Impotence: A Cultural History [Hardcover]

"Impotence in an age that believed in witchcraft was quite different from impotence in an age that believed in science." So writes Angus McLaren in _Impotence: A Cultural History_ (University of Chicago Press). What's even more important than the differences, however, is that all cultures have fretted about not having sufficient lead in their pencils. We have _the_ solution now, a wonderful pill, although like all the others, it is a solution linked with its own problems. McLaren's extensive history may be about impotence, but winds up being a history of all sorts of sexual ideas, like understanding of conception, superstitions about masturbation, women's emancipation, and more. This is literally a vital topic, and in some ways it is dismaying that we have a long history of surrounding it with silly and illogical worries. That merely shows, however, that the subject is an important one, and McLaren's entertaining book puts it into proper historical perspective.

Everything always seems to start with the ancient Greeks, who started the long tradition of blaming someone else for the problem. A Roman man would fret if neither women nor boys prompted an erection, and not having an erection, not being able to penetrate, was a shame in itself. It had nothing to do with failing to please a partner, for a desire to please a partner was itself felt to be effeminate. The medieval church felt that a marriage was only a marriage if it were properly consummated, and as a result, there was the irony of nominally celibate churchmen having to debate and adjudicate the finer points of coitus. If a wife or her family claimed that a husband had not fulfilled his part of the bargain, he might have to show that he had the power to do so. Sometimes prostitutes would be hired so that the clerics might witness the resultant erection. The performance anxiety must have led to many false positives. The problem has always been perceived as a real one, and so solutions were always there to be tried, even if they were not real solutions. Impotence then as now has been a boon for quacks. In the 1700s Dr. Brodum offered his Nervous Cordial and Botanical Syrup to get men ready for the rigors of the married state. Victorian doctors tried to cure the ailment, but they had little to offer to distinguish themselves from the quacks. They had advice on morals; don't have sex too often, and for goodness sake, don't masturbate. It would be nice to think that the twentieth century and its scientific and sexual revolutions would have solved things, but such is not the case. There were nutty therapies involving the implantation of goat or monkey glands. Viagra (and the subsequent Cialis and Levitra) were supposed to take all the worry out of sex, but nothing performs that function. McLaren reports that female partners of Viagra users aren't nearly as convinced that the drug is a boon as those who swallow the pills are, and anyway, only half of the men who try it ever get their prescriptions refilled.

It would be nice to shake some sense into people, to have them see that erections are not all there is to sex, and that there is plenty of sexual enjoyment to be had in lots of ways whether or not an erection can be counted upon. That's really the only sensible way to look at the issue, but McLaren's book demonstrates that we do not look at it sensibly. The best guess is that there will be even more advanced solutions to the problem a hundred years from now, and a hundred years from now, we will be fretting over the problem (or turning it into some new problem) just as every generation in history has.

As an everyman "hey, look at what people did in Ye Olden Times!" book, this is enjoyable and amusing. It is a perfect example of how to publish scholarship that will actually sell on a mass scale. As a "Cultural History," this book exemplifies the common complaints against *some* works in Cultural Studies and New Historicism.

For individuals interested in a vague overview of gender issues and sexuality through the ages, the book is fine (with a grain of salt). Its tendency to conflate hundreds of years of history into "one era" and "one viewpoint," to hand-pick items of literature that will prove a statement while ignoring several dozens of items that disprove it, to overlook some *major* elements in the field, and to play fast and loose with information makes the book risky to use for any real scholarship. Its attempt to be the Reader's Digest of the topic makes it and its dubious veracity virtually uncitable.