Lust, Impotence, Porn.
When I lost my libido I knew it immediately. Not that there were physiological warnings beforehand. There were none. I had been going about as frisky as ever; I hadn’t been more tired at the end of the day. No, the first time it was a classic unexpected fiasco, as Stendhal called it. Suddenly sensation was gone; emphatically absent.
Still, what is one fiasco? When my husband and I were young and early in the habit of love-making, when I was unused to regular orgasms, I used to miss often. This thought–that I had a past of uneven accomplishment–didn’t occur to me until after the second fiasco. After a long lag, a second failure followed the first: the next time we tried to make love. After the second time I was eager for explanations and solace. In recent years I had never missed an orgasm twice in a row. That shouldn’t sound boastful: it certainly didn’t when I groaned to myself, over and over, “I’ve never missed an orgasm twice in a row.” Orgasm had become a matter of almost unconscious planning. If I’m not interested–if I’m seriously fatigued or angry or simply not in the mood (rather than just wound up)–we don’t try. When you’re long married and long-bedded, small nonverbal signs go a long way.
Q–I’ll call him Q–gives off his own silent signs as well. Some nights when I am feeling a little keen I’ll find him watching a late movie instead of coming to bed; and since he knows I need a lot of sleep, that’s a sign he wouldn’t be interested. Mutual forbearance–unless we are both fairly sure of success–goes far to explain why I have lovely sex with my husband. Not to make a fetish of orgasm, but it had been a fact of our midlife. The intensity varied, but it was firmly there. My libido had long felt as much a piece of my identity as the color of my eyes.
The second time I was worried. (The first time I simply fell asleep right away, tuckered out.) A list of possible causes emerged. There are days in any ambitious, involved life when ego-centered obstacles to pleasure mount up too high to leap over. No, I wasn’t angry at Q. If he had made me mad, we wouldn’t have been trying to make love at all. No, I wasn’t especially distracted, although my day had contained an editor’s letter refusing a submission. Sensitive to my own moods, I feel capable of knowing when the total jangle of the day has gotten so chaotic that it’s absurd to pursue any goal but sleep.
No, my day had not been stressful enough to serve as an explanation, no matter how darkly I retold its accumulated frustrations. We had alleviated a lot of them in the debriefing session that Q and I often held while driving home from work. Years ago we set up the habit of venting. I was then working for the haughtiest university in the world and Q was dealing with his own institutional malice. As soon as we get into the car, whoever is in higher dudgeon goes first. By the end of the session we have almost invariably located the enemies and hung them by their thumbs. That doesn’t necessarily mean we are calm enough afterward to manage sex. I see this turning into a commentary about labor under capitalism. Sex and work–or rather, impotence and the conditions of work–are subtly connected. (This might partly explain why the level of impotence in this country appears to be rising, especially among the young.)
This time, the second time, the failure was, starkly and utterly, mine. It was as though my body had been anesthetized, but only from the waist down. Sudden muscular tugs, gone. The slowly cumulating energy for sex, gone. Even the basic daily comfort of crossed legs–which I had complacently assumed would accompany me through life with or without Q–gone! Sensation didn’t come back the next day, or the next, or the next…. There was no sign that it might ever return.
So here was my body benumbed, for no reason I could guess. That your body has failed is perhaps the least-wanted conclusion in the explanatory repertory–worse for me than the idea of my mind in trouble. I would then have preferred to be depressed or angry rather than physically ill. Perhaps it’s because “the body” is so rarely uninfluenced by the mind that the idea of its having a life on its own is terrifying. My mind-body wanted to make love. I had never needed to know how much. When my body refused to perform in its wonted way, it threatened “me” the way illness or craziness might do. I failed to be me.
What saved our marriage early on, before I got the knack, was that Q either didn’t notice that I wasn’t coming very often, or else he expected it, as what girls were like. One sensational orgasm that he had provided long before we thought about marrying had reassured me that I was competent and heterosexual, and I just hung in there, waiting. That was fortunate, since after around 1,000 couplings I got into the habit. I could accomplish at worst a modest basic orgasm. We had floated on confidence–along with patience and delay–ever since. Over the years being able to count on orgasm has been another reward for getting older together. Obviously no one changes a winning formula much. My sensitivity, once aroused by the raptures of the missionary position, stayed virginally astounded by the same old same old. This has had the unexpected benefit of stretching our simple pleasures over many years, with only serendipitous minute variations. It still feels vanilla, but that’s a contented Puritan’s estimation. I can’t know, because not even my closest friends discuss such things.
