by Tom Hickman
By the end of the nineteenth century spermatorrhoea had lost its hold on the medical profession and the popular imagination. But the obsession with masturbation had a long twilight: men still alive remember when teachers pinned up the trouser pockets of those caught with their hands in them, and the dire warnings that masturbation resulted in hairy palms or even in blindness. As late as the 1930s (when anti-masturbatory devices were still being patented) some of the backstreet museums of anatomy, which had proliferated in Victorian times, were still open. Among the dubious exhibits and wax effigies displaying the Secret Diseases of Men, one cabinet remained dark inside – until someone stood in front of it and a sudden electric light showed the leering face of an idiot and the placard: LOST MANHOOD.
POWER CUTS
NO MAN CAN say there’s never been a time that his penis has disobeyed the command to stand and deliver. For a man normally in full working order such a temporary break in transmission is of no lasting consequence. But for other men, their desire constantly outstrips their capability. Such men are impotent – literally without power. When Henry VIII was intent on offloading Anne Boleyn as his wife and spuriously had her tried for treason and adultery she ridiculed him for being ‘without potency’ (and, for good measure, that he was ‘not skilful in copulating with a woman’) – an insult to the royal other head that did nothing to ensure she kept the one on her shoulders.
Impotence comes in degrees. An erection may pump sufficiently to penetrate but then, inexplicably to its possessor, lose interest in proceedings, leaving the recipient of it, as one woman has described, feeling like ‘trying to stay afloat on a life raft that is slowly deflating’. An erection may inflate but so weakly that it cannot penetrate, ‘pushing at the door’, as Fanny Hill relates of a client, ‘but so little in a condition to break in that I question whether he had the power to enter, had I held it ever so open’. For other men, even the semblance of an erection is a distant memory, ‘their sex lives in long oblivion/Or if they try, it’s hopeless; although they labour all night long at that limp and shrivelled object, limp it remains’ (Juvenal).
Limpness has nothing to do with another form of erectile dysfunction: the penis-possessor has no problem with standing and delivering, the problem is that he delivers too quickly – even before he gets as far as penetration in some cases. Medical definitions of premature ejaculation vary: in less than a minute and a half of penetration in one commonly accepted definition, within ten seconds in another, within six thrusts in a third. In his best-selling The Case of Impotence As Debated In England (1700), Edmund Curll mocked the condition, writing:
There are many men whose Penis very readily rises, nay, lifts its self up in a most proud and ostentatious Manner; but then its Fury is soon spent; like a Fire made of Straw, the Moment it approaches its Mistress’s Door, it basely falls down at the very Threshold, and piteously vomits out its frothy Soul . . .
It’s been argued somewhat unconvincingly that there’s no such thing as premature ejaculation, that men who climax quickly are simply doing what their ancestors did, the theory being that our ancestors once had the sexual characteristics of other primates such as chimpanzees – whose couplings have been timed at four to seven seconds. ‘Normal’ ejaculation, according to the theory, should therefore be redefined as ‘delayed’ ejaculation.
Be that as it may, according to the literature perhaps a quarter of men are premature ejaculators. But the numbers of those estimated to suffer impotence are even more astonishing:half of those over forty experience some degree of it, with five in a hundred totally without function, a figure that rises to around twenty in a hundred in the over-fifties and continues upwards – erections, like teeth, weren’t designed to last into old age. An estimated 150 million men in the West are either unable to attain, or to sustain, an erection, ten million of them American, two million of them British.
