I'm interested in learning what are simple, natural and pill-free solutions that can provide higher sexual stamina for men — both short term and long term. On the TV, the pornstars seem to be able to perform for a much longer time with more energy than in real life. How do they do it? Is it possible for normal men to achieve similar stamina with any natural stuff / habits?

-N

Before we get started, can we talk about how your email almost got deleted without being read because "Simple and pill-free solutions for higher sexual stamina for men" sounds like spam? It sounds like spam. And also like a scam. Moving on: I have absolutely zero recommendations for creams, pills, potions, gizmos, or gadgets that will make you last longer in bed or increase your stamina. What I do have is the flu. And also a need to debunk the idea of pornography as an appropriate place to learn about sex.

Pornographic videos are not documentaries. They are not an acceptable substitute for sex ed. Unfortunately, without widespread access to acceptable sexual education, people seem to be trying to use explicit entertainment as a replacement.

Stop doing that.

The lack of functional sex ed — and this tendency to try to learn from porn videos instead — leaves inexperienced people cobbling together bits of rumor and snippets of video in an attempt to understand the mechanics of sex. Which sucks for everyone.

We need better sexual education. And apparently we also need better pornographic education to provide context for what people are seeing. Because for some reason people can watch a car chase scene in a movie and understanding that it isn’t meant as a model of how to drive, but when it comes to porn everything just goes sort of sideways.

Editing is a process that happens to many forms of media (or content, if you prefer). Charlie Brooker did a great video showing what an editor can do with raw footage to make a situation look entirely different in the final product.

If you don’t want to go watch the video, maybe you’ll take my word for it: editing can do crazy things. Crazy things like make the hour spent waiting for a male performer to get an erection just disappear. Actually, any footage shot during that hour sits on a hard drive with the rest of the raw footage, but to the end viewer, that hour is invisible. Because the dominant theory of what consumers of pornography want says that consumers want to see Olympians with atypically large anatomy banging away at each other for an hour.

(The dominant theory also says that if there’s a penis in a sex scene and semen is not ejaculated out of that penis the viewers might riot. I’ve produced and distributed scenes where penises are involved in entirely non-ejaculatory ways, and there has been no riot, so the dominant theory might be a little incorrect on some finer points. Or wrong about lots of things.)

Sometimes an hour-long sex scene does get shot without stopping the camera or bits that need to be edited out. I would be willing to believe that a few of these scenes involve penis-in-lower orifice penetration for the entire length of the scene. But I have never performed in a scene like that — nor have I seen one.

All sorts of things make filming less than efficient. Sometimes the male-bodied performer takes a while to get a solid erection or loses their erection partway through filming. Sometimes they need time or a very specific sort of stimulation to be able to ejaculate. Sometimes a female-bodied performer is menstruating; most companies hide this, either because their payment systems’ guidelines require it or fear of obscenity prosecution. And that’s leaving out all the technical problems: cameras malfunctioning, lights shorting out, costume issues, noise from helicopters ruining the sound, or scenery falling over. Pornography leaves all that out because we believe that most consumers of pornography want to escape into a fantasy land where nobody trips over their pants or falls off the kitchen counter.

Unfortunately, these fantasy conventions have brought us to the point where people — who are presumably otherwise capable of understanding that what they see on TV is not real life — are comparing their sexual prowess unfavorably to the assumed prowess of pornographic performers.

Just this weekend, one of my sexual partners expressed a desire to have more control over his penis. Like my co-workers have, or at least like my co-workers have in his imagination. After what was essentially this same monologue, it turned out that he hadn’t ever watched a professionally produced explicit sex scene all the way through. But if you do watch those scenes the whole way through, you’ll see that while the acrobatic, super-energetic sex does go on at length, it does not usually consist entirely of vaginal or anal penetration with a penis. There’s finger banging. And pussy eating. And kissing and generally lots of hands and mouths on body parts in ways that probably feel good. (Or at least look good on camera.)

What I’m really saying here is that if you want to increase your sexual stamina, you’re going to need to expand the range of parts you use sexually. Get creative with it. And stop comparing yourself to the TV.