I am no longer astonished by the idea that physiological compatibility can deepen over time. (I choose anonymity, in fact, not least to preclude becoming notorious for this marital-progress narrative.) Success in long-term monogamous relationships must actually be quite common. It is first-time lovers at any age who are ignorant about the mind-body of the particular other: particular sensitivities, tastes, dislikes; not to mention deeper apprehensions and phobias. And boys are encouraged to be selfish, ignorant, awkward. First times must be relatively dreadful, and any culture that idolizes them–as ours does–shows its fundamental Puritanism and youth-centeredness. Cultures truly interested in pleasure don’t romanticize inexperience. But we aren’t told any of this often enough, so the cliche that passion declines is harmfully fixed in people’s minds.
Time passed after the second fiasco. Quite a lot of time. I avoided occasions of sex because I didn’t want to fail again. Three times in a row would, I was sure, spell doom. (Believing that was itself a curse, making me afraid to try and postponing the trial more and more.)
But one night I felt I couldn’t evade Q’s puzzled persistence any longer. I was determined to make it work. It was a little late and I was a little tired but I relied on my old saw, “My orgasm is in my own power.” That maxim is usually helpful, but not when it goes wrong. It had become flippant instead of ancillary. The incipient excitement I counted on to grow to crescendo had utterly vanished. I couldn’t find it in any of its usual spots.
At least Q did not make it worse, by turning hypersolicitous, as if worried. This story is really not about him, even though sex is supposed to be a two-person affair. It always ought to be, and in mutually good sex it must be. But fiasco is not one of those happy cases. In that emergency you discover the ultimate solitude: solipsism a deux. With loathing.
This time I found myself drawing on that standby in times of solitary stress-relief, sexual fantasy. I used this rarely: when I went on trips alone, after stressful conferences, in impersonal hotel rooms. When my body works with Q, fantasy would be superfluous. A distraction. Various body parts are going off like timed fireworks and I would miss the display by looking elsewhere? Recurring to fantasy had been useful only at moments, say when I wanted to move from a trot to a canter.
I hadn’t paid attention to my sexual fantasies until a feminist discussion group in the mid- Eighties brought up the subject of where the imagery comes from. We dropped the scalding topic quickly, because no one wanted to expose her fantasies. Since the fiascos, I have slowly figured out where most of my imagery comes from: soft porn. Even though I’ve never watched a porn movie, images of sexualized domination are available in real life, from the teacher of my Southern second-grade class hitting a fat boy on his bottom with a ruler to Abu Ghraib. Similar visualizations turn up increasingly in the mainstream, TV and film. The repertory of behaviors is limited, so writers and directors ratchet up the sadomasochistic violence year by year.
But I didn’t understand that I had internalized so much of this until I taught myself to stop the action and review my fantasies as if they were an old movie. Some are. One scene derives from Godfather Part II; another from a sexist photo by an art photographer. Of course I don’t do any of this analysis while I’m cantering.
Fantasy took me to places I didn’t like to be. My fantasies–those I deployed on the occasions I am describing–used to occur in a wild garden. (One thing I still don’t know is where this setting came from, but it’s not Edenic. Far from it.) Remote parts of the garden were dimly lit and separated by total obscurity. Each site was linked to a different violent practice. The sadism I made go on there was graduated. There were other female bodies, but one, not recognizably “mine,” was the primary object.
Even as tension duly built in my solitary body, I would feel disappointed that sex is not always physical and pleasurable; degraded that my imagination needed to borrow from society’s much-handled store of images. Perhaps this distaste was related to my kind of feminism. The increasing dissemination of porn in this country is an unmistakable sign that a whole lot of people are suffering too many obstacles to pleasure: physiological failures or–perhaps worse–fear of failure, even in couples. Porn smelled rancid to me, stinking of this fear. Opposed to the male degradation of women required by actual porn productions, I felt ugly using fantasy dominators and victims for getting off. (Later I found a powerful essay about the masochistic side of this quandary by Sandra Lee Bartky.)
In the garden-movie I was also–this too took a long time to realize–the director of degradation. How bad was this? The surrogate men were not abusing any body but split-off versions of mine, presumably; and the activities went on only in my own mind, not for public consumption; and they did not cause me to regard Q’s body or my own with less affection and gratitude. Discovering all this about my mental life did not lessen my antipathy to commercial porn a whit; nor did it sharpen it. But those did not feel like saving distinctions. My aversion, not to mention my reflective disgust after I came, did not have a calm philosophical tone, like debates between pro-porn and antiporn feminists about what counts as sexual liberation. Having to have recourse to any of the distant sites was a misery, a different kind of failure.
On this third try I quickly found myself in the dismal far parts of the garden. Not in one at a time as usual, in a well-paced sequence, but in all of them in rapid fire, chaotic simultaneity. The Godfather scene didn’t work; nor the Bergman pastiche. Frenziedly trying for a location that worked, a rhythm to fall into, a sequence of S/M scenes that would take me over the top, my voyeur’s eye swept from one site to another, trying to escalate, failing in each, again and again. I didn’t know what caused this hysterical scampering of the images. Figures that had moved with grace when my body was working rhythmically halted, like a break in a jerky primitive film, and commenced the same vile gestures with mechanical rigidity. The most punitive images in my fantasy repertory jammed up against the introductory episodes, as I tried in vain to restart the movie. There was no progression. It was clockwork bedlam in por-nurbia. (How often does porn fail? Escalation means that more violent levels of stimulation are failing. Eventually, as D. H. Lawrence knew from his own experiences of impotence, you simply cannot have sex just in the head.)
I had humped to exhaustion. At least Q had come, at my suggestion. That was a relief. But I felt utter fatigue, mixed with a sense of wasted effort greater than any I had ever experienced in love-making. To find a similar experience of such numb futility I had to go all the way back to adolescence–to my first experiments at intercourse, with boys who were relative strangers. Or rather, to their clumsy sexual experiments on me. But those first times had, by contrast with my mid-adult state, less awfulness, because at seventeen I had no idea what I was missing or what good sex could be. I wasn’t even trying then. I was present out of ignorant passivity, not physiological volition, not to mention affection or love.
At that age, I had had only one sexual fantasy, of walking on a path through the woods clad only in a slip, fearful of being seen. Nothing else happened. The technique of turning that dread into excitement was unknown to me. Years later, someone whose name I can no longer remember had technically ended my virginity without producing in me the slightest sensation of pleasure. The comfort I derived from putting my hand between my legs before going to sleep seemed to have no connection with the useless groping of boys making out. What were boys for, sexually? I didn’t have a clue. Those boys didn’t know I had a problem, they thought the song was all about them.
Q was light-years from those narcissists. My husband, my lover, my partner in history. These were sentimental thoughts, unhelpful now. His concern hovered; the air was thick with it. I saw it would add to my abjection.
This time there was no doubt we were going to have to talk about it.
“There is something wrong,” I said in an especially calm voice. “I don’t know what it is.”
We had a slightly technical exchange.
“It’s probably some passing thing,” I said. “You can ignore it, you know; go on as if …”
“I can’t,” Q said without needing to reflect. “We’ve always climbed the mountain together. I can’t do it without you.” He explained a little bit more.
That was what mutuality was, to be sure. But I was filled with grief and terror. Without reasoning, I knew his attitude was a terrible danger to us. It was a critical moment. “We can’t let this become a big thing,” I said, leaching from my voice all the panic I felt lurking outside us, in the dark future. “We could let it become important. It could overwhelm us.” Like someone trying to soothe a strange dog, I achieved a firm tone of conviction. I felt as I were teaching an absolute truth, and that Q would have to believe me. “Have to” only in the sense that if he didn’t, or couldn’t, we were lost. If he panicked, we would never recover.
The close thickness in the dark dissipated. Q relaxed; slept. I was worn out; I did, too.
The next day, I told myself to put it out of my mind and work. And so I did. I read in the library, I made calls, I felt absolutely myself in the world: concentrated, attentive, efficient. The same upright posture, energetic walk. But every so often without warning I crashed. A sick feeling coming into my stomach meant I had had a thought labeled “the third time.” It was the same nausea that came over me after I was told that my father had lung cancer, when I was trying to forget it; succeeding, until heaving informed me that memory had flooded over.
“It’s the end of my marriage,” I thought. “We’re way too young to deal with this well.”
So that was it. Despite my firmness to Q, I had already concluded that I had become “impotent.” That was the word that came to me. (”Frigidity,” that old-fashioned word for women who had never been aroused, perhaps–when the term was accurate–because they had been anesthetized by patriarchal selfishness and contempt for their lack of phallus, didn’t come into my mind for an instant.) It was already in my head that I’d never recover. I assumed Q must already have reached the same conclusion. I must have somehow communicated it. When you have been married that long, it is harder to have secrets. Much harder. For the first time in our entire life, I regretted all the contiguity and sharing that had made him so sensitive to me. Our love had become a bitter joke, almost a tragic irony. Every strength was a weapon against us. A newer lover wouldn’t have known so exactly how different I was, and with a new lover I might have faked unobserved until it–whatever it was–ended and I got my normal body back.
