My Boyfriend Is Trained Like a Dog to React to a Particular Song. What He Does Makes Both of Us Blush.

How to Do It is Slate’s sex advice column. Have a question? Send it to Jessica and Rich here. It’s anonymous!

Dear How to Do It,

My boyfriend has an unusual sex problem, one he says has been going on since he was in his late teens (he’s 24 now). It has to do with a particular song.

Every time he hears it, he gets an erection. No matter where he is or what he’s doing. He says prior to when the issue began, he could listen to this song and nothing would happen. I’ve heard of something called a Pavlovian response, and this seems to meet the definition. Have you ever heard of anything like this before? Can anything be done to “cure” him?

—Musical Malfunction

Dear Musical Malfunction,

I often want more information when I read questions to this column, but never have I wanted more information this much. How dare you deprive us of the name of this song that has your boyfriend standing at attention! I am left to wonder what has remained in the ether for the past five-ish years, so that one might hear it going about their daily activities. Is it something by Taylor Swift? “Uptown Funk?” Is it a wedding song? “The Macarena?” “Billie Jean?” “Electric Boogie?” I could ponder this all day, each boner-sprouting pop hit funnier to imagine than the next.

Anyway, there is some data to suggest male arousal can be Pavlovian. A 1999 paper in the journal Behavior Modification tested a small sample of nine men, ages 18 to 20, to see if associating a neutral stimulus (a picture of a jar of pennies) with pictures of nude/partially clothed women would get them hard (or at least harder than resting). It did. They were shown a picture of the pennies for 15 seconds and then erotic stimuli for 30 seconds. During “random probe trials” in which the pennies were presented alone, they presented evidence of a “classically trained response,” which is to say their dicks grew in circumference. This was not a long-term study (it was only three weeks), so who knows how long the jar of pennies would have continued to stiffen this lot, but at least it worked for a period.

So yes, this is theoretically possible, though I believe your boyfriend would have had to undergo some kind of conditioning—maybe the mystery song was playing during a particularly defining sexual experience for your boyfriend? He’s 24 so I suppose unwanted erections still constitute a “problem,” but there may come a day when he wants more erections than his body is providing, and if he has some music to help lift him, he’ll be thankful. I say change nothing but his location—when he hears the offending song, make a beeline for the door. He could theoretically de-condition himself (perhaps by pairing the song with material that is decidedly a turn-off to him), but why bother? A few stray boners aren’t going to hurt anyone and this is a fun trick to have in his back pocket.

—Rich

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