ERECTIONS

No one knows why men have erections when they have them and not when they don't. Clearly they happen in response to erotic stimulation, but this stimulation can be purely physical or purely inspired by the imagination and the senses other than touch, or some combination of the two. Ned Rorem, in his memoir, Knowing When to Stop, reports what he was told about the French poet and filmmaker Jean Cocteau, "that, as a parlor trick, [he] used to lie naked on his back, and surrounded by a cheering section, with no manipulation, no friction of any kind, would achieve ejaculation ... ."

Though men have erections when they're sexually excited, they also have them when presumably they're not. Teenage boys have erections when they least expect them. Fear can also cause erections. And a man can desire sex and be so tense, for whatever reason, that his erection doesn't materialize. Or, especially when he gets older, he may be thwarted by physical problems.

One seventy-year-old man told me he couldn't count on his penis to get erections anymore. "In youth and middle age having a penis can be a source of enthusiasm for the world and for expressing oneself to others," he said. "I no longer always like having a penis."

A sure sign of the high value we place on erections is the word we use to describe a man who's unable to have or sustain an erection. We call him impotent, which means without power. Even though we now have a politically correct euphemism for impotence, erectile dysfunction, everyone knows exactly what that means.

Temporary impotence happens to every man sometimes, and it's always a big embarrassment. The more a man worries about it, the more likely it is to happen again. If it begins to happen most of the time the impotence is in all probability no longer temporary—and according to figures released when the first erection pill, Viagra, went on the market in April of 1998, some 30 million American men are in this category. Yet in 1997, for example, only 2.6 million saw their doctors to try to do something about it—and of those only 628,000 were new patients.

In 1998 urologists became the nation's busiest doctors, working day and night writing out Viagra prescriptions. But before the advent of Viagra—which is said to solve the problem for 60 to 80 percent of those men who take it—impotence was not the sort of thing men liked to acknowledge by talking about it. For that reason little attention was paid to it by the medical profession in spite of the fact that most doctors are men, and it wasn't until the 1970s that the physiology of an erection was fully understood. (Altogether, we people are awfully slow about understanding our bodies. Homo sapiens were a fully developed species, having sex with each other for some hundred thousand years, before we figured out where babies came from. Until the Neolithic period, around 9000 B.C., no one knew men had anything to do with conception. As soon as men realized what their role must be, presumably from studying animals, they began to lord it over women.)



Source: The Book of the Penis by Maggie Paley