Authors: Tom Hickman
A few men went so far as to have their foreskin pierced with silk threads that they fastened together on going to bed.
There were a variety of procedures to deal with spermatorrhoea or masturbation. Physicians embedded potassium and
chloral
hydrate in men’s penises ‘to blunt the venereal appetite’; blistered perineums with poison and applied suction cups to draw blood; applied hemlock poultices to the genitals and injected tepid water into rectums; inserted metal, rubber or porcelain ‘eggs’ into rectums to massage prostates into health. Circumcision was popularly prescribed, much to the satisfaction of extreme moralists on both sides of the Atlantic, including John Harvey Kellogg who was so enthusiastic about the treatment that he advocated it should be done without anaesthetic ‘as the brief pain attending the operation will have a salutary effect upon the mind’.
Until the nineteenth century Western culture had no tradition of circumcision. It became fashionable among the aristocracy of continental Europe after King Louis XVI of France was operated on for phimosis (a too-tight foreskin that makes erection agonising, even impossible), which prevented him from intercourse with Marie Antoinette for seven years. Queen Victoria chose to have her sons circumcised, making it de rigueur among the English upper classes.
What made circumcision common among the proliferating nineteenth-century middle classes on both sides of the Atlantic was the hysteria about masturbation; removing the foreskin helped its prevention, doctors declared, and also cured bed-wetting and other conditions. By the outbreak of the First World War such claims had diminished and the medical profession touted circumcision as being ‘hygienic’ – fathers were not only encouraged to have their newborn sons snipped, but to belatedly enjoy the benefits themselves.
10
At the height of the panic about spermatorrhoea, many of society’s ills were attributed to the moral degeneracy it brought about. Anti-masturbation movements were formed; families were urged to expose adults who habitually indulged in ‘the deed of shame’. A boy who did, it was advised, could
be
identified by ‘his shifty glance and the way he pulls his cap down so as to hide his eyes’.
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?
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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.’
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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 during 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: