so fascinating about the body. As a layman, I do this every day while pooping or having an ache or pain; or having to brush and floss my teeth. Not looking at a corpse here of course but I'm asking myself what is so enchanting about the vacillation between fear for the body and identification with it. I'm not some advanced spiritual master of course, but I've benefitted by reframing my own body, its weird smells and incessant maintenance demands to see it as mostly a burden with some benefits.
Rethinking women and their bodies is useful in keeping the libido in check even if your reproductive organs are brimming with life. It is not however fool proof. Try as you might to reframe the female body, you will still be under assault from greed, hatred and delusion. These are clever forces, brilliant strategists and keen tacticians.
I once developed a very detailed imaginary planet of womens' bodies. The whole planet was just naked, rotting females corpses piled up in a swamp. All sorts of foul gasses were emitted by their rotting flesh and the sky was putrid green with vaporous clouds smelling of mustard farts. This did wonders for several months in reframing lustful thoughts. Until it didn't. Whatever mental tricks you conjure up, realize that the kilesas have been with you for millions of lifetimes and they've seen all this before. Creating disgusting scenes of a woman's body in decomposition or filth is still giving mental focus to an external body. The problem with attraction and aversion is that they're not different in their operation, only their end. So idolizing the perfect woman for you ("oh, i'm quite taken with redheads myself...") is just as unhealthy as imagining her with her head caved in and maggots crawling around.
On the topic of rebirth, you should recall that you yourself have been a woman many times. This is something Westerners and Muslims don't get in their traditions, the ability to stop and think, "I've been this woman, or this man or this child before..." Coupled with meditation and metta, it leads to an empathy and compassion for other creatures. Again, the point here is not denigrate women or their bodies. Remember that your head came out a hole next to your mother's asshole, but also recall that she took good care of you and loved you the way only a mother can.
If rebirth isn't your thing, then consider it from the point of view of evolution, which has conspired for billions of years to ensure that life is propagated by building biological machines.
The practice is not a series of tricks for short circuiting lust; the taints can only be slain and the heart purified through meditation, mindfulness, virtue, and wisdom. Imagining a pretty girl as dead and filled with maggots doesn't work long term. Imagining yourself as newly unalived and then watching as your body turns into dust by degrees on the other hand is recommended by Blessed One as a salubrious practice. The mechanisms would appear to be the same, but their outcomes are very different.
Semen retention (SR) is not a thing in Buddhism at all. It's not something the Buddha talked about in the early canonical writings, but I've no doubt the Tibetans have secret ancient lineages with cryptic rituals and esoteric murmurings on the matter. Theirs is a blend of Hinduism/Bön/Mahayana so of course they will have all this stuff. But based on my deep research on YouTube, SR is pretty much a Hindu thing and if it helps men remain masters of their domain, then great. Personally, I don't have any interest in the Ayurvedic tradition of medicine and physiology but understand many people have benefitted from it.
SR has this problem of placing an emphasis on keeping it because it grants spiritual powers of insight, physical energy and mental clarity, so it ends up being ordered to reinforcing the ego in a way different than orgasmic release. If you believe your spunk can give you the ability to pick Powerball numbers or read the minds of people at a grocery store checkout, you will be adding subtle layers of delusion. I once thought it would be cool to recall past lives then realized it would be a horrible experience, to have these memories floating around, mixed up with the current life. Maybe SR poses this risk.
I question the scientific validity of claims like "semen is the distilled essence of essence." It's a lofty way of saying that semen is made from blood and is packed with vitamins and minerals. I heard a claim that one tablespoon of semen was as nutritious as a steak from an anti-fapper who was making the case that ejaculation was the removal of valuable nutrients from the body. So, the good woman who, while menstruating, takes a load from her man into her tummy via the mouth is getting a super vitamin while also lowering his spiritual quality. There is according to ChatGPT only speculative theories regarding the benefits of a woman consuming her man's semen and, in its view, the nutritional value is overstated. Women eating semen is probably a very recent thing brought on by the video porn industry and there may be absolutely no reason for it in evolution. Of course, it's happened many millions of times throughout human history, but I suspect it is mostly verboten in traditional cultures.
While Hindus discuss the benefits of SR, Western science has suggested that masturbation is a prophylactic against prostate cancer, the second leading cause of cancer death in men, with lung being the first. Some medical professionals recommend masturbation to flush the prostate of fluids and dead cells in order to keep the organ young and healthy. Out with the old, in with the new seems to be a protective barrier against disease.
ChatGPT admits however that there are no studies showing that celibate men are at a higher risk for prostate cancer than masturbators. If masturbating 3-4 times per week prolonged life in laymen while monks and priests in celibate traditions had a higher mortality rate from prostate cancer, then a case could be made for wanking. However, there is no data showing this because no one studies it. Male health just isn't that interesting. However, I can imagine a future where Artificial Super Intelligence has access to data from all over the world and is willing to settle the question. But even if jerking off keeps your prostate in good shape, the spiritual consequences are still dire. If you extend your life by four years because of regular wanking, you'll will have extended the length of life but diminished its overall quality. Jerking off makes you dull. Better to live one day intentionally, peacefully than to live a week in confusion and heedlessness.
