How to Deal with Your Boyfriend's Excessive Pre-Cum

Most of Broadly's amateur sex-doctorin' is spent reassuring people with vaginas that they are normal for having stuff gush out of them. Finally—finally!— here's something dick-swingers can feel shame about. A woman posted to on Reddit's r/sex about her boyfriend's "buckets of precum" :

So is it normal for your boyfriend's penis to be dripping like a malfunctioning soft serve machine throughout foreplay?

First, we need to know what pre-cum is before we can figure out how much there should be. Pre-cum is made by the Cowper's glands, two pea-size glands just below the prostate. The glands produce a fluid which neutralizes pH inside the urethra as it comes out. That way, spermatozoa aren't dissolved before even making it out of the dick. In unprotected penis-in-vagina sex, pre-cum also neutralizes the pH of the vag, again to make it more a more hospitable spot for sperm.

The Journal of Andrology says that pre-ejaculate emissions vary "from a few drops to more than 5 mL"—a little over a teaspoon. That might not seem like a lot of liquid, but when it's involuntarily spilling out of you every time you have an impure thought, it can turn your daily commute into Splash Mountain. "I travel to work by train every day," said a poster on Netdoctor forums, "and when I see an attractive girl I instantly get hard and start oozing pre-cum so much that by the time I get to work my pants and trousers are soaked which work colleagues obviously tease me about."

If bringing a change of pants to work every day seems like an insufficient solution, there are more extreme measures. Some people report success with kegels, or just masturbating more. The theory behind the jerk-it solution is this: The pre-cum leakage seems to be linked to mental arousal. If you whack it till you're dead inside, you won't be tormented by your deviant sexual fantasies all day. Unfortunately, there's no scientific backing for such claims. "The only medical treatment for this as far as I know is Finasteride," says Dr. Andrew Rynne, who founded a website called Medical Advice and is the author of the memoir Vasectomy Doctor.

Finasteride is the generic name for Propecia, the treatment used for male pattern baldness. The Cowper's glands are triggered by the hormone dihydrotestosterone (DHT) and so as is hair loss. Finasteride stops testosterone from being converted into DHT. No more pre-cum, and maybe you're a little hairier. It's a win-win.

Or maybe not. "Finasteride has many potentially devastating sexual side-effects," says Dr. Rynne. Namely, as is the case with many hormone-altering drugs, sexual interest may decrease significantly. Sometimes a person loses all interest in sex, or can't come during any sexual activity. "The only time that I ever failed to produce any pre-cum was during a few months while I was on a certain prescribed medication," said one poster on a sexual health message board. "But I also could not [cum] while on it either. After I stopped taking the med, and it had completely left my system, I was back to soaking my drawers once again."

So what is one to do? Much like jizz leaking out of a vagina, or farts traveling through the labia, or most vagina smells, this "problem" isn't really a problem. The problem is society's one-size-fits-all mentality when it comes to genitals. Many men report a "drying up" as they get older. The Cowper's chill out, and back-up pants become a thing of the past. In the meantime, Dr. Rynne has this advice: "if at all possible, to look on this 'excessive pre-cum' as normal, healthy and pleasurable—not as something dirty or shameful." In other words, everyone gushes.