The fall of man

Women who wanted out of their marriages on grounds of their husbands' impotence were obliged to argue that their sacred desire for motherhood was being frustrated; a total absence of sexual gratification was no grounds for annulment. But claims of potency and impotence had to be proven, as marriage was too serious a spiritual contract to be lightly broken. The unfortunate men in question were subjected to bizarre trials. Sometimes prostitutes were brought into court to arouse them; in other cases, they had to produce erections on their own -- usually in another room -- then bring the judges in to view the evidence. Needless to say, the pressures inherent in this sort of scenario led to lots of false positives, and if an "impotent" man divorced and then fathered children in a subsequent marriage, he was sometimes forced to go back to his first -- and now only legitimate -- wife.

As you might expect, many experts through the ages have written on the mystery of why some men are unable to sustain erections or to impregnate women. Countless theories have been kicked around over the years. Perhaps the most persistent is based on a concept that McLaren calls the "spermatic economy," the belief that a man possesses a limited amount of some kind of vital, masculine substance and if he squanders it -- especially in improper ways -- he will eventually run out. Even the Greeks and Romans believed that men lost something when they ejaculated during intercourse and they also thought that women gained by the exchange. Women, being made of a lesser, passive, cooler material, benefited from an injection of their partners' finer, livelier, hotter elixir. Women needed sex for their health, and if not restrained could become insatiable, especially since they lacked the male virtue of self-control. So men had to be careful, or they'd be sucked dry.

Sorcery was an equally popular explanation, especially since it let the sufferer entirely off the hook. He wasn't impotent because he'd overindulged with hookers or his own right hand -- he was the victim of a spell! You could jinx a groom on his wedding night by knocking on the bedroom door and breaking off the point of a knife in the wood as you called his name. If he answered, the bride would remain a virgin. According to McLaren, women were almost always fingered as the culprit in these cases, and tying knots in a piece of string while performing various incantations was the preferred method. The witch responsible might be a rejected lover trying to spoil her ex's new marriage, or she could be a wife determined to keep her husband from straying, but whenever a man had difficulty getting it up, he always had the option of blaming a disgruntled or vengeful female.

Although women had no recognized right to sexual satisfaction in marriage, authorities still worried about this factor. The frustrated wives of impotent men were, they feared, liable to run amok and precipitate a general moral decline. Women needed regular sex to keep them from destabilizing society with their rapacious lusts, so it was in everyone's best interest to find a cure for their husbands' difficulties. "Impotence" features a fairly mind-numbing catalog of the various remedies so-called physicians have recommended over the years.

From the ancients, people retained the idea that "hot" and irritating substances like chilies, cantharides (ground up beetles, aka Spanish fly) and nettles would replenish the store of masculine warmth. Phallic-shaped foods like leeks and celery, or foods producing flatulence were also recommended. (Erections were thought to be powered by abdominal gas.) Moderate quantities of alcohol or opiates were sometimes prescribed. Or you could piss through your wife's wedding ring or wear "the right molar of a small crocodile" as an amulet. Men laboring under an evil spell sometimes found that simply killing the witch brought relief.

The placebo effect is so powerful with any impotence cure that any one of these wacky prescriptions could be said to "work" at least part of the time. At the time something approaching real medical science emerged, doctors still sometimes knowingly recommended bogus remedies, often with excellent results. The earliest discussions of the placebo effect, McLaren claims, were in connection with impotence and its "cures."

Many doctors, alas, were all too eager to capitalize on men's anxieties, and some went so far as to whip up hysteria among the general populace. Marten and his "Onania," mentioned above, kicked off a 250-year masturbation panic whose toxic effects we experience even to this day. This most commonplace and innocuous of sexual activities was demonized by both doctors and quacks as the cause of a panoply of ills, ranging from cancer and schizophrenia to chronic fatigue and, of course, impotence. Men were led to believe that they could "use up" all of their sexual resources in their onanistic youth, only to find themselves coming up short on their hallowed wedding day. One French physician sought to document this principle by availing himself of the services of several prostitutes until reaching the point where his penis no longer responded to their attentions -- all for science, of course.

Some of the impotence cures advocated during the height of the masturbation panic of the 19th century were outright "punitive," to use McLaren's word. Blistering, cauterizing, spiky catheters, surgery and other tortures were used on men who had been persuaded that the sin of "self abuse" caused their sexual dysfunction. The merely uncomfortable treatments included cold baths, electrical belts, Spartan diets, hard beds and vigorous exercise. Some of this actually made a little sense -- impotence is sometimes a side effect of obesity -- but most of it functioned as penance in the guise of medical care.

Next page: A gruesome craze for grafting animal and even human testicles (from executed prisoners, mostly) onto impotent men