Herb Goldberg
The Hazards of Being Male
(1976)
[22]
3. The Wisdom
Of The Penis
...
The essence and ultimate joy of male sexuality lies in the experience of total arousal, the moment when nothing in the world exists except the woman beside him, ... —desire at such a peak that no fantasies could possibly intrude ...
... it is a state most men have experienced at some time in their lives before they allowed their sexual spontaneity to be mired in the intellectualizations about "sexuality," derailed by abstractions about "meaningful relationships" and "sharing," alienated from their own experience by a destructive emphasis on techniques, and numbed by scientific teachings about the physiology of the woman and himself. That, to my mind, is the essence of much of the so-called new sexual enlightenment—the "progress" and the problem.
While women's sexuality has been misunderstood and they've been confused and degrated [sic] by psychoanalytic interpretations ... men, I believe, have been seriously and negatively affected by such labels as "latent homosexuality," "fear of intimacy," "mother fixation," "repressed hostility toward
[23]
women," "fear of failure," ...
Undoubtedly these all contain a basis in truth, but instead of facilitating his growth, the major impact of these concepts and terms have been to propel the male into greater self-consciousness, guilt, and self-accusatory reactions. Belief in these ideas often causes him to distrust his own unique sexual responses.
The beginning of a new male consciousness in the area of sexuality will first require, along with being fully aware of his feelings, a different way of interpreting his responses. ...
...
It is true that a boy is given more exploratory privileges and has traditionally been allowed a wider latitude in terms of sexual indulgence. However, cultural evaluations of his sexual behavior have been far more harsh.
Impotence
... In our culture the subject has become an almost maniacal preoccupation.
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... While lip-service is paid to the fact that impotence is a two-way problem, it is the male who is in the majority at the sex therapy clinics. The image of the female's role in male impotence is still largely one of helper—a sometimes supportive, sometimes resentful spectator waiting for him to overcome his problem.
...
The psychoanalytic and psychiatric approach to impotence, which involves tracing back and exploring early experiences and traumas, has a basis in reality but is a little like treating
[25]
food poisoning by exploring early eating habits. It neglects the fact that the real cause may be in the present, with the body appropriately responding to something that is seeks to avoid.
... The vast majority of men are of course capable of becoming erect under certain conditions and with certain women. So-called impotence is almost always a pair-specific phenomenon, that may be making a powerful statement about the man's feelings about the relationship toward the particular woman he is in bed with. Ironic as it may seem, most men, would rather feel they have a medical problem than say very simply to their intimate, "I don't want to make love to you." In other words, acknowledging impotence and claiming, "I've got a problem," is easier than expressing the feeling, "I'm not turned on by you." Therefore, instead of seeing himself as impotent, I would encourage him to say "I don't want to have sex with you." I would have him translate "premature ejaculation" into, "I want to get this over with as fast as possible." I would encourage him to explore and understand his negative responses to the particular woman or situation rather than assume the burden and then try to overcome the "symptom."
My clinical experience indicates that the man who diagnoses himself as impotent is often experiencing something within his relationship or about his partner that is killing his desire. However, the feeling message is only being telegraphed by his body response and is not being recognized in his conscious brain.
A colleague of mine is treating a forty-one-year-old man who became impotent after he lost his job. The patient previously was informed by one well-meaning doctor and had also read in several magazine articles that his inability to achieve erection had something to do with the fact that he associated his job with his masculinity ... An in-depth interview with his wife revealed that she was secretly deeply resentful about his unemployment and blamed
[26]
him for his lack of foresight. Out of guilt, however, she never told him, but she did say to the therapist, "He knew it was bound to happen and he could have done something about it in time, if he had really wanted to." The man's penis was perceiving her unspoken anger and her attitude of rejection toward him and was refusing to "make love" in the face of her anger and rage.
...
A different form of the wisdom of the penis is illustrated by the responses of a twenty-six-year-old recently married engineer. ... The twenty-nine-year-old wife had had two years of psychology courses and had convinced him that he was really angry toward women because of the way his mother had treated him. ... That sounded plausible to him and he came to therapy wanting to be "cured." Several private sessions with his wife, however, brought to light the fact that she had married him primarily because she was approaching thirty and was concerned that she'd never get married. She revealed that she had never been attracted to him physically and had been faking her sexual excitement right from the beginning. ... His penis was aware of her basic lack of true involvement with him. ...
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...
An associate of mine told me of a patient who had recently gone to bed with the wife of a friend of his and found himself impotent. As he explored his reaction he realized that she probably was only using him to precipitate an end to her own faltering marriage. His body sensed this and wisely kept him out of a potentially explosive and dangerous relationship.
