When foreplay doesn't play out

By Tom Rwahwire

It really does happen to every guy sooner or later. If it has never happened to you, according to science, it doesn’t mean it won’t: it just means it hasn’t yet.

You will be somewhere getting down, getting hot and heavy, all busy knowing you are about to unleash dragons without Sisqo then all of a sudden you will find that, ooops, the boss is not in the office. UMEME has load-shed.

The call is not going through because of network failure. You know wharra’ I mean. You know wharra I am talking about? It really does happen, and not just to most guys, to everyone.

Failure less than 20 per cent of the time is not unusual in dudes, says Livescience.com, and is no cause for wasting your doctor’s time. You only officially have a problem when it’s half the time.

So if you get a flat tire one night, but you know you are still at 99 percent success rate, you are ahead of the game. Gwe champion.

Now, it is typical to blame the male in the equation, after all it is his equipment which is failing. Usually you get mad and sneer with contempt and label him less than a real man and diss him and so on.

You even tell your friends, like Sandra who can’t keep her mouth shut, and next thing the whole course unit knows. Then the poor guy is so embarrassed. He thinks he is a failure as a man because he is a failure at that, little knowing that it could have been something really easy to solve. Something as simple as:

• Get enough sleep. A simple thing like just being tired can cause dude to jam. Chaw takes a lot of calories and your body can just decide that it is exhausted and it is not going to spend the remaining energy on those. It will just jam. So next time, rest.

• What are you on? Drugs can often, well, always have side effects. For some drugs, that is the side effect, that it will inhibit the functions there: the nerves won’t receive signals or the blood won’t trap in the valves or something.

Drugs from all over the place, from antidepressants to anti-allergy medication can cause this — you should look at the bottle before you take the pills on the night of a date. Oh, and yes, even narcotics, those ones which the cops tell you not to snort, smoke, inject, etc.

• Sickness: If it is malaria you won’t know because you won’t be trying to do anything with anyone, or nobody will want to do things with you while you are vomiting and sweating anyway, but other diseases also mess up the plumbing. Like diabetes. That makes a guy two to three times more likely to not ignite the engine.

• Physical zibs: Like riding a bike. Four percent of regular bikers who rode three hours a week had moderate to severe bouts of failure to launch. This is because when you bike you sit on the nerves that control launch and they can get damaged over time.

So when affande doesn’t report for duty, it could be any number of things causing it, none of them actually your fault. You didn’t ask for diabetes, or you didn’t know that that medicine will do that to you, or you have been working too hard with the finals coming up and the team training so hard. Heh heh. Mbu “So hard”.

But there are also other factors— To get the machinery active you need not only physical things to function right—the nerves, the blood vessels and muscles-- but also psychological ones. It is, after all, the reaction to mental stimulus. And it can just as easily react negatively as positively.

And that is when it can turn out to be squarely the girl’s fault. It is a very precarious thing, that state of mind; you don’t realize how easy it is to just switch things off? Try mentioning a man’s grandmother just when you start petting and see. But it doesn’t have to be as drastic as that. Even bad breath, a dirty environment (chick who doesn’t wash her sheets?

The nerves say ain’t nobody got time for that and they switch off, fear when he hears the gate open and he knows they are going to catch him, mentioning his (or your ex). You know how women have turnoffs? So do guys.

Guys just don’t dwell on them and probably won’t find out what they are until they are in some chick’s room and she takes off her blouse and has dreadlocks under her arms which smell of garlic.

Jacob won’t want to know, but he is not the one in charge— other Jacob down there will just decide he is not going to be a part of this.

So before you go telling the hostel that Jacob can’t get it up, check yourself. He could be diabetic, or you could be the problem. With your armpits that smell like zombies.

The Kampala Sun