The agents of erectile dysfunction are complex: psychological, emotional and physical – and in the case of premature ejaculation, a neurological hair trigger. Hippocrates blamed his impotence on having an ugly wife. Some of those who believed in the ‘spend’ theory (which still had currency in the last century, with Ernest Hemingway among its adherents) blamed women for draining their battery; contradictorily, many impotents throughout history have blamed a partner’s lack of sexual enthusiasm, and do so today. Until at least the seventeenth century men thought that witchcraft was the root cause of impotence – if a man’s blood was on fire and his penis was not, what else could it be?11 Actually, seventeenth-century women blamed coffee houses, a pamphlet against the new establishments containing the insult: ‘They come from [them] with nothing moist but their snotty Noses, nothing stiffe but their Joints, nothing standing but their Ears.’12
In Christian Europe, impotency gave grounds for divorce from the Middle Ages to the seventeenth century (it remains so under Islamic law), indeed it was the only grounds, and it was ascertained by ecclesiastical courts. A man might have his genitals submerged in ice water so that the veins in his scrotum could be examined for constrictions; he might be ordered to a curtained bed with his wife and left for an hour or so, after which the sheets would be examined for signs of emission; or he might face trial by a group of ‘honest matrons’, as happened in York in 1433 when Alice Scathloe sought a divorce from her husband John. At the top of a house in the city a fire was lit, food and drink brought in, and the women removed most of their clothes, kissed John’s face and neck, danced around him, exposed their pudenda and let him feel their breasts. As a last resort they ‘warmed their hands by the fire, ticked his testicles and stroked his member’ – without result. The court decided in Alice’s favour.
In time, impotency as grounds for divorce was taken out of ecclesiastic hands and became part of civil law; and cases were sometimes witnessed by as many as fifteen clerics, physicians, midwives and magistrates.
There was little sympathy for husbands deemed impotent, with no consideration given to the fact that those who contested the charge were likely to wilt under the pressure of having to prove otherwise in public. The examining matrons in John Scathloe’s trial cursed him and spat on him; an unnamed husband who appeared before an eighteenth-century civil court in Rheims in France – where the accused went behind a screen to produce ejaculatory evidence of erection, while the witnesses waited around the fire – was ridiculed, as a record of the proceedings shows:
Many a time did he call out: ‘Come! Come now!’ But always it was a false alarm. The wife laughed and told them: ‘Do not hurry so, for I know him well.’ The experts said after that never had they laughed so much nor slept as little as on that night.
In relatively recent times received wisdom was that impotence was entirely a psychological problem. Current understanding is that three-quarters of cases, discounting those attributable to the natural deterioration of old age, are due to medical conditions – cardiovascular disease, high blood pressure, diabetes – all of them often undiagnosed. Obesity is another common cause. There is a long list of prescription medications (including antidepressants, diuretics and hypertensives) that cause impotence in many men. As drinking and smoking do in many, many more.
The penis has no head for alcohol; as the sage porter in Macbeth remarks, it ‘provokes the desire, but it takes away the performance’; beyond that, however, alcohol can lead not just to impotence but to testicular atrophy and penile shrinkage. So does heavy smoking, which also depletes the penis of elasticity (the substance elastin) needed for erection. The attempted erection of heavy drinkers who are also heavy smokers often resembles the balloon left after the Christmas party. The obese frequently suffer shrivelling of the testicles, caused by their fat being converted into the female hormone oestrogen. One in five cases of impotence is due to the penile arteries, which are no thicker than the tines of a fork, clogging up with cholesterol.
Yet activities regarded as healthy are not without dangers. Urologists say that seemingly harmless knocks sustained in youth duri
ng exercise are sometimes to blame for a percentage of impotency – 600,000 men in the USA, it’s estimated, are impotent because of participation in contact sports. The constant jolting of horseback riding is a factor in some other men’s lives (Hippocrates noted that many of the Scythians, who spent virtually all their lives in the saddle, were impotent – though he blamed their custom of wearing breeches) – and cycling in the lives of many, many others. Normal sitting doesn’t put weight on the perineum, the area between the scrotum and anus. But cycling does and, the Journal of Sexual Medicine reported in 2005, it compresses both an artery supplying the penis with blood and a nerve necessary to sensation. Moderate to total erectile dysfunction can result, with heavy riders coming off worst; additionally, ultrasound tests have shown, as many as half of those who regularly cycle a couple of hours a day develop stone-like calcium deposits in the scrotum.
