Bonk (14 page)

Even when a patient is young and the physical state of his erectile tissue is unlikely to be the problem, urologists are inclined to skip the RigiScan and try a Viagra-type drug. I asked Ira Sharlip, a spokesman for the American Urological Association and a clinical professor of urology at the University of California, San Francisco, why these men would be prescribed pills if their condition is likely to be psychological. “These patients get into a vicious cycle,” he said, “where the anxiety over not being able to get an erection compounds the problem.” A PDE5 inhibitor can help reverse the cycle. “We use it as a bridge. But at the same time, I have all of those patients, if they’re willing, work with a sex therapist or a psychologist.”

Meika Loe quotes the medical essayist Franz Alexander on the enduring appeal of medical—over psychological—approaches to conditions like impotence. “Alexander claimed that medicine’s aversion to psycho-social factors harkened back to ‘the remote days of medicine as sorcery, expelling demons from the body.’…Twentieth-century medicine was ‘dedicated to forgetting its dark magical past.’”

That’s too bad, because it was, as we’re about to find out, pretty darn entertaining.

i
n the Middle Ages, the common assumption was that impotent men had been cursed by a demon or by a witch, acting as a sort of local proxy for the Devil. According to
Malleus Maleficarum
—a 1491 handbook of judicial proceedings against witches and methods of “curing” curses and spells—witches could induce both impotence and sterility. Some displayed a surprisingly sophisticated grasp of male anatomy. While impotence was achieved by simply “suppressing the vigor of the member,” the sterility curse required the witch to “prevent the flow of the semen to the member…by as it were closing the seminal duct so that it does not descend to the genital vessels.”

Witches with no formal training in andrology could employ a simpler, more fanciful approach. They made the man’s penis disappear. Authorities quoted in
Malleus Maleficarum
disagree as to whether the organ is truly gone or the bewitched individual is simply under the sway of a perceptual illusion that causes him to believe it’s gone. The author quotes an unnamed venerable Dominican father who, during a confession, hears a parishioner confide that he has “lost his member” to witchcraft. The priest relates that he asked the lad to remove his clothes, so that he might, likely story, check for the missing part.

The author of
Malleus
brings up the strange matter of penises stockpiled in birds’ nests, which he presents as proof of a literal disappearance. “What, then, is to be thought of those witches who…sometimes collect male organs in great numbers, as many as twenty or thirty members together, and put them in a bird’s nest or shut them up in a box, where they move themselves like living members, and eat oats and corn, as has been seen by many and is a matter of common report?” It’s a question I cannot answer. I can only lament the long, dry journey that legal publishing has made in the centuries since 1491.

The recommended cures for impotence suggest that medieval authorities may have suspected that psychological, not supernatural, powers were more likely at play. The accursed man who seeks advice is invariably asked to give some thought to whom he believes might have bewitched him. He is then urged to “prudently approach” this person and to sit down and have a talk. “Soften her with gentle words.” Whereupon the penis generally reappears. As a Plan B, the learned tome recommends that the accursed “use some violence.”

c
ome the late 1700s, blame for impotency shifted from supernatural beings to men themselves. The year 1760 saw the publication of a slim, pernicious work of hyperbolic quackery called
Onanism; or, A Treatise upon the Disorders Produced by Masturbation.
A shrewd blend of the clinical and the moral, it spread like a virus through the medical circles of Europe and the United States. Impotence was prime among the disorders said to be produced. Sperm-carrying semen was believed to be a vital source of life energy.
*
As with fossil fuel or health insurance payouts, there was thought to be a finite amount of it available; woe befall the man who wantonly squandered it. Masturbation and casual sex—particularly with “ugly” women, who sapped one’s vitality faster than the handsome ones—led to all manner of bodily woes. (Spilling sperm into someone you love did
not
deplete one’s vital juices because, quoting
Onanism
author Samuel Tissot, “the joy which the soul feels…repairs what was lost.”)

Onanism
and its imitators—
Excessive Venery, Masturbation, and Continence,
by American M.D. Joseph Howe, came out over a century later but is no less hysterical—had citizens worrying that masturbation could cause not only impotence, but blindness, heart trouble, insanity, stupidity, clammy hands, “suppurating pustules on the face,” acrid belches, “a flow of fetid matter from the fundament,” tongue coatings, stooped shoulders, flabby muscles, under-eye circles, and a “draggy” gait. It was the Victorian-era version of the anticrack campaigns that you see today, with their closeups of acne-blighted cheeks and discolored teeth: vanity as a force more powerful than medicine.

