Ask Isadora: Where’d It Go?

* I’m getting older and putting on weight, but as of late it seems as if my penis is shrinking. I know things change as you get older, but this seems strange. I’m 5’11”, 285 lbs. I used to be a real athlete. Last time I measured was in college (7 ¼”) but not any more. I was planning on asking my doc too.

Genitals do shrink with age, a bit, and erections become less firm, so look less large. My guess is that the fat pad around your groin is the major culprit. Men often say that when they lose a lot of belly fat their penis appears to grow. How’s that for a healthy incentive?

*Just read your response to the woman who wondered who cheats more, men or women. By and large, in such cheating arrangements it takes both a man and a woman to cheat. So, if it were correct that men cheat more often than women, it must also mean that those women who do cheat must cheat with more different partners than the men who cheat. If both had the same number of cheating partners, then men could not be cheating at a greater rate than women because there wouldn’t be enough cheating women to go around. Or, perhaps, the disparity (if there is one) would be definitional. If a married or committed man cheats with a single woman, perhaps only the married man is deemed to be cheating. The woman, though an equal partner in the extra relationship, would consider herself not to be cheating on anyone. So, if married men cheat with single women more often than married women cheat with single men, and if the single partners in each relationship considered themselves non-cheaters, then you’d get a disparity in self-reported “cheating” between men and women, even though it’s hard to see much of a moral difference between them.

* Who’s on first? As I always say when I report statistics here, any such about people’s sexual behavior, particularly when they report on it themselves, is to be taken with more grains of salt than the recommended daily sodium intake.

* My boyfriend and I have a long and somewhat silly history of fetishizing his ejaculate. I do enjoy swallowing, but we talk in our fantasy life about other things he could do with it. (Yes, we read the salad dressing column, and joke about that, though I always tell him it would be a terrible waste of a natural resource.) So one day we were idly fooling around, I got a phone call I had to take, left the bedroom for the living room to have some privacy, and when I came back, sat back down on the bed, and took a sip of my tea. He looked at me and grinned. “How’s your tea?” he said. I said, “Fine . . . oh no you didn’t!?!” I didn’t think I’d been out of the room long enough for him to jerk off, but there you go. I thought it was kind of adorable and charming. If a little weird. But then, that’s kind of how I think sex should be.

This is in apparent reference to a recent mention of the famous salad dressing column wherein a host ejaculated into the salad dressing he served his dinner guests and I bawled him out since it was entirely nonconsenting as well as possibly dangerous. In your case, if you found it “adorable and charming” where others might have found it disgusting and offensive, I’d say how lucky for him.