Manhood
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In feminist confessional literature men generally take quite a beating. The novelist Erica Jong, in her bestselling Fear of Flying, exorcizes her penis envy and emphasizes the fantastic qualities of the female genitalia in contrast. She turns a ‘spineless guy’ into a ‘spineless prick’, a cruel description she uses repeatedly. Erica maintains that she has been a feminist all her life, but her biggest problem is to reconcile her feminism with her insatiable hunger for male bodies, which proves far from easy. In addition it becomes increasingly clear that men are basically terrified of women, some secretly, others openly. What could be more poignant than an emancipated woman eye to eye with a limp prick. In her eyes the major issues of history pale beside the two essential facts: the eternal feminine and the eternal limp prick. A typical fragment:
The ultimate sexist put-down: the prick that lies down on the job. The ultimate weapon in the war between the sexes: the limp prick. The banner of the enemy’s encampment. The symbol of the apocalypse: the atomic warhead prick which self -
destructs. That was the basic inequality which could never be righted: not that the male had a wonderful added attraction called a penis, but that the female had a wonderful all-weather cunt. Neither storm nor sleet nor dark of night could faze it. It was always there, always ready. Quite terrifying, when you think about it. No wonder that men hated women. No wonder they invented the myth of female inadequacy.
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Erica Jong takes a very sharp and humourless view of male impotence.
Not very cheering for a man – but then that probably was her intention.
As has been said, taking the initiative sexually is no longer the prerogative of the man. These days women make demands which their partner simply has to meet. Some direct their bedfellows as if they were football coaches: stroke me a bit more to the left, a bit harder, a bit softer, etc. In the past the man called the tune in bed, and the woman more or less complied, but today’s woman is not content for her partner to ejaculate after a few minutes and then roll over on his side. In the view of some experts women’s demands lead to ambivalence and uncertainty about male identity. Be that as it may, the fact remains that according to influential sexologists some men even today don’t like sex with the woman on top! Man’s sexual emancipation has only just begun!
If he’s not in the mood
According to recent American research 40 per cent of men don’t feel much like sex and regard lovemaking with their partner as a duty, more work than play. It is no accident that the first self-help manual on this nettlish topic recently appeared in the United States. ‘Making sure you’re properly equipped’ plays an important part in it, but that is easier said than done. There is also a career to be worked at, a mort-gage to repay. Eating out and sports club membership are expensive, and you have to pay for all that.
It may also be that the man has gone off the idea because his wife has got a promotion and not only earns more but also works longer hours so that he has to ‘hold the fort’ at home. Or that the man loses his urge because they have to do it every Saturday night, when he’s tired. Only stands to reason, doesn’t it, after a hard week at work, people over on Saturday evening, when he has to get up early Sunday morning to go jogging with the guy next door?
The enlightened feminist Yvonne Kroonenberg (1951–) explains in her book Alles went behalve een vent (You Can Get Used to Anything Except a Man, 1990) why postmodern man may sometimes not be in the mood. In her view it is open to question whether men are that horny or whether they just say they are. She knows plenty of women who complain of the reverse. She tells Anke’s story. Anke is married to Henk, a heavily built, pleasant guy, who prefers playing about with his computer to playing about with his wife. They had been to doctors, so-called sexologists, who suspected obscure inhibitions in his sexual feelings. But Henk shrugged his shoulders and said: 260
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An orgasm is nice, but it’s such a business getting there. I don’t enjoy just banging away at Anke, so to create a party atmos-phere, I need to stroke her and make sure she comes. Only then do I want to fuck and I don’t like the idea of going straight off to sleep afterwards, so we have a little afterplay. It’s all great fun, but not something for every day.
Another man tells the author that he has a big problem with ‘objecti v -
ity’. When he’s with a woman, he observes himself. He sees his white buttocks going up and down and is always mortified. That’s why he’d rather stop altogether . . .
The fact remains, though, that women can also be partly respon -
sible for the man’s erection problems. A slovenly appearance, bad breath and excessive hair growth are all factors that can lead to male impotence. The nineteenth-century doctor Smit, mentioned above, formulated the problem as follows:
A scolding, bad-tempered woman can make a man so cool that he loses the desire to fulfil his marital duties, and he gradually becomes incapable of intercourse with her. Revulsion at messi-ness, dislike of particular things, can extinguish the effect for particular people, sometimes gradually, sometimes suddenly.
Women and girls who do not keep their bodies clean, whose private parts exude a strong, unpleasant odour, or whose breath is bad, who neglect to wash their feet, particularly when they sweat heavily, etc. often become the objects of aversion and disgust. Someone who was keen to embrace a woman of pleasure, saw a louse running over her body, and immediately became impotent. Another heard a girl making water, and was forced to leave without finishing his business. With a third a feeling of embarrassment produced the same effect. He was in the full vigour of his youth, and fully prepared to enjoy a common whore. But the latter conceived the idea of checking her lovers’ health in advance, and wanted to see his manhood.
The young man, as yet unfamiliar with such behaviour, found it so strange that his vigour turned instantly to impotence.