Anything that causes impotence is also likely to cause infertility – the semeniferous tubes of one in six infertile men have been damaged playing sports, for instance. In heavy smokers and drinkers, sperm numbers plummet and sperm develop abnormalities including reduced motility and loss of sense of direction. All of this said, a quarter of cases of impotence are psychologically rooted: stress, depression, guilt, a worry about not measuring up, the last prevalent among the inexperienced. A doctor can establish whether a problem is psychological, or not, by calling upon a curious fact about male physiology: that three to five times a night during rapid-eye sleep the penis erects and stays erect for between fifteen minutes and an hour. Why this is so is not definitively understood; perhaps to oxygenate a poorly oxygenated part of the body, perhaps, in computer terminology, simply to run a check on the hard drive.
A man has no conscious control over this functioning – and if his problem is in his mind rather than elsewhere, then his penis will boot up normally. In the 1970s, assessing the state of affairs could be cumbersome. Experiencing impotency in early middle age and refusing to believe it had anything to do with his heavy drinking and that his was a case of brewer’s droop, the novelist Kingsley Amis took his flagging libido to a psychologist, who provided him with an electric contraption (in his novel Jake’s Thing he called it a ‘nocturnal mensurator’) to which futilely he wired himself at night-time in the hope of recording penile activity. Today, a doctor is likely to send a man home with a small snap gauge, usually consisting of three bands of increasing strength that break under different levels of erectile force, if any.
So humiliating is erectile dysfunction that prior to the arrival of Viagra in 1998, before which most treatments were lengthy, vague or invasive, nine in ten sufferers didn’t consult a doctor. Premature ejaculators, who might have been helped with ‘mind over matter’ techniques, counselling or medication, chose to live with their shortcomings (‘Then off he came/& blushed for shame/Soe soone that he had endit’ – ‘Bishop Percy’s Loose Songs’, 1650); as did those suffering impotence, no doubt raging at their treacherous best friend’s inability to achieve satisfactory elongation. The Earl of Rochester, much given to fornication with prostitutes, poured out that rage in ‘The Imperfect Enjoyment’, after a rare experience of both impotence and premature ejaculation (the ‘thunderbolt below’ turning ‘dribbling dart of love’) with a woman he loved:
Base recreant to thy prince, thou dar’st not stand. Worst part of me, and henceforth hated most, Through all the town a common fucking post, On whom each whore relieves her tingling cunt As hogs on gates do rub themselves and grunt, May’st thou to ravenous chancres be a prey, Or in consuming weepings waste away; May strangury and stone thy days attend; May’st thou ne’er piss, who didst refuse to spend When all my joys did on false thee depend.
Desperately seeking solutions
Ernest Hemingway was only thirty-eight when impotency started to encroach. It led him to physically attack a fellow writer, Max Eastman, whom he wrongly believed was spreading tales ‘and playing into the hands of the gang who are saying it’. Until he died Hemingway was in denial. In his posthumously published ‘fictional memoir’, True at First Light, he wrote about the
old, well-loved, once burnt-up, three-times restocked, worn-smooth old Winchester model 12-pump gun that was faster than a snake and was, from 35 years of us being together, almost as close a friend and companion with secrets shared and triumphs and disasters not revealed as the other friend a man has all his life.
Sadly for Hemingway, whose attempted restoratives included doses of synthesised testosterone, nothing restocked his penis-rifle; at the end of his life all he could rely on extending was the metaphor.
There’s nothing more despairing for those who still feel what Eric Gill deemed ‘the seethe of tumescence’ but who have nothing with which to answer the call, try as they might, ‘as cocks will strike although their spurs be gone’ (Earl of Rochester). Which is why, throughout time, men have sought ways of stiffening their resolve. Rulers, despots and several popes have found that taking a young woman into their bed could work miracles – though not for the aged biblical King David when he was ‘stricken in years’ and ‘gat no heat’. His servants provided the fair virgin Abishag, but however hard she ministered to him, ‘the king knew her not’.
