The fall of man

For ages, impotent men cowered in shame and submitted their penises to terrible remedies. Yet in time, a new cultural history shows, relief would arise for their private misfortunes.

By Laura Miller

Read more: Books, Laura Miller, Viagra, Impotence, Reviews, Book reviews, Penises

Mignon Khargie / Salon

May 21, 2007 | "We are right to note the license and disobedience of this member which thrusts itself forward so inopportunely when we do not want it, and which so inopportunely lets us down when we most need it; it imperiously contests for authority with our will: it stubbornly and proudly refuses all our incitements, both mental and manual."

So wrote Montaigne of the penis, the organ whose misbehavior is the subject of Angus McLaren's "Impotence: A Cultural History," an exhaustive (and exhausting) survey of male sexual failure in the Western world. That title is chosen carefully -- over the currently favored term "erectile dysfunction" -- because, as McLaren points out, the definition of impotence has changed over the centuries. So have people's ideas about what causes it and what can be done about it.

The one thing that never seems to change is how bad impotence makes a guy feel. In the 17th century, the French writer Louis de Serres reported that the afflicted "must be despised, can succeed to no office, lose the support of the powerful; and finally are regarded as imperfect and defective monsters." John Marten, an 18th-century British surgeon and author of the infamous anti-masturbation tract "Onania," insisted that an impotent man must be "a useless Member of the Commonwealth in which he lives, and One, whom the Fair Sex would avoid, unless it were to look at him, Point and Laugh with their Fans before their Faces." A 19th-century psychiatrist insisted that even should such man manage somehow to reproduce, the results would be lamentable: "Has a being so degraded any right to curse a child with the inheritance of such a wretched descent? Far better that the vice and its consequences should die out with him." And in the 20th century, a follower of Freud observed that this private misfortune inevitably led a man to suffer "a total inability to hold his head erect and look the whole world in the face."

No wonder, then, that to find relief from this terrible condition, men have been willing to submit to a barrage of icky, silly, smelly, expensive, painful and dangerous remedies -- most of them completely useless (apart from the not inconsiderable placebo effect). But of what "condition," exactly, are we speaking? "Impotence" as a sexual term only came into common usage in the 17th century, and as McLaren puts it, "there has never been a universal, biologically determined standard of male potency," which makes it pretty hard to define its opposite. Different societies have had different ideas about what makes a man a real man, and that means their idea of what constitutes an inadequate man has varied, too.

For example: An ancient Greek or Roman man would have been considered potent if he always penetrated (and dominated) his sexual partners. But, if those partners happened to be boys, the same man would have been labeled impotent by early Freudian analysts. They regarded anything less than "successful vaginal intercourse" as a sexual failure. In the classical world, who you did it to mattered less than the way you did it; an elite male always took and never gave pleasure. Receiving fellatio from another man carried relatively little stigma, but nothing was more shameful than performing cunnilingus. A rampant, inarticulate stud seemed less manly to the ancients than a self-disciplined, aristocratic orator because theirs was a culture where self-mastery and certain privileged skills counted for more than brute force.

This didn't keep Romans, when engaged in the aforementioned skilled oratory, from including impotence among the worst insults you could fling at an enemy. They also defined potency as the ability to sustain an erection without much coaxing; older men were often taunted for requiring lots of assistance from their slaves' mouths and hands. A superior, virile man exerted perfect control over his body and his subordinates -- be they wives, servants or male or female slaves. Manhood was, as McLaren puts it, a kind of performance rather than a "natural" state.

By contrast, in early Christian Europe, fathering lots of children was the foremost means of proving one's manhood. A guy could be capable of getting it up and in, but if no offspring resulted, it didn't quite count. At the same time, some of the young religion's most influential thinkers mistrusted any kind of sex, and a model of celibate manliness -- the Soldier for Christ -- emerged as a counterpart to the lusty patriarch of a sprawling brood. Where the Romans had seen marriage as a coldblooded business contract (with adoptions readily used to make up for reproductive shortfalls), the Christians "moralized" sex and therefore matrimony. This, as McLaren sees it, marks the beginning of "the modern view of sex as the essence of one's being."

The very first Christians thought the world was going to end at any moment, so they viewed any attachments to the fleshly life as perilous distractions. A vogue for "spiritual" or "Josephite" marriages had husbands and wives vowing to remain virgins even after their nuptials, and Margery of Kempe successfully appealed to Christ to make her husband impotent during Holy Week to keep him from polluting the sacred days. If you had to have sex, it was imperative to do it only for the sake of reproduction, with one (opposite-sex) partner to whom one was lawfully wed for the entirety of one's life. As St. Paul put it: "Better to marry than to burn."

Nevertheless, the newly converted barbarians of Northern Europe clung to the custom that only consummation made a marriage. This meant that the only way out of an unwanted union was to claim that the "marriage debt" had never been paid. This loophole, McLaren explains, resulted in a rich irony: Celibate churchmen found themselves engaged in long, complicated debates about the finer points of sex and potency. Was it enough merely to be able to get an erection? Or did penetration have to be achieved as well? Was ejaculation necessary?

Next page: Blistering and cauterizing were used on men who had been persuaded that "self-abuse" caused their sexual dysfunction