Tissot took it to the extreme in his description of the effects of “self-pollution” on a watchmaker referred to as L.D.: “A pale and watery blood often dripped from his nose, he drooled continually; subject to attacks of diarrhea, he defecated in his bed without noticing it, there was a constant flow of semen….”
Hello, yes, this watch you sold me is all sticky and stuff?
Impotence was almost beside the point. Masturbate for a few months, and you’d soon be so revolting no one was going to climb in bed with you anyhow.

The cure for erectile troubles, then, was simple: Quit masturbating. Stop wasting your vital sap. Dismayingly, this included sap spilled involuntarily during sleep. Nocturnal emissions had to be prevented too. Here simple willpower wouldn’t do the trick. You needed technology. You needed, in the words of the U.S. Patent Office, a Device for Preventing or Checking Involuntary Spermatic Discharges.
*

o
n the simple side, there was the Penile Pricking Ring. Invented in the 1850s, this was an adjustable, expandable metal ring slipped onto the penis at bedtime. If the sleeper’s penis begins to expand, it forces the ring open wider, exposing metal spikes that, should it expand still further, are pushed down into the flesh, awakening the sleeper. Later, higher-tech variations had the expandable ring hooked up to an alarm bell or—
suppurating pustules!
—a shock-producing current. One device monitored length rather than girth. A metal cap was slipped over the end of the organ, giving it somewhat the appearance of a muzzled dog snout. Attached to the cap by short chains on either side was a pair of clips. These were affixed to tufts of pubic hair. I will let James H. Bowen, the owner of U.S. Patent 397,106, describe the ensuing scenario. “When a discharge is likely to occur, the device is elevated with the organ, and the connections are drawn sufficiently taut as to pull the hair.”

Many of these devices included an option for daytime use, along with a lock-and-key mechanism. For the true target customer was not the penitent masturbator, but the worried parent and, even more so, the insane asylum caretaker. The institutionalized lunatic who attempted to remove his antimasturbation device faced—in the words of Raphael Sonn, inventor of the Mechanical Penis Sheath—“great physical pain and possible mutilation.” Sonn’s patent reads like the instruction manual for something in the Marquis de Sade’s basement, with “clamping members,” “gripping elements,” teeth, prongs, and hinges “of the tight-butt type.”

Happily, parents of K-through-8 masturbators were encouraged to try less drastic preventive measures. Little hands were tied to headboards, and trousers fashioned without pockets. Hobbyhorses were taken away, and climbing ropes removed from school gymnasiums. One of the biggest spoilsports in the antimasturbation crusade was American physician William Robinson. His 1916
Practical Treatise on the Causes, Symptoms, and Treatment of Sexual Impotence and Other Sexual Disorders in Men and Women
includes a long chapter on preventing the premature awakening of the sexual instinct in children. “I strongly urge parents to keep their boys away from sensuous musical comedies and obscene vaudeville acts,” tutted Robinson, clearly something of the tight-butt type himself. “Many of my patients told me that their first masturbatory act took place while witnessing some musical show.”

Mental masturbation was also to be discouraged. “It is very rare,” wrote Robinson, “that people who devote all their time to severe intellectual work do not pay for it by sexual weakness or impotence.” He goes on to describe the case of a famous mathematician who, during each attempt at intercourse, “would be disturbed by an abstruse mathematical problem and the attempt would fail.” Somewhat contradictory advice, mentioned in
Masturbation: The History of a Great Terror,
comes to us courtesy of a Dr. Crommelinck, who advocated memorizing difficult passages on philosophy or history when overcome by the desire to masturbate.

Truly it seemed that any activity undertaken—sleeping, thinking, eating spiced food, taking in a matinee of
Mame
—led the heedless male down the path to self-pollution. A man couldn’t even relieve himself without having to worry. Crommelinck urged gentlemen to avoid touching their genitals at all times, lest they inadvertently arouse themselves—even at the urinal. “Urinate quickly, do not shake your penis, even if it means having several drops of urine drip into your pants.”

