Actually, a big thanks needs to go out to our caseworker – Andrea at the IRS. She was wonderful to work with. She was a good sport about working with an ED organization. At one point in the process she asked us to “send pamphlets, press releases, articles and photographs about the foundation. Wait…on second thought, skip the photographs.”

Maybe it’s because our topic is anything but trivial that this is such a great band of brothers. Guys come here from all over the world to talk about the most intimate area of their life – and their failures, fears, and disappointments in that most intimate area. Each guy has come here with his soul bared and the response is compassion, caring and support.

The site has continued to grow at a steady rate. We recently passed 1000 members and we are getting over 12,000 hits a month with 7000 unique visitors a month. Each month, 50% of those visitors are brand new (do some rough math and you realize that nearly 50,000 men have been on FT this year). All this has been done with absolutely no marketing, SEO work or advertising. We had a nice mention in a few places, but aside from those, we have continued to grow as men find us.

The Erectile Dysfunction Foundation, who now owns and runs FrankTalk.org, is already under great pressure to meet the needs of the 35 million men who have ED. As the ONLY advocacy and support group for men with ED, the need for our involvement in public awareness, educational programs, prevention, and becoming a united voice to the medical community is increasing daily.

But as with any new organization, we need resources to begin our work. FrankTalk alone needs money simply to stay online. There is new material that needs to be posted, redesigns to make things easier, and improvements in chat and the discussion boards. We can do none of this until we have money to do it. Your tax deductible contribution to our work will make a huge difference.

Remember how you felt when you first found FrankTalk? The relief? The sense of hope? The feeling that you were no longer alone? Pass that hope along to the next guy whose life is slowly crumbling because he has lost all hope.

There is a donate button at the top of the home page. You don’t need a Paypal account, simply enter your credit card info. If you’d rather use snail mail, our address is

EDF, Inc.
PO Box 181
Greenwich, CT 06836

As the ONLY non-commercial site for ED and the only one with no agenda, we are a David among hundreds of Goliaths. Please help us Give Men Hope.

VIVUS is not a house-hold word in pharmaceuticals, but they are on the brink of final approval of Avanafil, a next generation ED drug with fewer side effects and rapid onset and half-life. Jumping through hoops for the FDA is a long, laborious and perilous journey. Getting a new drug to market involves years and years of research and paperwork. They have striven to get the product to market as cleanly and quickly as possible. This drug could work for men who are not currently able to take the most common ED drugs.

I was talking to GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) a while back about the launching of their new product STAXYN. Staxyn is an improved delivery system of their tried and true drug, Levitra. Staxyn dissolves in your mouth, thereby helping some men avoid the indigestion issues or absorbtion issues of a full stomach. Both of these companies are under constant scrutiny by both government agencies and consumer watchdogs. You may recall that GSK no longer advertises its ED drugs on TV. Their president decided that prime time was just not the place for talks about priapisms and erectile difficulties.

We applaud both of these companies for the ethical, business, and marketing high roads they have taken. Their efforts are truly on behalf of the men who need these products.

Another fascinating development in ED treatment is the Viberect by Reflexonic. Dr. Kambiz Tajkarimi is a urologist/inventor who has created a completely new ED treatment based on nerve stimulation of both top and bottom surfaces of the penis. The Viberect uses vibrations to stimulate nerves and excite them enough to produce a firm erection over the course of 7-10 minutes. It has just passed FDA approval. Read about the Viberect here: http://www.reflexonic.com/viberect.html Apparently this is one of few treatments where using the treatment is as much fun as using the intended results!

So, rest assured when things aren’t working quite so well at the moment, somewhere someone is inventing something new to help all the men with ED. They are good guys.

