Men’s health centre

Sexual foreplay: What’s in it for men?

Dates that end with lovemaking often begin with eating out. So the meal itself can be seen as a form of sexual foreplay - in more ways than one.

How many times has this happened to you? You take a woman out to dinner at a favourite restaurant. The waiter takes your drinks order, tells you about the specials and brings you a choice of bread, before you get down to the business of perusing the menu. Your eye is on the right side of the page - steak? Lobster? Steak and lobster? -  when your date announces, “I think I’ll just have a salad and a couple of appetisers.”

She insists she knows her appetite, and enough of those little things make, for her, a full and satisfying meal.

So it is with sexual foreplay. A lot of men don’t think they’ve had sex unless they have had full-on sexual intercourse - the meat and potatoes of many men’s sex lives, if not the steak and lobster. They don’t see the value of sexual foreplay in lovemaking - the well-placed nibble and stroke, the suck and bite - even if that is what women often want. 

Or at least that’s what they say about us. “It depends how much these people read,” says sex therapist Louanne Cole Weston of men’s attitudes towards lovemaking and sexual foreplay. “If they are at all readers, they are likely to have come across the idea that most women enjoy the idea of foreplay.”

Why men have a fear of foreplay

A sensitive well-read man may indeed have encountered this notion of sexual pleasure but most of us have probably filed it under “forget”.

“I think it’s fair to say men are still afraid of women’s bodies,” says Dr Mark Epstein, a psychiatrist and author of Open to Desire: Embracing a Lust for Life. “Exploration of female sexuality is still something that can be perfected.”

Plus, some of us are working on perfecting it, even if it’s with just one woman, but why the fear of sexual foreplay? “Most men are hung up on the fear of losing their erection,” says Epstein. “It dominates their mind during the act of sex. They’re really preoccupied with themselves, or they are in some kind of dance with themselves.”

Based on her own practice, as well as her experience as author of the Sexual Health: Sex Matters blog, Weston agrees. “If men have a worry about losing an erection, they tend to sometimes rush to insert for intercourse,” she says. “They can skip over foreplay or make it extremely brief because they’re just thinking about maintaining that erection above all else.” It is as though the act of sex is a performance and they will be judged on the quality and longevity of their erection - while the irony is that, if you please your woman in other ways, she doesn’t care how hard you are and those imaginary judges vanish.