Those who could not manage to curb their impulses with philosophical tracts and antimasturbation gadgetry faced a withering assortment of brutal treatments. Robinson casually states that in two or three cases he applied “a red hot wire” to a child’s genitals. Joseph Howe advocated a treatment that involved a six-inch syringe (“Dr. Bumstead’s syringes are the best”) up the urethra.

The bitter irony here is that regularly spilling one’s seed serves a valuable biological function. Sex physiologist Roy Levin explained to me that sperm which sit around the factory a week or more start to develop abnormalities: missing heads, extra heads, shriveled heads, tapered and bent heads. All of which render them less effective at head-banging their way into an egg. Levin speculates that that’s why men masturbate so much: It’s an evolutionary strategy. “If I keep tossing myself off, I get fresh sperm being made.” Thereby upping the likelihood of impregnating someone and passing on your genes.

Though if conception is the goal, you don’t want the sperm to be
too
fresh. Daily masturbation would deplete the number of sperm per ejaculate. Got to give the pinheads time to build up their ranks. To produce an ejaculate with optimum potential for fertilization, Levin recommends a holding time of five days.

f
rance in the late-sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was really and truly a place where you did not want to be an impotent male. This was the era of the “impotence trial.” Compared to the magistrates of these Reformation-era trials, Dr. Bumstead is the Gumdrop Fairy. When theologians elevated marriage to the status of a sacrament, impotence was likewise elevated, from a source of frustration to an actual crime. And because impotence was thought to arise from the intemperate spilling of one’s seed, it was assumed that a man who could not get hard for his wife had been spending too much time doing so for others. Or, at the very least, that he was an immoderate masturbator.

Be that all as it was, the main reason a man’s erectile capacity found its way into the courts was that impotence was a legal ground for divorce. Women seeking to escape a miserable marriage would accuse their husbands of it, with or without cause. If the wife won the case, the man would not only be fined and forbidden to remarry, but would have to return the dowry he had received from the woman’s family. The legal battle that ensued was a spectacle a hundred times more surreal than Michael Jackson in his pajamas, though here too the defendant wore pajamas.

For the husband to win his case, he had to prove himself capable of, as they say in modern-day erectile parlance, achieving and maintaining an erection. This meant a visit—often two or three or four visits—from a team of “experts” and examiners: as many as fifteen physicians, surgeons, and legal functionaries kitted out with their clipboards and pince-nez.

The defendant was examined in his home rather than in the courtroom, but it only moderately softened the humiliation. The team would arrive at the appointed hour and wait outside the bedroom until the defendant yelled through the door that he was ready for viewing. The examiners would file into the room and gather around the bed, whereupon the accused would pull back the bedclothes and show them what he had. These were tough critics. “We did find him in a state of erection upon our arrival,” reads one report excerpted in Pierre Darmon’s
Trial by Impotence
, “but he did not have sufficient attributes to consummate a marriage.” How did they know? They leaned in and groped (“Touching this swelling, we felt it to be flabby”).

Insult to injury, the examiners tended to wander afield from their appointed task, noting and commenting upon irrelevant anatomical quirks and afflictions. “We did perceive on the anus divers rather swollen haemorrhoids,” snipes the report on one Jacques François Michel. Another defendant whose report is excerpted in Darmon’s book, the Baron D’Argenton, was observed to have “no visible cullions [testicles], but as if a purse without sovereigns,…which did withdraw inside his person when he turned over, in such fashion that he had nothing left him but his member, and even this being far smaller than is customary among men….”

Defendants occasionally resorted to extreme measures. The Marquis de Gesvres hired a theater troupe to perform an obscene vaudeville in his boudoir just prior to the arrival of the examiners. Others simply cheated. M. Michel, he of the swollen hemorrhoids, “uncovered himself only with the left hand while the fingers of the right pressed the root of the penis.” (Too bad Robert C. Barrie hadn’t been born yet. In 1907, Barrie received a patent for a hidden penis splint, which stretched the flagging organ along a thin rod between two metal rings, one concealed by “the gathered prepuce,” the other by the man’s pubic hair, “thus presenting a seemingly natural and unoffensive appearance to alley suspicion…[in] the opposite sex.”)