Agony rather than ecstasy

Byron Rogers

IMPOTENCE by Angus McLaren

University of Chicago Press, £19, pp. 332, ISBN 9780226500768

✆ £16 (plus £2.45 p&p) 0870 429 6655 One of the most interesting conversations I have ever had took place in a Carmarthen pub. There were three of us, the others a builder and a policeman. At one point the policeman told us the weight of a severed human head: it was 14 pounds, and he should know, he went on, having had to carry one in a hat-box. The conversation then turned, somehow, to impotence, which we agreed was something all sensible men should welcome. ‘Be a chance to talk to the wife,’ said the builder. Unfortunately not every man can be a philosopher king in the Black Horse.

Professor Angus McLaren’s book sets out to be an account spanning two millenia of the anguish caused by impotence and of the various profitable quackeries practised by the medical profession in its treatment, up to, and including, our own time. But despite its title, it widens into a history of sexual attitudes, and as such could have been one of the funniest, and saddest, books ever written.

The fact that it isn’t is due to such sentences as this. McLaren, a Canadian professor of history, is discussing the work of Masters and Johnson, those masters of DIY who got the physics department to build a sex machine to their design, then filmed wired-up women using it in a university research laboratory:

By teaching techniques of orgasmotherapy, starting with an education in masturbation, they claimed it was possible to ignore cultural conditioning and circumvent the psycho-analytic preoccupation with the psyche that might demand years of treatment.

In other words, forget your childhood, pal, press the right buttons and you’re away. Yet ignore the jargon for a moment, just look at the structure of that sentence, and listen to the rhythms of the prose. An academic wrote that, an educated man, and one, alas, let loose on the young.

On the next page McLaren quotes a scientist on therapy which involves being plugged into the National Grid:

The technique employed to reduce the patient’s aversion to the female genitals was a modification of the ‘stop-shock’ technique described by Feldman and MacCulloch, which is reported to be highly and rapidly effective in reversing the sexual orientation of secondary homosexuals. Briefly, the technique consists of pairing pictures of the female genitals with relief from an electric shock.

It would be impossible to make any of this up, but you do see the potential for black comedy, if only one were able to separate the material from the language. Which is why in this review, worn out by the ugliness of words like genitalia and vagina (the Victorians took nervous shelter in the Latin of membrum virile), I have gone back to honest asterisks.

The irony is that on the surface there was a sexual breeziness about the classical world, when representations of erect cocks were as much household ornaments as the Royal Doulton Balloon Ladies, say, are now. But then in civilisations without a word for homosexuality there was an enthusiasm for such things. Buggery was aesthetic, f***ing a poor second, and, because it involved women, debilitating. For the Greeks it was not a matter of any port in a storm: the pudenda were rarely, if ever, mentioned in verse, while the adolescent male arse, according to the Professor, was praised to the skies, though he does not give examples, despite a comet trail of footnotes.

I found this extremely irritating, especially when, as later, he asserts that in religious paintings Christ’s cock is often shown erect. Where? When? By whom? The Professor does not say. But given the Christian attitude to sex, such an approach would have consigned both painter and painting to the flames. Again, it is a shock to be told, without references, that St Joseph, apparently the patron saint of marriage, is depicted as decrepit and a virgin. Try getting your brain round that one.

The high points of comedy in his book, for which you have to dig, come when you get on to those periods when headbangers roamed the earth, in other words, the Middle Ages, the time of Victoria and the 20th century.

The medieval church (‘priests’, says the Professor) believed that there were two sure-fire seduction techniques open to women. One was to feed men bread which they had kneaded with their buttocks. He does not go into the practical problems involved (but then priests and professors have never kneaded bread. I have). The other was to stuff fish up inside themselves, then cook this. What kind of fish?

The Victorians, or at least those who wrote on the subject, believed men had only a finite reservoir of semen which had to be husbanded (nice irony, that). It was not just a matter of conservation; the stuff leaked out (which meant that well into the 20th century libertines like Frank Harris tied cords round their cocks). Circumcision was extolled as a means of preventing masturbation.

Then there was Kinsey who did not believe in conservation at all but in the principle of ‘use it or lose it’, and directed his researchers into multiple use with volunteers. For sex had come into the laboratory. A scientist injected himself with the crushed testicles of dogs and guinea pigs and claimed this made him pee 25 per cent further. In 1983 an English scientist, addressing a learned conference in Las Vegas, of all places, on the erectile effect of direct injections into the cock, cheerfully dropped his trousers and gave a demonstration.

Somehow amongst these shenanigans discoveries got made, often by accident. The vasectomy, initially pioneered in the 1890s as a cure for prostate trouble, became in the 1930s commercially successful as a recipe for rejuvenation (Yeats had it done), and of course now is a contraceptive. Doctors do not come well out of this account.

Nor does anyone else. There was the myth of the cervical orgasm fostered by Marie Stopes, and of the vaginal orgasm, the big one, a sort of Grail still believed in by my generation, whom it torments, even though this is impossible, the vagina having no nerve endings. Like America, the clitoris was discovered many times, usually by male doctors (presumably women knew it was there all the time, but didn’t think it worth mentioning).

What comes over in this book is how little is still known about sex, or perhaps how little there is to be known, even after all those electrodes. Also the refinements of cruelty it allows couples, a woman smoking during the act, a man, as instructed, gloomily studying the wallpaper to postpone orgasm.

It is the sadness I shall remember most.