To air is human

Dear Sasha

—Not Gassed Out

Dear Not,

Michelle Bodner, a naturopath I consult frequently, says you may just have a lot of digestive issues going on, “and perhaps a visit to a nutritionist or naturopath may be in order to cleanse and rebalance your gut.” As a stage performer, I’ve worked with people who get gas or even the shits from nerves or excitement and sex can be pretty nerve-wracking and exciting. Either way, I’d take Dr. Bodner’s advice and see what’s up with your colon.

Dear Sasha

I’m a 24-year-old straight male who has either embraced safe sex with gusto, or developed a complex about catching herpes, depending on your point of view. I always use condoms, but nevertheless in almost every instance when I have sex with someone for the first time, I find myself rushing home, jumping in the shower and scrubbing my crotch like it was covered in red ants for anywhere up to half an hour. Is this practice doing me any good, prevention-wise?

—Scared Senseless Showerer

Dear Scared,

I confirmed what I already knew with the Hassle Free Clinic: scrubbing your pud will do nothing to prevent a herpes infection if it’s already entered the skin, which it does upon contact. Craig Stephen says they see concerns like yours at the clinic all the time, what they call “low-risk high-anxiety” or “worry well” because you’re well but you worry, and Google, apparently, has not helped the hysteria. “People get fixated on one symptom in 100,” he says.

Stephen also says he finds obsessions like this point to more complex issues: guilt or unresolved feelings around sexual expression and what STIs then represent to you as moral symbols. My advice? Start becoming more comfortable with and knowledgeable about sex in general. Get yourself one of the guides I recommend often here, like The Good Vibrations Guide to Sex or The Guide to Getting it On. Read impartial yet positive views on sexuality and you may find yourself less worked up about its glitches.

Dear Sasha

Although somewhat predictable (and not that predictability is a bad thing), I usually find your idealistic and fervently righteous attitude toward your subject quite entertaining.

In the case of your column on premature ejaculation [“Ejaculation and egos,” Feb. 22], however, I can’t let it go without comment. As a woman, I have spent more years than I wish to admit trying to overcome the very problems described by the young woman you replied to. I tried everything you suggested with the unflagging conviction that if implemented will work to alleviate the dissatisfaction; I would suggest to you that the gap is wide between the theoretical solutions you propose and the very real possibility of a perennially unfulfilling sex life with one’s chosen life mate.

Better to advise this young woman to cut her losses while she’s ahead, to bow out of the relationship now as gracefully as possible and not waste years of her life trying to change another—regardless of one’s idealism about how things really should or could be.

—BT...DT

Dear BT,

I find your jaded attitude equally entertaining as, no doubt, does the huge percentage of men who have issues around erection, ejaculation and the myriad other things that can happen to their poor, put-upon dicks. And not that being a disenchanted sexual sophisticate is a bad thing either but let’s just consider for a moment how you might respond if I offered the same advice to a man whose girlfriend suffered from any number of the disorders that can wreak havoc on the vagina. People have trouble with their bits. It doesn’t mean they should be shunted away.

Got any questions for Sasha? E-MAIL: POULEDELUXE@YAHOO.COM