Not having access to fair virgins, most of history’s possessors of malfunctioning penises have turned to supposed aphrodisiacs to beget heat. Eating the genitals of animals, on the apparently logical assumption that like would help like, is a practice as old as history in all cultures. What became known as the ‘doctrine of signatures’ – which stated that something with a resemblance to something else could be of benefit to it – in genital terms included types of fish, some at least penis-shaped and all redolent of the smell and slipperiness of sex, with eels (naturally) and oysters (the best-known vulvar aphrodisiac) heading the list. Fruits, vegetables and roots with some male genital similarity also had their advocates: penile asparagus, celery and carrots, for example, testicular artichokes, truffles, broad beans, tomatoes (the ‘love apple’ of the sixteenth century), orchis bulbs (once, in fact, called dogstones) and apricots – ‘a-prick-hot’ a popular Renaissance pun. Garlic, onions, spices and black and chilli peppers were also sought because they quickened the pulse and induced sweating (like sex) – and onions and nutmegs, thought doubly effective because they were testicular as well as hot. The man-shaped roots of ginseng and mandrake, the latter known since biblical times and in the Middle Ages said to grow only where the seed of a hanged man had fallen (a tale that pushed up prices), were highly prized, as were figs (another of the few aphrodisiacs seen as vulvar in appearance, once cut open) and mushrooms, regarded as a symbol of intercourse, the stem thrusting up into the cap like a penis into a vagina.
The East still has faith in traditional sexual stimulants. Asia’s once plentiful seahorses are in sharp decline largely because the Chinese so believe in their sexual efficacy (not only fish but persuasively erection-like in swimming upright) that they pulp them in their millions to make an aphrodisiac broth; in Indonesia the cobra is becoming increasingly scarce because concoctions of its penis are more popular than Viagra. And China’s conviction that seal penis, tiger penis, bear penis and rhino penis can salvage a faltering erection has contributed to bringing these species to the brink of extinction. The rhino is hunted not just for its genitals but for its horn – the ‘doctrine of signatures’ at its most logically illogical – as once was the narwhal in the West for its tusk, often sold as unicorn (another tale to push up prices).
History abounds with measures more desperate. Men have swallowed virtually everything imaginable – alabaster, pearls and metals including gold – as hardening compounds. Assyrian women rubbed a man’s penis with oil containing flecks of iron; some Roman men, on the advice of Pliny the Elder, ate excrement; Elizabethans and their French brothers tried urinating through their wife’s wedding ring or through the keyhole of the church in which they married; in the early twentieth century hundreds of men (including Freud and the poet/playwright William Butler Ye
ats) subjected themselves to vasectomies on the advice of an eminent Austrian physiologist who was convinced it would ‘reactivate’ them (and cure baldness). Hope springs eternal, which is why impotent men in some primitive tribes in the Amazon still ask their comrades to blow on their penis, in the way one blows on a fire’s dying embers.
From the eighteenth century, the medical profession in the West took the view that toning up the man would tone up his below-par penis. In consequence men undertook regimens of fresh air and exercise, tonics and beef-steak, cold baths and scrubbing with rough brushes. Penises were cleaned out like a blocked chimney with surgical instruments; corrosive chemicals were deposited at the prostatic end of the urethra. ‘Electro-therapy’, heavily advertised in the newspapers, was popularly prescribed; by the early twentieth century it was fashionable for well-to-do men with erectile problems to wear a battery-pack belt that passed a current to their genitals, which purported ‘to improve sexual vigour by massage’. The first suction and vacuum pumps became available to force blood into the erectile tissue, kept there by a constriction ring.
With the rise in the standing of surgeons in the nineteenth century, the idea that animal genitals could be the key to impotence made a comeback, with a twist. The doyen of European physiologists, the seventy-two-year-old Charles-Édouard Brown-Séquard, injected himself with a composite of dog and guinea pig testicles and caused a sensation by claiming that doing so had enabled him to ‘visit’ his young wife every day without fail. As the century turned, others, the serious and the charlatan, went the whole way to xenotransplantation – in America, John Brinkley used the testicles of Toggenburg goats; in France, the Russian Serge Voronoff used grafts from chimpanzees and baboons. In fact, Voronoff had begun by transplanting human testicles – into millionaires – but demand exceeded his limited supply of executed prisoners and he had to find another source.13