My guess is that celibates (not practitioners of extreme asceticism) probably live longer. I suspect that, for men who take fatherhood seriously, it leads to a shorter life. Add on top of the stress of a long unhappy marriage followed by divorce, etc. you end up with more additional wear and tear than the bhikkhu living a quiet peaceful life. Most marriages are not happy according to respondents on surveys; 40 - 50% will end in divorce. So there's the happy few, the unhappy and the divorced.
Happy marriages between good friends are exceedingly rare, rather like winning the lottery.
What are the effects of masturbation on meditation? My opinion is that orgasm reinforces the sense of self and contributes to suffering. The things which give us the most intense pleasure also debilitate with the most crippling pain. Unlike normal sexual intercourse between a man and a woman, masturbation can be overindulged and it does lead to a deadening of the senses and the intellect. It's possible for a man to have lots of sex with his partner, but generally women won't put up with this for very long. Like, jerking off 5-7 times a day is totally doable for a young healthy male, but climaxing the same number of times in/on/around your wife every day will lead to problems. Unless she wants to get pregnant.
Masturbation's deadening effect makes meditation more difficult because, contrary to our expectations, it requires alertness, energy and focus to have a good sit or walk. From personal experience, even a manual override to clear out the pipes involves an indulgence in sensual ideation and this is a serious impediment to formal practice. Cleaning out several months of backed up sperm may provide physical relief but it completely ruins spiritual gains made beforehand. Jerking off is like starting over in your practice. Concentration, relaxation, observation take a nose dive.
Good meditation can be described in many different ways, but relinquishment works for me. Letting go of name-and-form is more difficult when masturbation is part of your life. I don't see things getting better for a committed couple. Unlike Christianity, which sacramentalizes the marital act, Buddhism doesn't pretend that there are intense sensual experiences which lead to some great spiritual benefit. (Tibetanism is not Buddhism of course, but that tradition does say things like this as the result of left-handed, dark tantra practices adopted from Hinduism.)
Buddhism is not like other religions since it doesn't place any value on marriage, does not celebrate it, requires its monks to avoid attending ceremonies for it, etc. Most religions have at their core a set of precepts influenced by biology, aimed at the perpetuation of the species and these find concrete expression in a marriage rite. Buddhism does not worry about marriage because it knows the species will go on in this world and in 10,000 others. Its sole focus is the ending of suffering. The householder life is a barrier to this goal.
So it's important to understand that Buddhism is a renunciation tradition; sensual experiences in the world are no longer sought and are seen as hindrances which produce suffering. Rightly so. There are however no Buddhists in the strictest view, just people who've joined the sangha and then everyone else. The latter are leading a life of sensuality, but this doesn't mean that these laymen can do whatever without consequences or that they have to remain blind to how sensuality begets more lives filled with dukkha, aging, sickness and death.
Sensuality includes eating two or three meals a day and sleeping on a comfortable bed above a certain height for eight hours. This doesn't mean that one cannot be a practitioner since the early texts furnish examples of householders attaining stream entry. This by way of saying that laymen who take matters into their own hands are going to have a harder time benefiting from formal practice and will struggle to develop the kind of awareness in daily activities that makes them pleasant rather than toilsome. The more effort that is put into self-denial, the greater the benefit now and in the future. The Buddha taught that the gift of dhamma was something to be experienced here and now, not in some future heavenly existence. That gift disappears once jerking off, overeating (a separate blog) and self-indulgent sensuality become the norm. Laymen can benefit by practicing some asceticism.
Probably the best path to follow is to get regular sleep, eat moderately with no heavy snacking, fast once a week. If you can pull off eating once a day for a couple of days every week while avoiding looking at women, even better. I'm still a sucker for checking out attractive women in public. Fortunately, with the rise of obesity, it's rare to encounter a woman worth looking at anymore. Add on top of that the steady increase in average age of the general population. Guarding the senses and practicing awareness of space, sounds and your internal mental state will of course improve over time such that even these are no longer a distraction. It goes without saying that avoiding tv and films with nudity or sexual dialogue are essential if deeper, more fruitful meditation is the desired goal.
I've heard from Christian clergy that exercise and hobbies are a good way to keep busy and engaged in something. Idle time spent sitting around doom scrolling on a device is just asking for trouble. Lifting weights, doing cardio, going for a walk and so on are going to increase t-levels but this is offset by their other benefits, which tend to counteract the urge to rub one out.
Corpse meditation (asubha) is also worth a try if you are not squeamish. It would be preferable to find images of younger women who have died and the Internet being the Internet, these can be found, but you should look for stuff that is tasteful and not voyeuristic. Not easy to do. For this reason, you might look for anatomy textbooks which show high quality photos from actual autopsies of chicks.