Robin D. Ader, author, public speaker, and interesting guy, has just released a book, Hard! Maintaining Potency, Eliminating Erectile Dysfunction, and Enjoying Healthy Sex for Life.
This book is a delight to read. Geared toward the man who has erectile dysfunction due to everyday life, stress, obesity, old age, or poor nutrition, the book chronicles his own slide into ED and how he dug himself out.
It is funny, gutsy, and searingly honest as he talks about his mental train wreck as things start to go downhill. The frustration over the lack of medical discernment or effective treatment spurs him to take matters into his own hands (so to speak) and figure out what his doctors could not. The final success is inspiring.
Mr. Ader has very generously offered to donate some of the proceeds of this book to FrankTalk.org. In his own words:

I’m a biologist, and I’ve had ED. No I hadn’t suffered groin injury in Viet Nam, and I’ve never had cancer. I’m just one of the 70%+ that just got ED for reasons my doctor could not diagnose. I spent more than a year doing research, and applying what I’d found to my own body. Now, I can screw just fine, and without drugs… I just need more opportunity, but that’s another story.
Being a writer as well as a scientist, I wrote a book about how I cured myself. It’s available for download as an ebook. The Title says it all: HARD! Maintaining Potency, Eliminating Erectile Dysfunction, and Enjoying Healthy Sex for Life.. The cost is only $4.99 regularly, but I’m offering it for $4.89 to (FrankTalk) guys.
I’m going to donate $1.00 for each book purchased by you guys to FrankTalk. Go to http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/65109 and use code ZZ84X when you purchase. You’ll save the freaking dime and be donating a buck to (the Erectile Dysfunction Foundation’s) great endeavor here. Most importantly, you’ll be able to share in what I’ve discovered about how, for many of us, eliminating ED is in our control.

If you’re one of the tens of millions of men who have ED just from life itself, this book is a great guide and companion to your journey. Help yourself, support FrankTalk, and read a good book all at once.

Men’s Health. An interesting dilemma. For years we’ve seen clinics for women, free screenings for women, sexual health centers for women, and countless women’s health initiatives. I always assumed it was because someone felt that men were hogging all the medical resources and it was women standing up for their fair share. Boy, was I wrong!

The fact is, women organized these programs to make sure they were taken care of – period. Men aren’t hogging any health resources. In fact, in a recent Harris Interactive poll, 58% of men said they simply did not go to a doctor unless they were extremely ill. We all know guys who have not been to a doctor since their sports physical in high school. It’s often a point of pride.

This helps explain why so many men don’t seek medical attention for their ED. In fact, according to the International Journal of Impotence Research, as many as 90% of men seek no treatment for ED. It would seem that men aren’t in the habit of going to a doctor period – forget about bringing up a topic as uncomfortable as their ED struggles.

We have learned that ED can be the ‘canary in the cave’ for far more serious issues. One study showed that, on average, ED began 53 months before a major heart issue. ED can signal circulatory issues, diabetes, neuropathy, cardio problems and a whole list of other conditions.

Amazingly, the first line of treatment for many men is to head to their local supplement store and play pharmacist based on advice from a body builder. When that doesn’t work, there is always the internet for help, right? There are hundreds of sites promising a cure for your ED – you just have to fork over the money, and the solution will be on your doorstep in days. Funny how we’ll avoid a doctor when it comes to our most treasured member, but we’ll trust gym rats and con men to help us out.

If you’re experiencing ED and you don’t know exactly what it causing it, call up a urologist and make an appointment. They’ll take it from there.

Bottom line? Every guy should be getting a physical once a year. Getting a baseline of your health helps docs see when real problems start to come along. A PSA test for prostate cancer, cholesterol levels, blood sugar, and a whole host of tests can be accomplished in a few vials of blood. If you don’t want to do it for yourself, do it for your family and friends.

Honor Men’s Health Month – honor yourself.

Getting an endorsement from a public figure is a quick, easy way to overcome this challenge. The problem is, public figures don’t give out endorsement easily. We are very fortunate indeed, to have gained the trust of Senator Bob Dole.

