The ED

I was sitting around the sorority house discussing senior projects with my sisters when the synergy hit.

It was a comment by Arlene that kicked off the whole discussion, "Kelly and I have an idea for a great psychology experiment, but we are running into a problem with taking some of the measurements."

"What kind of problems?" Nicole asked.

"Erection problems," Kelly put in and then laughed at many thoughts her answer evoked.

"I never had a problem with any of my boys maintaining an erection." I managed to choke out between laughs.

"No, no, it's not like that," Kelly went on, "We have a problem measuring erections."

"Haven't you girls ever heard of a tape measure?" Pam said.

That broke off a side discussion on how a penis should be measured. Some of the girls were quite opinionated when it came to this topic.

Arlene finally brought the conversation back to the original topic, "It isn't the length we are concerned with for this experiment; it's timing when a guy gets an erection. It's easy to judge a completely flaccid penis, not that I've seen many of those," she added with a wink, "and it's not difficult to tell when a guy is completely hard. It's that area in between that's difficult to define. When does a prick go from not erect to erect?"

"What are you girls up to," Pam asked, "that makes timing an erection such a critical thing?"

Kelly described their proposal, "For the last three years, Arlene and I have been studying psychology. Between the two of us, there hasn't been a course offered at the university on human sexuality that we haven't taken. And in all those courses, there has been a fair amount done on male sexuality. However, little has been addressed about male sexual response to stimuli, and in particular, male susceptibility to fetishes and fetish objects."

"What Arlene and I propose is to take males in various stages of development, and expose them to familiar fetish objects such as leather, rubber and silk. We need to measure response time; that is time to erect, in the presence and absence of these objects."

"Part of the experiment is to measure mean time to ejaculate, in the absence of the object, while masturbating in the presence of the object, and while being masturbated with the object. This measurement is fairly easy to obtain. All we have to do is measure the time from the first stroke to the first squirt, and we have our data."

"However, erections are another issue. When a boy gets hard is very subjective. We need a better way than just physical observation."

Here Arlene turned and asked, "Pam, you're a pre-med student. Isn't there some clinical definition of an erection?"

"Technically speaking," Pam said, "an erection happens when the penis becomes engorged with blood. This is caused by the constriction of muscles around the base of the penis that traps the blood and prevents it from going out as fast as the heart pumps it in. When it gets full, it's hard."

"That still doesn't answer my question."

Pam continued, "If you are asking me for a definition of now it's erect," here she snapped her fingers, "now it's not. I can't give you that."

Now it was my turn to jump into the conversation, "You say that the best definition of an erection is that the penis is full of blood. Is there any way that we can measure how much blood is in the penis?" I couldn't believe how casually we were talking about this subject. It belied the jittery stomach I knew I had.

"I suppose we could use the old Archimedian principle of displacement." Pam said. "Simply have him dunk his member in a glass of water and see how much it displaces."

Arlene frowned, "That won't work. It will interfere with the experiment. Is there any other way?"

"Well, so much blood in so much volume, should raise the blood pressure in the organ. I suppose we could measure that."

The bulb went on in my head, "So you are saying that all we have to do is put a little blood pressure cup on his penis."

"Essentially, yes."

Kelly interrupted us again, "That won't do either. Wouldn't that be the same thing as clamping down on his dick and preventing the blood from leaving - sort of like a penis ring? Wouldn't that create a 'false' erection?"

"Penis ring?" I thought, "What has Kelly been doing on her dates?"

Pam never got to answer as I jumped in, "Suppose there were a way to measure the pressure passively. Would that do?"

"I guess so." Kelly admitted.

Pam asked me, "How are you going to do that?"

"You told me a moment ago that erections are caused by restricted blood flow, right?"

Pam nodded.

"Well, in the unerected state, blood flows through the penis, right?"

Again the nod.

"In the erected state, the flow is slower."

Pam prodded, "and?"

The electrical engineer in me took off, "Well, the blood has electrolytes in it. These ions, as they move, constitute a current. The faster the blood flows, the higher the current. All we have to do is measure the current. It should start off high, and decrease as the penis erects. When the penis is full, it should level off."

"How high a current are we talking about here?" Pam asked.

"You tell me. Give me figures for the ion concentration in the blood and an idea of the average speed of the blood, and the amount of blood in a penis."

Pam quoted some figures. I tapped numbers into my calculator and announced, "It ought to be in the neighborhood of nanoamps."

"Nanoamps?" Arlene and Kelly announced at once.

I figured it was time for a basic lesson in electronics, "It takes a couple of amps to run your hair dryer. A milliamp is a thousandth of an amp. A microamp is a millionth of an amp. A nanoamp is a thousand times smaller than even a microamp. Now, bear in mind my calculations are crude, and I might be off by a factor of 10."

Pam chuckled, "Times two at least. My figures are a good guess at best. I'd have to do a lot of research and calculations of my own." She hesitated and added, "A nanoamp? Can we measure something that small."

"Not yet, but I think I just figured out my term project. There is a lot of application for this besides measuring erections."

And so the Erector Detector (ED) project was born. Officially, and for the school records, ED stood for "Electrolyte Displacement."