For the first time I understood why men who are impotent become adulterers; it made perfect sense, however stupid and destructive. For myself, I discarded the option, because I jumped straight to how humiliating it would be to fail three more times with a new lover, and how hurtful for him. Whereas Q already knew, through the same mute communication, that it had nothing to do with him. How long he would believe that, however, or whether it would console him … He would think I had stopped loving him.
I would be washing my hands or picking up a cup and my stomach would churn as if my ship were collapsing into heavy seas; my mouth filled with bitter phlegm. I heard the final judgment, “Failure.” I thought, this is what those poor wilted men must feel. I felt unutterably sorry for us all. Even as I tried to deaden these feelings with routine, I was saying to myself, “This is despair.” I had forgotten that you could be in despair and use the word at the same time. And I thought, “This will never end now.” And then the moment passed and I was my same self until it walloped me the next time. “You’re a failure. This can’t end. There’s no help for you on this one.” I, who had never believed in “no exit” signs, absolutely had no response to this one.
Once I did think of consulting my doctor, but I cringed from the revelation that would be necessary. Writing this is possible for me now, even necessary; speech was then unspeakable. I could imagine his smooth, serious, practical face tensing from the effort not to reveal his surprise and discomfort. Moreover, I didn’t believe a doctor could help. Going to a therapist also seemed absurd: This wasn’t mental. My complete numbness unnerved me. I concluded, “This is so freakish they can’t have a remedy for it.” Nor could I imagine a friend to whom I would have the courage to tell this. None of my female friends had ever described their own impotence. Sympathy from the immune would be unendurable. If I had known at the time how widespread “impotence” is, I would still have thought, “But theirs can’t be as complete as this!” What was the point if lust was irrecoverable? “Lust.” I had never thought to use that word in connection with myself, but that was precisely what I had had and lost.
As it happened, over the previous four or five years I had been researching autobiographical accounts of male impotence written early in the twentieth century. I had never read a story of impotence written by a woman. I had also never come upon a story by a man or about a man where onset was both sudden and final. My isolation–from Q, from medical assistance, from my best friends–felt total. Because of something so chancy–something that, had I chosen it and called it celibacy, would have left my identity unimpaired–I had suddenly had all my stitches in the warp and weft of the world cut.
Even in despair there are degrees. In one of those frantic routines of discarding hope after hope, as I depressively saw it, I stopped taking a new medication I had just begun, an anti-cholesterol drug. And then in bed some nights later, when we were lying hand in hand, Q said, astonishingly, “Could it be those pills?”
“Hmmmm, that occurred to me…. I’ll call my nurse practitioner at the end of the week, see what she says,” I said, surprising myself by lying without premeditation. I had already called her complaining of “side effects,” and she agreed to my stopping without asking questions: “It will take twenty-four hours to wash the drug out of your system.” I was giving it a week, maybe ten days.
Q said, one night, haltingly, heartbreakingly, “I wouldn’t want you to … be at risk, you know, with your blood pressure…. I mean, just for me.”
“Oh,” I said instantly, with some harshness, with much tenderness, in truth, “It’s not for you.”
What saved us, in part, aside from holding hands, is that I never thought the cause was premenopause or perimenopause or whatever the ridiculous catchall diagnosis is that doctors rely on who can’t diagnose a midlife woman otherwise. If I had employed against myself the current version of the dread “magic marker” of the female life course, as Margaret M. Gullette calls it, that would truly have blocked all hope. In this emergency, however, a loony idea of Marie Stopes came to me. Marie Stopes was a British sex therapist who wrote books for crossover audiences. In the 1930s she wrote one on the male menopause, in response to letters she had been getting from men in their middle years who thought they had become permanently impotent. Everyone concerned believed in men’s midlife sexual decline; it was already a credo of the scribbling sexologists. Stopes didn’t have the courage to deny the male scientific wisdom of her day, but she wrote that the climacteric, although real, was temporary. It might last a year or so, but then it would vanish and libido would simply return. Why she alone of her contemporaries believed this, I cannot say. She provided no evidence of such cures. But, given that a midlife “climacteric” is itself an invention, her solution was not crazy but brilliant. A moratorium offered hope, however remote. This hope lightened my despair by maybe two degrees.
I was laughing at her and thinking, “I’ll kill myself before the year ends.” Another few months of this crashing pain in the gut and utter misery striking at unexpected moments, with the fear of losing my marriage underneath! But even two shades less darkness is better than nothing.