Senator Dole was known for his 1999 Public Service Announcement style ADs about Erectile Dysfunction following his own bout with prostate cancer in 1991. His famous TV commercial was paid for by Pfizer, but its product, Viagra, is not mentioned anywhere in the AD. Interestingly, he never says whether he experienced ED. As with anyone who breaks new ground, Bob Dole found himself the butt of many late night comic material.  It would be nice to think that things have changed since then.

So, it was logical that we turned to Senator Dole when looking for a voice to put behind our cause. He carefully researched us and our work. He wrote a very kind note thanking us for the great service the Foundation was providing and we worked out a statement for us to use.

Be assured that his name has opened doors to us already. When we approach a corporation that has never heard of us, Bob Dole’s name raises a few eyebrows and opens the door a few more inches.

We are about to launch a capital campaign among our membership. The expenses of the site maintenance and marketing are significant. The better our numbers, the better our chances of corporate sponsorship. It all takes money. Our goal is to raise $10,000.00. For 500 members, and 4000 Unique Visitors a month, this should be an easy target. But it would pay some bills, build our Market Place and move us to the next level. Please follow the statement of support by Bob Dole and help us help the 35 million men still waiting for hope.

If you’ve turned on a TV since 1998, you know how obsessed we are with hard-ons. Since the little blue pill appeared more than a dozen years ago, countless imitators of varying legitimacy and effectiveness have hit the market. Ads for drugs that promise to cure erectile dysfunction run nonstop during sporting events, and the sales of these medications generate hundreds of millions of dollars a year. We watch these ads and pop these pills without ever considering that the periodic inability to get an erection could be the best thing that could happen to our sex lives.

Losing my erections forced me to rethink my sexuality. It helped me make the vital shift from focusing on my own technique to focusing on sharing pleasure. I became a participant rather than a performer.

I’m not talking about men who have serious medical problems that make it impossible to get erections without pharmaceutical help. Of course, the drug companies wouldn’t be making much money if those were the only men consuming Cialis and Levitra. A growing percentage of those taking these anti-ED drugs are men under 30, a population in which medical impotence is rare. Performance anxiety is what’s driving most young men’s Viagra consumption. And they’ll never get to the root cause of that anxiety unless they overcome the source of that fear: the belief that an erection defines a man’s sexual power.

The first time I couldn’t get an erection, I was in bed with my high school girlfriend. We’d been dating for about three months and had been having sex for two. Michelle and I played hooky from school at least once a week, riding the bus to her empty house and spending a few hours in bed together. But this particular day, we were fighting (I have long since forgotten what the quarrel was about). For the first time, we tried having make-up sex. I was angry and confused and so was Michelle. We both wanted the soothing of sexual connection. But no matter what we did, it didn’t work: my penis stayed soft.

I was 17, near the peak of what is supposed to be teenage male horniness. I’d certainly never had this problem before, and I was confused—and quickly devastated. Michelle tried giving me a blowjob, but nothing happened. I tried masturbating myself, to no avail; the harder I tried, the softer it got. Michelle burst into tears, crying that I must not be attracted to her anymore. I felt incredibly ashamed, and ended up leaping out of bed, pulling on my clothes, and running down the street to catch the bus home. I couldn’t face her.

Similar incidents would bedevil me throughout the remainder of my teens and well into my 20s. To my tremendous frustration, I could never predict when I would suddenly be unable to get an erection. It happened with one-night stands, and it happened with women I’d been sleeping with for weeks and months. The “problem” would disappear for a long time, and then re-emerge with a vengeance. Unlike that first incident with Michelle, later bouts of impotence rarely had anything to do with a fight. More often, it was performance anxiety—I’d worry about getting an erection, and it became a self-fulfilling prophecy.

