A study from the University of Koln in Germany shows that premature ejaculation is in the eye of the beholder. Men who came to a urology clinic with a chief complaint of premature ejaculation had the same time to ejaculation as normal men who had no such complaint.

All the men in the study were married for at least two years and made love regularly. They were asked to use a stop watch to measure their time to ejaculation and to keep diaries. The premature ejaculators went from start of intercourse to ejaculation in an average period of 2:32 minutes. The healthy volunteers had an average time of 3:01 minutes. The differences were not statistically significant.

This study shows that premature ejaculation is not defined by how many strokes or how much time it takes to ejaculate. It is defined by whether a person is satisfied with his time to climax. 20 mg of the antidepressant drug Paxil, taken 1 hour before lovemaking, can delay ejaculation to more than 8 minutes, but it still won't help most premature ejaculators because their early finish is not the problem. This study shows that premature ejaculators have a terrible misunderstanding of human physiology. They think that they are inadequate because their female partners do not come to climax with conventional penile-vaginal lovemaking.

The vast majority of women do not climax from conventional lovemaking. Many young girls can climax quickly, but as most women age, they can climax only when their clitoris is stimulated vigorously. On the basis of this study, premature ejaculation should be defined as occurring primarily in men who do not understand female anatomy, and the treatment for most cases of premature ejaculation should be for a woman to explain her own physiology to him and tell how what to do.