If a man develops erection problems, for instance because he has lost his job or has learned that he is infertile, the key to the solution of the problem is the way his partner reacts. The modern view is that women are just as responsible for the success of intercourse as men. This contrasts with the beginning of the twentieth century, when sexologist Premsela wrote the following:
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Sexually, every woman achieves what her husband makes of her. He – and he alone is her teacher in this. That education requires time and knowledge, and in the first instance time. I read somewhere that the honeymoon of the copper wedding in a good marriage is better than that of an ordinary wedding.
In this respect husband and wife are unequal partners and it is principally the man – the leader in the sexual relationship –
who must take account of this fact. He must not jump the gun and must realize that he can only achieve results gradually.
Premsela is quite persuasive, but the reverse is equally true: sexually every man achieves what his wife is able to make of him. Several centuries ago the French surgeon Nicolas Venette (1633–1698) summarized the situation in a single sentence: ‘If a woman’s hand does not succeed in making the penis stiff, no other treatment will be successful . . .’.
The twenty-first century
Unfortunately as far as ‘seduction’ is concerned the twenty-first century has begun as a time of confusion and there is no immediate sign of improvement. Now male reluctance to show emotions has been overcome, the ‘new’ post-feminist woman turns out to have had enough of cotton wool. Men must again, as they have traditionally done, fight back their tears. There are no more certainties. There was always one aspect that supported men through difficult times. As a man you could always rely on it, and that put you beyond women’s reach: sex and love were never confused. Having sex and being in love at the same time was a kind of bonus. In most cases what young men experienced was an unbridled hunger for sex. Good sex, bad sex, emotionless one-night sex, it didn’t matter. The sole performance criterion was a single feeling: lust.
There has been an obvious sea change. Nowadays the young generation of women have sex for sex’s sake. Today’s young women are self-confident, assertive, promiscuous and brazen. After the sexual revolution, heralded by the pill, the waves of feminism and the achievement of economic independence, for the time being woman, with her much greater social intelligence, still has the initiative. The man as hunter – those were the days. Women worldwide watched the tv hit Sex and the City in their thousands. Not only were viewers being presented with four highly educated single women, but the really revolutionary thing was the unbridled pursuit of a great deal of high-quality sex by pr executive Samantha Jones. Keep your wedding plans!
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frequent component of many tv series and films in previous decades, but then it was always a male prerogative. The man’s role has shifted: from active to passive. Will it all come right in the end? I have my doubts!
Jean de La Fontaine (1621–1695), a member of the Académie Française and best known for his animal fables, also wrote much erotic poetry, including the following ‘Epigram’:
Let’s Love, let’s Fuck, these are pleasures
That one must never separate;
Enjoyment and lust are rare treasures
For the soul to cultivate.
A Prick, a Cunt, and two fond hearts
Create sweet songs in many parts,
Which the holy wrongly blame.
Amaryllis, ponder this:
Love without sex is a paltry flame,
Sex without love is empty bliss.
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chapter eleven
Eroticism
Erection, orgasm and reproduction form part of a long cycle, in which people partially fade into the background as they pass on their life to their descendants. In the last analysis we live not only for ourselves, but partly also for previous and succeeding generations. Seen in this light, intercourse, having an orgasm and fathering descendants is experiencing a thousand centuries in an instant. The most innovative presentation of the significance of all this was that of Georges Bataille (1897–1962), one of the founder-members of the Surrealist movement.
In Bataille’s view mankind’s whole journey, from a monocellular micro-organism to Homo sapiens erectus, is actually an erection in itself. Yet he sees that erection as incomplete, since man’s eyes are parallel to the earth and are still not able to withstand the sight of their ultimate goal, the dazzling sun.
Bataille was obsessed by atheism, eroticism and mysticism. He engaged in psychoanalysis, economics, philosophy and sociology. He wrote poetry, novels, studies on ethnology, the visual arts and literature.
God, sex and death remained his principal themes. In Visions of Excess Bataille explains that mankind’s mission will have been fulfilled when the pineal gland in the front of our forebrain opens and the content of the human body pours out in an ejaculation towards the sun. In his view this will be the logical conclusion of human evolution. The link that Bataille makes between the sun and sexuality is not totally ridiculous. When in spring the days grow longer and blossoms appear all over, many hearts beat faster. More sunshine has a particular effect on the brain: the production of melatonin, a hormone that inhibits sexuality, is reduced.
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Computer sex
A professor of neuroanatomy at Groningen University is convinced that all sexual behaviour can be explained with the aid of brain scans and computer models. ‘As long as you programme computers properly, of course you can teach them to fuck,’ were his actual words. His statement testifies to an ancient and outdated view of mankind, the mechanistic vision of the Enlightenment. The professor’s ideas lead to a worldview in which man is seen as nothing more than tissue, cells, molecules, atoms, elementary particles, whose behaviour is laid down in natural laws. Everything that makes us human – cultures, values and standards – falls outside the hard natural sciences. For a true understanding of human sexuality, the humanities are much more important, for example literary studies. In 1928 Bataille published the novella History of the Eye under a pseudonym. It is a gruesome book, which does not allow the reader to assume a voyeuristic role, but makes him, so to speak, complicit in a series of crimes. The book shows clearly that by breaking bounds sexuality turns into violence and from violence into death. Bataille calls orgasm le petit mort. In the little death there is a longing for the great death, the totally other, that might cancel out man’s dreadful existence. The central paradox is that man is only truly human in a desire that drives him to inhumanity.