In another instance, a forty-two-year-old man became completely impotent with his wife of seventeen years. However, he was extremely potent during occasional visits to prostitutes. When I first spoke to him he was in an extreme anxiety state regarding his inability to perform sexually. He wanted to be "cured" as quickly as possible. ...
As we spoke at greater length however, it readily became apparent that internally he had been experiencing rage toward his wife for many years. ...
He acknowledged that he felt smothered and engulfed by his wife whom he felt resented him and tried to block his every autonomous move. He had been unable to assert himself with her. Instead he had given up his own activities— ... He simply went to work and came home.
While consciously he rationalized his wife's demands and stated that he felt she was justified in her expectations and requests to have him at home with the children, his penis registered his innermost feelings. It was protesting the annihilation of his real self. It was his "truth teller" and it said that he did not really want closeness and physical intimacy with a woman he felt was destroying him.
There are other examples, some so transparent that they are amusing. For example, an obviously hostile woman who was always putting down men, recently asked me if I could confirm her experience that "just about all men today have impotency problems." Clearly, she was not aware of the impact her
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hostility toward men had on her lovers. She apparently believed that erections automatically appear under all conditions. Her underlying assumption was that men have no emotional reactions when it comes to sex, and that a "normal" man will automatically have an erection when there is a naked, willing woman.
Men are not impotent today. They only are impotent with some women under some conditions and their non-responsive reactions reflect important truths that they must learn to trust and understand.
... Certain kinds of contemporary conditioning techniques and "helpful" and "supportive" advice ... would have done these men great disservice. Their basic distrust of the wisdom of their body responses would only have been reinforced.
... I don't believe that an erection, no matter how achieved, is a good thing simply because it reduces a man's anxiety for the moment. I feel that this attitude robs him of the necessity of owning up to his real feelings about his partner or the relationship in which he's involved. The man who gets his erections by cheating on himself through fantasizing sex with other women, arousing himself with pornography, or using various and sundry mechanical devices is demonstrating disrespect for himself and rejection of his real emotions.
...
The penis is not a piece of plumbing that functions capriciously. It is an expression of the total self. In these days of over-intellectualization it is perhaps the only remaining sensitive and revealing barometer of the male's true sexual feelings.
Arthur Danto
Analytical Philosophy of Action
(1973)
[116]
5
GIFTS
i
'We are not able to move all the organs of the body with like authority',
Hume observes,
'though we cannot assign any reason besides experience, for so remarkable a difference between one and the other.'
'As we are
now',
wrote St Augustine,
'not
only do our articulate members obey the will — our hands or feet or fingers — but even those that are moved only by small sinews and tendons we contract and turn as we list, as you may see in the voluntary motions of the mouth and face . . . and the lungs do serve a man's will entirely, like a pair of smith's or organist's bellows.'
Like Hume,
Augustine supposed it merely contingent that our 'authority' should be circumscribed as we find it to be,
for there are men capable of doing odd things:
'We
see some men's
natures
far different from others,
acting
those things strangely in their bodies
which
others neither do
nor
hardly will believe.'
So
we
could
have been framed
with our authority differently seated:
'God could easily have made us with all our members subjected to the will',
he writes,
adding the possibility
which obviously haunted him as a man,
as we might recall from the
Confessions,
'even those which now are moved by lust'.
I italicize the word 'now', which occurs twice in this passage. For it was Augustine's curious view that Adam, in paradise, indeed was so framed that he could perform what I have termed basic actions with his sexual organ, and hence achieve the sexual act immune from the contaminations of sin.
It is thus not sex but lust which is the root of sin, and hence the domination by the flesh of
us
rather than the domination by us over our bodies, which is the fallen state. Paradise accordingly is a condition we may get some glimpses of from our present powers of direct action, executing intentions without the concomitant torment of desire.
I am not at all certain that
it is a merely contingent matter
that voluntary erection
lies outside the boundaries of direct action.
For curiously enough,
a man who were able to erect at will
might in fact be impotent in the received sense,
which is an incapacity for genuine
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sexual response;
where
response
implies
precisely the absence of
that order of control
Augustine supposes our first parent
to have exemplified.
A man who had direct control, or who was obliged to exercise direct control, would be a man without feeling, erection being the common expression of male sexual feeling.
And it is in some measure a logical truth that if erection were an action it would not be an expression, and the entire meaning of sexuality would be altered were tumescence something over which we had 'authority'.
Hence feeling,
or lust, if you will,
is not so contingently related to erection
as Augustine's argument implies.
But
perhaps it is his claim that there would in fact have been no sexuality in paradise:
a wry conjecture in the light of post-Freudian sexual romanticism.