For many years, this anxiety made me fearful of too much foreplay. Once I had an erection, particularly with someone new I wanted to impress, I would try and rush to intercourse, scared of losing my hard-on. (The way it worked for me was that once I was inside a woman, I could always stay hard indefinitely. The dreaded problem always came before what one ex of mine liked to call “invagination.”) I wanted to be hard because I wanted so badly to perform. But as I eventually figured out, that anxiety made me a worse lover rather than a better one. Everyone likes a quickie now and again, but it gets awfully dull as the default.

Some women were understanding; some weren’t. One woman with whom I had a one-night stand said, after a prolonged amount of foreplay did not result in a “workable” hard-on, “Christ, I always knew you were a f**got.” Ouch. And other women became anxious, worrying that this was evidence I didn’t really want them. That only increased my desperation, making the problem worse.

But eventually, I figured out the lesson my body was trying to teach me. Contrary to what I’d grow up hearing, I figured out my penis is not a “tool,” a “drill,” a “rod” at my disposal. It’s part of my body and part of me, and it doesn’t perform on command. Thank goodness. ED left me feeling vulnerable and inadequate—and that’s exactly what I needed to feel in order to learn how to be a real partner to my lovers.

Like so many men, I didn’t question the dominant message about sexuality and the male body until I found myself falling woefully short of the standard. The fear, desperation, and shame associated with these periodic bouts of impotence was a gift. Even though I studied gender and sexuality in college, it took these on-again, off-again struggles with ED to get me to accept just how toxic and damaging the inflexible masculine idea really was.

ED made me much better in bed. Though from my earliest sexual experiences with other people, I’d known that there was more to sex than intercourse, I hit my early 20s still somehow convinced that penis-in-vagina sex was what really “counted.”

Losing my erections forced me to rethink my sexuality. It helped me make the vital shift from focusing on my own technique to focusing on sharing pleasure. I became a participant rather than a performer. Though I know that many of my partners did like intercourse, there’s no question that I learned to be a better and more present lover because of ED. And, predictably, as I learned to decenter the importance of intercourse, the erection problems gradually disappeared.

I don’t think there’s anything wrong with taking Viagra or similar drugs when it’s clear that there are purely medical reasons for erectile dysfunction. But before we pop the little blue pill to make ourselves hard, we need to question what’s so “dysfunctional” about not being able to perform on command. We need to question our obsession with heterosexual intercourse, and broaden our understanding of what sex can be. We need to let go of the need to be hard and in control all the time.

Sex is not an athletic competition. We are participants in the creation of mutual pleasure, not solitary performers on a track or in a ring. And for a lot of us, the only way to really learn that lesson is to lose the one thing we were taught was indispensable.

This piece was originally published at The Good Men Project Magazine, an online publication which claims: “Unlike so many other men’s magazines, we don’t patronize or caricaturize our audience. We try to bring out the best in men, and we do that by producing content that challenges men to think deeply—and to talk about the things they don’t usually talk about.”

Swedish archaeologists claim they have found the world's oldest sex toy. The four-inch long dildo is carved out of a stag's antler and believed to be between 6,000 and 8,000 years old. It was discovered in mud on the banks of the Gota Canal in Sweden.

The next major project for both the Erectile Dysfunction Foundation (the corporation that runs this site) and FrankTalk.org is the creation of our own FrankTalk Marketplace. We have long observed that men are overwhelmed when it comes to selecting a sex toy. The sheer numbers are staggering. In any category of toy, there are usually hundreds from which to choose. What is the difference between them? How on earth do these things work? You’re supposed to put that where??

Then there is the general discomfort with the more lurid aspects of shopping for toys. Some sites seem to want to offer the shopper a ’stop-action’ porn movie while they shop. The local sex shop, even though it may be completely reputable, can be a challenge for some people to enter. The fear of someone they know seeing them enter or exit is paralyzing.

For the man dealing with ED, the extra challenge is finding a sex toy which he can find fulfilling, even without an erection. Most masturbation toys are definitely made with a turgid penis in mind.

