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 "he penis," proclaimed nineteenth-century psychoanalyst Wilhelm Stekel, "is the image of the entire man." What then, if that image is flawed? If it droops, hangdog, failing at the task it is set in place to perform?I'll relate one episode involving a sexual malfunction that, of all my sundry malfunctions, I, a virile thirty-one-year-old male of hearty Canadian stock, have only once been plagued by. That crafty little imp . . . . . . otence. Allow me to set the scene: those halcyon days of the mid-1990s. In these dark years before the invention of Viagra, the male-female bedroom dynamic unfolded as it had since the dawn of civilization: when the man failed to achieve workable tumescence, he simply blamed his wife or girlfriend for not trying hard enough,
Into this complicated cultural milieu stepped starry-eyed, innocent Craig Davidson, a university student in a quaint northern Ontario town. In that, my junior year, I'd somehow stumbled into a living situation my buddies found enviable: myself and four women in a little house not far off campus. I'd known the gals since freshman year, and when a vacancy opened up I was asked did I want to fill it. This, it was no harem. No palm-frond fans, no Salome and the Dance of the Seven Veils. No, it was a house where five people lived, ate, slept, puttered about in ratty nighties, picked their nails in communal areas, left aged yellowed panties flapping on the backyard clothesline, fried veggie burgers in said panties at three o'clock in the morning after a long shamble home from the club, so on. Now one of my roommates — let us call her "M" — got a crush on me. This was odd for a host of reasons. Reason 1: I was a moppy-headed, 230-pound bohunk with no discernable life goals. Reason 2: M was a pretty, intelligent, goal-oriented individual who would graduate that year to pursue a Master's of Social Work degree. Reason 3: M was engaged to a handsome pre-med student who in short time would be a chiropractor. But said fiance lived two hours hence, in Toronto. Clearly, the adult thing would have been to acknowledge her attraction and admit that, while baffling, it was also
But as I was only legally an adult — morally and otherwise I was a worm — the reality was that, after a night of heavy drinking and wild gyrations at a local discotheque, we found ourselves messily entwined in her bed. It started well enough: we had a workable physical dynamic, mainly due to her drunken acceptance of my gross bodily flaws; second base was quickly rounded, I held on for dear life and dove for third, she swam up for air and said, "Get a condom. Quick!" When I told her I didn't have any, she said, "Check my chest of drawers." I got out of bed, fat ass glowing in the moonlight and looking, I'm sure, like partially welded wheels of pepperjack cheese. The condoms were in an Easter basket — why? All kinds: reminded me of a dish of licorice all-sorts, this frightening melange I wasn't fully comfortable with. As if I'd opened her fridge to find a flock of tinfoil swans, of old entanglements. I stood there stymied by the selection and M, who'd had far too much to drink, got up to use the washroom. While she was gone I spotted a gold-foil packet: Magnum XL. It sounded rugged and put me in a Dirty Harry frame of mind: the sort of condom a bounder, a cad, a cuckolding rake such as I styled myself should wear. Intimacies resumed when she returned from the loo and before long it was time to sheath myself. Rolling it over my penis, I came to a disconcerting realization: it wasn't the right fit at all. Huge, this fucking condom, all wadded up round my cock, loose and crumpled. "What's the matter?" M asked. I recalled how as a young boy I'd gone into the cloakroom and slipped into my father's shoes, amazed how big they were and thinking, Someday I'll be this big, but this was different. I was as big as I'd ever be and still swimming in this farcically oversized condom that must have been designed purely for male emasculation. M spied the packet and said, "Oh, Craig, these are the ones J uses." J was her fiancé. I was gobsmacked: the idea that she'd throw her moose-cocked, soon-to-be-chiropractor fiance overboard for a risky fling with me pointed to some deep perversion of her character I couldn't bear contemplating. She pinched the receptacle tip between her fingers and pulled the condom off my cock — it came free with terrible ease, a woolen nightcap off a bald old geezer's head — and went to the drawer for a more suitable one. But it was no use: for the first time in my young life, and despite her ardent ministrations, I could not get an erection. My cock hung between my legs, shriveled like a salted slug; no amount of coaxing could make it come round. At this point a lot of readers may be wondering why this was such a mental impediment. Why, you're saying to yourselves, couldn't this chump put aside what was in essence a mix-up, just a misapplied too-big rubber, and get on with things? The truth is I realized what we were up to was pretty lowdown. To say you shouldn't trim another man's grass trivializes it — not to mention the saying prefigures a woman as a strip of sod — but that was basically the case. Yes, it was the Magnum XL, but just as much it was the notion that, of all the shitty things I'd done, this ranked way up the pantheon. So M became frustrated, fairly so, and called me a baby for being upset. Eventually she asked me to get out of her bed so she could go to sleep. It seemed a situation where I should have been forced to trudge home in the witching hour under streetlamps casting stark pools of light, the enormity of my failure crushing upon my shoulders. But even in this I was thwarted: my bed was up a single flight of stairs, one floor above M's own. I've never been struck by impotence since then, but seeing as the opportunities have been rare, this claim is misleading — a bit like a shut-in declaring he's rarely been mugged. At first blush one might view impotence — variously and euphemistically referred to throughout history as "an imbecility of the genitals," "male sexual incompetence," "gutted-candle syndrome," and the present-day "male sexual dysfunction" — as too hemmed-in a topic to devote an entire book to. But, as Angus McLaren adroitly shows in a rousing, informative study I recently read, Impotence: A Cultural History, impotence relates not only to the realm of male sexuality, but to sexuality in general, which bleeds to political, legal, social, medical, class, cross-cultural and gender realms, all of which are covered in a narrative that begins in early Greek times and culminates in the here and now. Of interest to this reader was the mutating manner in which impotence has been viewed over the centuries, first as a purely physical problem, then as a purely psychological problem, now as partially both. Humorous details — I'm not sure McLaren meant to lend a humorous tone to what is an academic work, but the topic itself is a source of
Another point touched on is the inherent sexism involved in what is entirely a male problem, a centuries-old inability to account for shortcomings in the bedroom. McLaren notes that, especially in ages past, there was more riding on potency than a mere blow to one's self-esteem: an impotent male risked issues with family succession, wealth and stability. Stakes high as they were, menfolk looked for scapegoats and found them in the opposite gender. Women were blamed for casting hexes on them (hexes involved a woman serving a man bread she had kneaded with her buttocks or a fish she'd slipped up her vagina), blamed for the ease of their existence which did not involve such male stresses such as "the piloting of motor coaches," blamed for frigidity or the opposite, unbridled lust — the lustful woman, one nineteenth-century doctor claimed, were "known by their long clitoris and large pupils" and "seemed to devour men with their eyes and invite them to erotic combats." These pitiful exculpations by males to excuse their sexual dysfunctions — which, it must be noted, are often nobody's fault — were foisted upon womankind until, in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, women mounted a spirited resistance. As evidenced by the billions of dollars Pfizer takes in every year, chiefly through Viagra sales, impotence is big business — has been for centuries. McLaren highlights the intersection of gender, commerce, psychology, religion, politics and shifting social values to show impotence is about more than a man's simple inability to get it up. You'll be amazed how the tensions of sustaining one's manhood in its most obvious manifestation has driven some men to distraction — and the odd barium urethral irrigation. n° 
©2007 Nerve.com and Craig Davidson |
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