Most men are so completely unaware of their prostate gland that they don't even know how to say its name. (It's often mispronounced "prostrate.") Generally, this obscure wad of tissue doesn't even enter male consciousness until it starts causing trouble sometime in late middle age.

The fact is, though, that most men are probably intimately familiar with sensations produced by their prostate - feelings about as far from pain and misery as you can get. In fact, there's an inexpressibly sweet moment 2 or 3 seconds before ejaculation in which the prostate plays a starring role.

In their studies of male sexual arousal, M.D., and Virginia Johnson, ofthe Masters and Johnson Institute in St. Louis, reported that ejacula¬tion actually consists of two stages. In the first, sometimes called emission, the prostate and several other related glands begin heaving with rhythmic contractions.

Since the main function of the prostate is to manufacture some of the fluid in semen, the purpose ofthese contractions is to expel the juice into the base ofthe urethra in preparation for ejaculation-almost like loading a bullet into the chamber of a gun. It's these rhythmic contractions that produce the sensation of ejaculatory inevitability (the feeling that you're about to ejaculate and can't stop). A couple of seconds later, in the second stage of ejaculation, the gun is fired, and semen explodes out of the body.