Lust, Impotence, Porn

When I lost my libido I knew it immediately. Not that there were physiological warnings beforehand. There were none. I had been going about as frisky as ever; I hadn't been more tired at the end of the day. No, the first time it was a classic unexpected fiasco, as Stendhal called it. Suddenly sensation was gone; emphatically absent.

Still, what is one fiasco? When my husband and I were young and early in the habit of love-making, when I was unused to regular orgasms, I used to miss often. This thought—that I had a past of uneven accomplishment—didn't occur to me until after the second fiasco. After a long lag, a second failure followed the first: the next time we tried to make love. After the second time I was eager for explanations and solace. In recent years I had never missed an orgasm twice in a row. That shouldn't sound boastful: it certainly didn't when I groaned to myself, over and over, "I've never missed an orgasm twice in a row." Orgasm had become a matter of almost unconscious planning. If I'm not interested—if I'm seriously fatigued or angry or simply not in the mood (rather than just wound up)—we don't try. When you're long married and long-bedded, small nonverbal signs go a long way.

Q—I'll call him Q—gives off his own silent signs as well. Some nights when I am feeling a little keen I'll find him watching a late movie instead of coming to bed; and since he knows I need a lot of sleep, that's a sign he wouldn't be interested. Mutual forbearance—unless we are both fairly sure of success—goes far to explain why I have lovely sex with my husband. Not to make a fetish of orgasm, but it had been a fact of our midlife. The intensity varied, but it was firmly there. My libido had long felt as much a piece of my identity as the color of my eyes.

The second time I was worried. (The first time I simply fell asleep right away, tuckered out.) A list of possible causes emerged. There are days in any ambitious, involved life when ego-centered obstacles to pleasure mount up too high to leap over. No, I wasn't angry at Q. If he had made me mad, we wouldn't have been trying to make love at all. No, I wasn't especially distracted, although my day had contained an editor's letter refusing a submission. Sensitive to my own moods, I feel capable of knowing when the total jangle of the day has gotten so chaotic that it's absurd to pursue any goal but sleep.

No, my day had not been stressful enough to serve as an explanation, no matter how darkly I retold its accumulated frustrations. We had alleviated a lot of them in the debriefing session that Q and I often held while driving home from work. Years ago we set up the habit of venting. I was then working for the haughtiest university in the world and Q was dealing with his own institutional malice. As soon as we get into the car, whoever is in higher dudgeon goes first. By the end of the session we have almost invariably located the enemies and hung them by their thumbs. That doesn't necessarily mean we are calm enough afterward to manage sex. I see this turning into a commentary about labor under capitalism. Sex and work—or rather, impotence and the conditions of work—are subtly connected. (This might partly explain why the level of impotence in this country appears to be rising, especially among the young.)

This time, the second time, the failure was, starkly and utterly, mine. It was as though my body had been anesthetized, but only from the waist down. Sudden muscular tugs, gone. The slowly cumulating energy for sex, gone. Even the basic daily comfort of crossed legs—which I had complacently assumed would accompany me through life with or without...