Impotence: A Cultural History (review)

Like his numerous other books on gender and sexuality, Angus McLaren's cultural history of impotence treats its subject with subtlety, erudition, and wit. Beginning his account with the ancient Greeks, McLaren identifies several key shifts in Western conceptions of gender and sexuality that altered the ways in which impotence was perceived over time. Although they differed in their views of the ideal penis size, ancient Greek and Roman men shared a preoccupation with penetrative and reproductive capacity, mainly because it signified status as an adult male and thus predominance over women, slaves, and boys. For them, impotence was a cause of deep embarrassment to be cured through dietary and other remedies. If the ancients tended to view sexual activity as a need like eating or drinking, medieval Christians made sex into a problem that was ideally to be mastered through abstinence. Insofar as penetrative sex was considered immoral outside of procreative purposes, impotence was theoretically less problematic for many churchmen; yet laypeople continued to prize potency as evidence of a properly aggressive masculine identity and thus sought cures that did not differ greatly from those of ancient times. By the seventeenth century, marriages could be dissolved on grounds of impotence, which was tested through so-called "trials of congress" to determine whether intercourse had been (or could be) achieved by publicly attempting to stimulate the male to have an erection.

Around the beginning of the eighteenth century, discussions of impotence emphasized physiological and psychological rather than religious or supernatural causes, and by the nineteenth century, modern life itself was increasingly blamed for the mental and physical wear and tear that left men sexually exhausted. As pleasure gradually eclipsed procreation as the main purpose of sexuality, by the twentieth century, attention was leveled on the impotent male for his inability to satisfy women's right to pleasure and thus strengthen the matrimonial bond. By the closing decades of the century, male arousal was viewed in more overtly mechanical terms, and as "erectile dysfunction" displaced earlier concerns about psychological, environmental, or interpersonal factors, products like Viagra moved men's historical anxieties about performance to center stage once more.

While remaining self-consciously constructionist in his approach, McLaren demonstrates how several kinds of male anxiety have recurred over the centuries, albeit for different reasons in different periods. For instance, the penis's penetrative capacity has been long steeped in violent imagery that serves to validate manhood. The ancients likened penetration to a beating that affirmed the aggression they believed characterized the true man, thus propagating associations among masculinity, male sexuality, and violence that persist to the present in one form or other. Penises also seem to have been always associated with some sort of technological performance principle, whether in terms of tools (plows, pens, etc.) or weaponry (swords, spears, and guns). Given the centrality of penetrative power to conceptions of male identity, it is easy to see why many men looked outside themselves to rationalize their performance issues. The causes of impotence could seem legion. Greek and Roman physicians often interpreted impotence as a symptom of a mismanaged life in which a lack of moderation in dietary, sexual, and emotional factors necessarily affected sexual ardor. Potions, talismans, and amulets were in no small supply, like the sex manuals and penis-shaped or aphrodisiac vegetables that were on offer for the exhausted male. And, of course, medieval thinkers had their own thoughts on why impotence occurred. According to Thomas Aquinas and the authors of the notorious Malleus Maleficarum, even God had it in for men, actually allowing Satan to prevent intercourse by way of witches who had been recruited mainly for that purpose.

The idea that women are somehow to blame for the impotence of men reinforces the connection between male penetrative power and sexual domination. Female sexual insatiability has often been cited as causing male exhaustion, so women seemed to undermine the myth of the impenetrable male...