Bataille spent a long time in psychoanalysis, which made him aware of the unconscious mechanisms that influence human thought processes. In his work Freud showed how associations often operated through the sound of words, and in the novella Bataille associates oeil (eye) with oeuf (egg). The identical initial sound ‘oe’ may have been the reason why he looked for similarities in meaning: eyes and eggs are round and white. In another associative leap he links eye and testicle.
In the sentence where he makes the link he manages to make the two resemble each other in sound too. He speaks of ‘testi cules’ and ‘globe o cul aire’. The shared word cul means cunt or arse in French. Curiously, he goes on to make this a keyword, using it as a synonym for ‘cunt’. In so doing he links the anal and the genital, and a little further on eye, egg and urine. There follows a disturbing confusion of all bodily orifices and all types of fluids: eye – egg – testicle – breast – arse, which secrete tears – sperm – milk – shit – and urine. They can also be destroyed in all kinds of ways: dug out – broken – removed by castration – drunk –
severed and deflowered. Because the egg equals the testicle, the female protagonist can satisfy her desire to castrate by crushing an egg between her legs, and because the testicle equals the egg, she can eat the former raw instead of the latter, and because the eye equals the testicle she can stick the eye up her arse, etc. The characters produce a series 265
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of metaphors. For example, the woman rolls an egg across her vulva, later she sticks a bull’s testicle in her vagina and finally also a priest’s eye. All these acts are obscene parodies of ‘normal’ intercourse. Georges Bataille, like Sigmund Freud before him, demonstrates clearly that man is potentially a polymorphously perverse creature.
Sexologists
The first sexologists were still heavily influenced by Victorian thinking.
Havelock Ellis, an English doctor, was the first Victorian with a modern view of sexuality. He believed that a person’s attitude to sexuality was individually and culturally determined. This was something totally new, since in the preceding centuries, it had been assumed that sex was the same for everyone.
The contribution of Sigmund Freud will be familiar to many readers. He gave a name to the unconscious and classified the sexual components of our personality. Freud was one of the first doctors to listen to his patients, and was the first to point out how important it is for the patient to gain an insight into his or her own problems.
Theodoor Hendrik van de Velde (1873–1937), a Dutch gynaecologist, made an important contribution to sexology. His international bestseller The Perfect Marriage (1926) is one of the most famous modern sex manuals, selling over a million copies. Van de Velde stressed the importance of sexual relations and an attitude of giving and taking.
Unfortunately he limited his readers’ sexual experience by advocating that they should strive where possible for simultaneous orgasm – an over-romantic presentation of the facts. In that respect manuals sometimes do more harm than good. For a long time Van de Velde remained a classic example of a prophet without honour in his own country, and it is not difficult to guess why. He wrote frankly about desire and sex, which, in those days at least, was not done. What’s more he ran off with one of his patients, a married woman eight years his junior –
another no-no.
In America it was Robert Latou Dickinson who did ground -
breaking work, also with women. For example, he examined the vagina with the aid of a glass tube in the shape of a penis, through which a lamp could be shone. This allowed him to observe the interior of the vagina directly, and this aid was refined by later researchers.
Alfred Kinsey, who had trained as a zoologist, did mainly large-scale quantitative research into human sexuality. Though many ‘case histories’ had been written, especially by Freudians, no one had ever used large samples. Certain sexual practices today regarded as perfectly normal were considered ‘deviant’ by the Freudians. Kinsey demon-266
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strated that much ‘abnormal’ sexual behaviour, for example homo -
sexuality, is in fact quite normal.
William Masters (1915–2001) and Virginia Johnson (1925–) were the founders of modern sexology, a typical interdisciplinary science.
They had the courage to observe and measure sexual responses in the same way that physiologists had studied respiration or digestion.
Masters determined at the outset of his scientific work that he would collaborate with a woman since he as a man would never be able to understand how a woman experiences sexuality. This was a brilliant idea. In the treatment of men with erection problems, the reverse may be true: only men can fully understand what a man feels in such a case.
Masters and Johnson achieved overnight fame when they published their first book, Human Sexual Inadequacy (1966). ‘Older couples can enjoy a healthy, normal sex life, at least well into their eighties,’ wrote Time, and there was a general chorus of approval from the media.
Masters and Johnson’s idea was that a couple where the man had erection problems, should spend more time together, say on two evenings a week. On one evening it was the man’s responsibility to create the right mood, and on the other the woman’s, preferably with background music and tasty nibbles and dips. And then the couple, naked on the sofa, were supposed to stroke each other a little, though the man had to stay above the belt! The intention was to take sexuality out of the sphere of emotional rejection, the urge to perform and the fear of failure. In a number of cases the therapy proved effective. Probably it was connected with what we used to call ‘tag-free’ in games of hide and seek: if you stood on a certain spot, you couldn’t be tagged.