Pam helped me a lot with the physiology portion of the project, particularly showing me where to place the sensors to get the best pickup on the blood flow. I learned more about penises and how they operated than most men will ever know.

The nice thing about the ED is that it could work on any body part we could wrap it around. Our initial experiments were done using arms since they were easily accessible and the large volume of blood going though them assured a decent current. I was right, when we got our figures put together, the current was in the order of tens of nanoamps.

Had we stopped at measuring the current in an arm, we would have gotten an A+ for sure. However, we went on to experiment using fingers and toes. If we could have success there, then we would most definitively do well with the much larger penis.

Success was ours and we had an analog signal that measured the blood flow in real time. Our first experiment with a live male subject on a live male member was conducted with a volunteer named George. Actually his girlfriend volunteered him. He had no idea that half a dozen girls would be watching his performance. You could tell I'm an engineer I spent as much time looking at my gauges as I did his penis.

It took a while to convince him to disrobe for us. Candice, his girlfriend suggested alcohol, but we didn't want the effects to interfere with his ability to get an erection. "Come on baby, I'll make it up to you," she said. Blushing and sweating, he eventually agreed. After all, it was all in the name of science.

That was the first time we ran into other psychological factors. Kelly was first to comment, "He's already erected. That's not good."

"So what's the problem with that?" I asked.

"Like, duh, we're supposed to be measuring how long it takes him to get erected."

"I forgot about that. I'm so used to seeing them this way." Nichole put in.

"I guess we will have to let the boys stay naked for a while so they get comfortable with it." Arlene suggested.

"I don't know," Kelly said, "would you be able to get it down if you were a guy naked in front of a roomful of girls?"

"Well, it's not like we're naked or anything," Nichole said. "So why would they be excited."

"It's not that easy," Kelly explained, "Erections can be caused by physical stimulation to be sure, but most of the time they are caused by purely psychological factors. Looking at something sexual is only one way men get erect. Other emotions can also stimulate an erection. Embarrassment is a very powerful emotion."

I had never thought of that, but putting it together with what I recently learned about female domination, it began to make sense.

"And we may have the opposite problem. Sometimes strong emotions can hinder the erection process. Either way we are going to have to keep the boys naked for awhile before we can start our experiments."

Although we were looking at him, we weren't really paying much attention to George. Here he is standing naked in the presence of a half dozen fully-clothed girls and we are discussing his penis as much as we would be discussing a rash on the back of his hand. George, the man, had ceased to exist. George, life support for a penis, was born.

Another problem with the project was all the preparation. Not only did we have to put the collar on the penis, we also had to hook it up to the computer. The sensor, after much design and redesign was manageable enough and came in sizes to fit comfortably on toes, fingers, necks, legs, and arms as well as penises. Nonetheless, it had wires attached to it, and the subject was tethered to a computer. Hardly a portable device, and hardly a romantic setting.

Nonetheless, this was good enough for Arlene and Kelly's experiment. The hard work we other girls put in was rewarded by being able to participate in and observe the experiments. Of course I had to be there to babysit my device.

Then there was the "fetish parade." That was the point of the experiment after all. As worldly as we girls liked to think ourselves, we were really didn't know anything about fetishes other than what we were able to read about.

We had a problem with this part of the experiment. What fetish objects should we use? The internet provided us with more than we could ever imagine. While searching these nooks and crannies, I came across the topic of female domination. So that's what we were doing! Or was it?

We knew that there were women who had a lot more experience with fetishes than we did. Unfortunately we couldn't afford to hire them to put on the shows we needed. Instead we hired one for one time to teach us. She was only going to spend a few hours with us, but when she found out why we wanted to know, she spent the whole day working with us.

I'm normally a jeans, sweatshirt and tennie-runner type of girl so I really felt funny parading up and down in front of these naked men and boys in a latex cat suit.

Reducing a penis to a mere object of study brought back memories when it was an mere object of study for my kindergarten girlfriends and me. Then it was curiosity and fascination about what the organ looked like. Now it was curiosity and fascination of how it worked. Specifically how the way women can make it work. I learned that I could control a man's penis and that control of the penis means control of the man. I liked that feeling. I liked having men naked before me.

Not that the men had to be naked. The detector didn't care how they were dressed. Arlene and Nichole never explained to them that remaining clothed was an option. All they really had to do was slip the collar over their organs and run the wire out their pants. They assumed that if we needed to measure their erections that they needed to be totally naked. None of us involved in the project felt it necessary to correct that misconception.

Nor were the pictures we took a necessary part of the experiment. They certainly were not going to wind up in the final report!

The girls were quite thorough in their measurements. Even with the device, men varied a lot in their erectile capabilities. Pam found this quite interesting. For Arlene and Kelly, it meant taking a lot of measurements on a lot of men to average out the differences and figure out a statistical variance.

We tested "normal" men (as if there is such a thing), self-confessed fetishists, and men who wouldn't admit being a fetishist, but whose penises told us otherwise.

Men were presented with a number of normal sexual scenarios, and their erection times were measured. They were required to masturbate during these scenarios, and the time to ejaculation was measured.

The experiment was repeated in the presence of the fetish objects and finally culminated with masturbation with the fetish objects.

At the end of it all, Arlene and Kelly had reams of data and not a few photographs to document the experiment in progress