YouTube also hosts human autopsy videos and while they can be very upsetting for many people, they can also be quite empowering. Demystifying the body goes a long way towards reducing the urge to masturbate since you see the body for what it is: a combination of the elements with all the same qualities you find in the meat section of your grocery store. Fat, muscle, bone, blood, etc. It helps to understand that your body is just like that of a fresh cadaver in all essentials save breath. The bodies you are attracted to are also the same unless you have some weird sexual fetish for inanimate objects.
Avoid drinking fluids before bed. Succubi are Mother Nature's daughters and they will take care of the fluid build up. No one has ever died from getting backed up by reproductive fluids and even arahants still emit nocturnally, but without making any negative karma in the process. One of the benefits of being a husk empty of defilements is that the body continues its natural processes without dragging the mind down into the muck. There's nothing left to drag down.
A key component of the sex drive for modern men is its isolation mentally from procreation. There are some men – known as fathers – who relish ejaculating inside their woman for the purpose of making her pregnant with a child. Think Elon Musk. In this case, the biological purpose of sex is united with his other desires and fantasies. For most men, especially younger ones, they are into the ejaculation part but have mentally severed it from the possibility of new human life. This is how literally billions of men have over the course of 200,000 years unwittingly accepted the burden of children. An innocent frolic lasting a few minutes turns into a very long, very expensive commitment.
No doubt, most pre-modern men of low estate could develop some affection for their offspring to varying degrees and thereby ease the pain of fatherhood. As I pointed out in one of the anti-Christ posts, children have generally been an indispensable unit of survival and possible prosperity whereas now, they've become just a pure burden for the middle and lower classes. The wealthy of course can afford luxuries like children and in cases of business dynasties, may even profit from having them. But for the average person, children are a net economic drain with no return on investment. This sounds really harsh, but you can verify this against your own environment. Are people having children in your circles? Are they having as many as say in 1970?
Modern sex has been completely severed from the creation of children thanks to birth control, feminism and a culture in which the act is portrayed childishly. In movies, the woman just gets up right after completion and puts on clothes and goes about her business. Of course, in real life, she must clean up and will involve her partner in finding an old sock, towel, paper towel, etc. to sop up the mess. (How many geniuses never made it into the world because they ended up stuck to a tube sock fetched from the dirty laundry basket?) Women do not simply bounce right out of bed after the man climaxes. Condoms are almost never shown in the more sexual scenes of the raunchier movies, which is pretty much all of them with an R rating. The younger members of the audience are left thinking that sex is a just a simple transaction, remaining unaware of the mess until they experience it first hand.
I bring up the mess because it links the act to what it's really all about: procreation and survival, if not for the individual, then the species. Sex as pure recreational activity is a much more modern invention and it has been devastating for both men and women. At some point early in the history of life, there was just a goo bag going up to another goo bag in warm ocean waters and squirting a load of spunk and then swimming off. When I first learned about sex, I assumed that the man deposited his seed into the woman's pouch and that it sealed itself up neatly like a zip lock bag so that the woman could go play racquetball or pick up groceries. This is of course not how it works as I learned when I watched hardcore porn for the first time. More mainstream movies are still teaching little boys about the sealed pouch.
For men, it is especially important to mentally re-establish the link between their libidos and the consequences of its use in real life. Men do not control reproduction in most use cases unless they refrain from sex. The decision to be intimate with a woman is to recognize that women are the gate keepers of the species. The woman will make the decision when and where she will get pregnant. She will not necessarily make the best decision either, especially in the current phase of Kali Yuga, but the man will just be along for the ride during conception (so to speak). He may abandon his child or children, he may be pursued by the courts and have his wages garnished; or he may accept or even welcome the role of father, but no matter the case, it will not be his call as to whether he undergoes the ontological change from not-father to father.
If you think this sounds extreme, ask yourself where the male birth control pill is.
In more traditional societies, formal marriage contracts are a way of changing this up a bit since it recognizes that both parties have agreed to form a partnership that will lead to children. In the current time however, marriage is something that takes place much later, after women have racked up a "body count," if it happens at all. The reality now is that women get pregnant all the time outside of marriage and again, they make the call. Ceding control to them over reproduction has not resulted in a happier, healthier or more humane society. Likewise, if the tables turn and men are granted full control, we could end up with factories filled with see-through bags where fetuses are grown, biological women are phased out and sex robots come as an accessory to every new PlayStation.
Even in marriage though, there are cases in which the couple has decided not to have children only for the woman to change her mind and get pregnant. I've known couples like this. A few years ago, I had a young male colleague who told me that he and his wife of two years were not going to have children by mutual agreement. That's what you think. I had heard this story before from DINKs. One guy I worked with was looking online for a new Audi when his wife called to let him know she was pregnant. Wow! How did that happen?