At the FrankTalk Marketplace, we’re going to take some of the guess work out of the whole experience. For example, when it comes to cock rings, many of them do not work well for guys with ED. Therefore, we’re going to sell only the ones that will. Masturbation toys will include some that are perfectly delightful with a flaccid penis. We will also find toys to help guys explore other parts of their body that can hold great pleasure, but have been a bit daunting up until now. We will also have a place for feedback from buyers. Customer reviews, hints, and comments will help other guys decide what to buy.

Don’t worry. We will offer toys for the man to use with, and on, his partner. The traditional favorites for women will be available for men to buy.

- We will offer secure, discreet shipping so when the postman leaves it on your doorstep, your kids or grandkids will have no idea that you’ve just bought a new toy!

Right now, as we’re putting our inventory together, please let us know if you have favorites or special requests. Ideas, suggestions, and yes, even fears will help us put together the best collection to help our guys. We’re listening. Let us know.

Clarence was an older man when I was a younger man. Every Friday he drove to a lonely place to dream about what could be — to think about possibilities.

Clarence was a mentor of sorts. I admired the way he held a guy’s personal growth above professional success. To Clarence, personal growth meant taking risk. It meant going where you’ve not been before. It meant turning my head to face my reticence to risk regular change in my life.

Though I was stalled, I wasn’t ready to risk my position to launch a new dream.

A professional crisis took my risk for me. My career exploded in my face, upset my values, exposed my emotion and put me at odds with dozens of people who would never understand.

Clarence phoned one evening. His annoying habit of marginalizing pain and hardship confused me. He thought my storm a mere squall. More important to Clarence were the possibilities of my future and taking steps to grow as a man than a little inconvenience of humiliation and destruction of my professional manhood.

How dare he?

That mere squall became my buddy and confidant. It ripped away the modesty of my fear and laid bare the intimate places of my life where risk was waiting for me. It took my seemingly indispensable obstacles out of my way so that I could unveil my dreams and actually touch them.

I felt exposed. I didn’t realize it at the time, but my crisis of career uncovered countless stunted areas of life which would soon bud and grow — among them my sexuality. And sexual growth would require considerable risk.

Some guys are natural risk takers especially in sports and adventure. Others put their finances at risk — a calculated risk expecting a return or an entrepreneurial pursuit.

However, when it comes to risk opening the shutters of intimate places of our lives, guys tend to play the safe game. It’s frightening to imagine that others might see what you really fear, or really think, or worse, what you really want sexually.

Most of us have a narrow view of sexuality because of our miniscule exposure to sexual ideas at the time of our value development. Sexual curiosity or experimentation may have brought us new experiences, but these are often concealed and followed by guilt. And that stunts growth. Risk stimulates it.

Almost every growth opportunity in life is accompanied by risk — risk of failure, disappointment or loss. The flip side is also accompanied by risk — risk of overwhelming success and a possibility of a richer life yet accompanied by a terrifying demand for a shift in values and behavior which begs to be known by others in our lives.

Just like Clarence telling me I’ll die if I don’t dream, our male soul warns us that our sexuality is a vital artery to a thriving life. If we don’t pay attention to it, we’ll shrivel and die. There is no passive sexuality. You have to go after it. If you’re in a sexual crisis, remember that it’s a mere squall. What’s more important is that you grow and thrive. Your soul tells you what you need to do to recover. You just need to take the risk and do it.

Sean Christopher
Bio:
Sean Christopher writes OrgasmicGuy.com, a web site geared to sexual recovery and sexual growth for guys of all varieties.

I could not have done any of this without you guys.  The most common remark I get is “I can’t believe I’ve finally found somewhere to talk to other guys about this stuff!”  That is all credit to the great bunch of guys who make up this site. The welcomes, the crazy times in chat, the responses and ideas that fill the discussion boards are what give men hope.  We have dozens of men who just lurk and read the posts. That’s fine. We hope they join someday, but if not, they leave here having learned something about ED – and maybe even about themselves.

It’s just the beginning! Thanks guys.

Paul