QI am a 23-year-old female who has a strange problem: I get off too quickly when I masturbate. I can get off in 30 seconds from clitoral stimulation, and though my friends envy me, I wish I was able to pleasure myself longer. I am able to give myself amazing full-body orgasms, but the part I most enjoy about getting off is the time that it takes to work up to the big O. I’ve experimented with just vaginal stimulation with my vibrator (since it seems that my clit is hypersensitive), but I don’t usually orgasm from that, so that’s no good. I’ve also tried going for a second round once I’ve come but I am usually too stimulated at that point and end up having a smaller orgasm that doesn’t feel anywhere near as good as the first. I just want to have a mind-blowing orgasm that takes me a while to work up to! Are there any techniques that will keep me from coming too quickly?

ASince most women have the opposite problem, there just aren’t a lot of products out there designed to minimize female orgasms. In fact, I think that sound you just heard was the Babeland folks’ heads exploding. There is an obvious solution here, however, and I’m just hoping it isn’t so obvious that you’ve already tried it and found it insufficient: Spend the majority of your masturbation time focusing on vaginal stimulation, and then when you feel worked up to a sufficient degree, quickly finish yourself off clitorally. That would be like the female equivalent of the lone finger up the ass of the dude who simply can’t seem to come from a hand job. You might also want to try putting a condom over your finger, in order to lessen the amount of sensation applied to your clit. And there’s also that over-the-counter numbing spray that premature ejaculators use to keep their dicks from erupting too soon, but that always seemed like a desperate last resort to me. I’d go for the condom option, and just be more careful about how much stimulation you give yourself. If none of these tips help, just know that most women would kill to have this kind of problem.

QI’m 34, male, straight, having the best sex of my life with my girlfriend of eight months. So far, so good. But she’s destroying my cock. It sometimes hurts me a bit when I first penetrate—the pain is always in the same place. It feels as if part of her pussy juts out in a weird way, like there’s a little nub in there or something and I rub up against it. Always feels worse if we’re not well lubed. And after sex, pretty much every time, my cock is red and irritated in the place where it hurt. Usually the lesion will crust over. I get little calluses. Then they flake off. I molt, basically. I cock-molt. This didn’t happen in the early days, when we were using condoms. And then we stopped using them. We were having what for me was an unbelievable amount of sex, three or four times every day we spent together. When I first noticed the calluses I thought it was an STD. Then I thought we were just having too much sex. We’ve slowed down a little and I still get these damn things. Could it be her birth-control ring rubbing against me? We remove it sometimes before intercourse, and it seems to help a little, but the irritation still happens. What do you think? What should I do? I’ve started worrying afresh this week because she’s away on vacation, it’s the longest I’ve gone without sex for eight months, my cock has had time to heal, and I’m noticing little red lines where the irritation happens. They look permanent, these lines. Is my cock ruined? Will it be, if I continue penetrating my beloved? I have no health insurance, so please don’t tell me to go to a doctor unless you really think it’s a cock-threatening emergency.

AThis column is hardly a suitable alternative to an actual doctor’s checkup, but I’ll give you my best shot: Your cock isn’t facing a cock-threatening emergency, it’s just engaging in self-defense. Like any other part of your skin would, your cock skin developed a callus to protect itself from whatever it is that’s constantly rubbing against it down there (my bet is that it is her contraceptive ring, and even though you remove it sometimes, your dick hasn’t had the proper amount of time to heal, so you still feel the soreness). This break from sex is the best thing to happen to your dick—now it can fully recuperate, and those red lines you see are likely just part of that healing process. I’m afraid one of you is going to have to go see a doctor, though, because you can’t just live with a penis that has an ongoing festering sore. Perhaps you can pool your money and send your girlfriend to see a gynecologist, who can (a) make sure that she’s using her contraception correctly, and (b) figure out if there’s some physical reason why her vagina might be attacking your penis. In the meantime I would go back to using condoms, because sex that leaves scabs is simply not the kind of sex I can endorse.

QI’m a 22-year-old straight female who’s pretty sure she has “daddy” issues. I usually am attracted to and date men that are older than me and who are authority figures (teachers, doctors, etc.). I wish my issue stopped there, though. I usually get turned on quickly and have intense orgasms thinking about daughters and their dads having sex (ewww, I know—by the way, I never would want to have sex with my own dad, who, it should be noted, is not in my life). I can have great orgasms through intercourse, but it’s still not as good as when I masturbate to these thoughts. I feel like I’m hiding a dark, ugly secret from the world. Can you help me get over this?

ANo, I can’t help you get over that, and nor would I want to. After all, they’re just fantasies. And if there’s one thing I’ve learned over the years, the more you tell yourself not to think certain things, the more powerful those fantasies become. In fact, I would advise you to start acting out the fantasy with someone, so that you can replace “the anonymous daddy/daughter” combo with an image of you and your daddy stand-in getting it on. It’s clear that you do indeed have a “daddy” fixation (which is probably heightened by the fact that your father is not in your life), but so what? Do you know how many people out there (whether they realize it or not) are married to their mommies or daddies in some respect or another? We’re all products of our pasts, and that is especially true when it comes to sex and attraction. Your problem is that you’ve stigmatized this “issue,” whereas most people just shrug off their kinks as unworrisome by-products of their psychosexual development. Trust me, you’re not hiding a dark, ugly secret, you’re just trying to wall people off from an extremely vulnerable part of who you are. The only way to get past it is to trust someone enough to show them that side of you and have them appreciate you for it all the same.

Send letters to Jamie Bufalino c/o Time Out New York, 475 Tenth Avenue, 12th floor, New York, NY 10018, or send e-mail to sex@timeoutny.com.