Of course I got my body back–indeed, not very long after I stopped taking the medication. Would I have told this story otherwise? But it wasn’t the anti-cholesterol drug that caused the impotence, because I’ve taken it since without bad effects. I’ll never know what caused those fiascos. I think I know what cured me, and it is related to not believing menopause was the problem. What I believed under all the misery is that my body like other bodies has a way of being that restores itself by nature, the way skin grows back after being cut. Sexuality is a piece of this. Of course I got my body back, with all the complacency that rushed back with it. I felt (knock wood!), “A fiasco might never happen again.”
Those times when sweet lovemaking doesn’t work, as I believe it would more often in a more secure world, are now once again blessedly rare. But I have been impotent again since then; once with Q for much longer. The difference is that we knew perfectly well what the external causes of anxiety and depression were; Q somehow knew that bodily closeness in hugs and kisses would help us through. And having once seen despair undone by keeping faith in the body, I waited, and I think Q waited, with trust.
The episode occurred several years ago, and if I hadn’t decided to write this for the sake of others I might have forgotten most of it, the way women forget the pain of childbirth. Except for the chaos at the dark end of the garden.
The one long-term difference impotence made in my life is that I have been changing my sexual fantasies by an effort of will. The humiliation of that dry hump the third time, hips driven into the air convulsively, lifting Q’s 165 pounds against gravity on the point of my clit, to the frenzied clash of porn tortures…. That moment was motivation enough. People believe that they can’t de-escalate the violence of the fantasies they direct and inflict on the shadow self. This belief is the road on which some even escalate to S/M actualization–a path that Pat (now Patrick) Califia has warned is fraught with peril for many people. There is a huge difference between fantasy and behavior, even though in my worst unhappiness over my porn fantasies I thought they were the same. S/M in real life was impossible for me, unthinkable for us. No, de-escalation was the only way.
It wasn’t easy, and I think anyone who struggles through any of the stages deserves credit. The whole process was enabled by feminism, and that’s a fact. Reading the Bartky chapter in Femininity and Domination called “Feminine Masochism and the Politics of Personal Transformation” gave me the vague ambition to be someone who tried to change her “unconscious.” And by then, I had somewhat prepared myself. I had slowed down masturbation from time to time enough to analyze its current imagery, even though focusing to analyze interfered with momentum and the discoveries often made me uncomfortable. But knowledge had brought some rewards: I knew fantasy had a history, in the sense that I had not always had the same pictures in my head; I knew the images had sources; I had identified some of my sources. The movie wasn’t entirely preconscious any more. (The good energy this process required was no doubt derived in part from my finally being able to appreciate my body both esthetically and physiologically. In midlife I had shed much of the self-hatred accumulated in adolescence, when girls are first exposed to the hypercritical gaze.)
Experimenting with fantasy was the next awkward slow hurdle, trying to replace sadomasochism with pleasanter pleasure. At first my imagination clung to the dread familiar because it had worked. It took experimentation to figure out how to avoid the rigidity, the desperation, and some of the sadism, without losing the visual aids that can help arousal at times when help is needed. One by one I have managed to take steps that make more of an agent of the faceless female figure who undergoes the adventures. At the beginning, safe outside the garden, a voice-over can now ask, “What would you like to do?” instead of “Hurry up now, it’s time.” On occasions when need invites me to speed into the violent darkness, even when with Q, I deliberately slow down. Thus I became kinder up to a point to that other, my surrogate, my ageless puppet, this recently avowed part of my self. Each step felt like a risk, but it wasn’t. On the contrary: Her body language often seems more eager. Some changes turned out almost to guarantee the surprise swoop toward crescendo.
Sometimes I still experiment when alone. I doubt I’ll ever experience the nirvana of reaching orgasm by myself through peaceful “oceanic” imagery, which some of Gina Ogden’s interviewees describe in Women Who Love Sex. But as I made these changes on the landscape of my arousal, the darkest parts of the garden disappeared, never to return. Now she can linger if she needs to in the early dreamy places, filled with warm pools, sensitive male fingers, easy time. To be sure, the question is asked by a powerful voice; the rule that she take charge seems as harsh as the more typical rules of porn. Yet what the voice with the authority of print calmly bids, over and over, is, “Go slow, stay in this part of the garden; enjoy this as long as you need; don’t rush, don’t let yourself be rushed.” It has no gender that I can recognize, being a voice from inside my own head, but on reflection seems feminist in its intentions. Now I make the repetitiousness of porn serve my sense of timing rather than pressuring it.
More recently, the surrogate female body goes into a theater with loges that is a prettier place. Before or after this change (I no longer remember), it came to trying to have women objectify male bodies, sauce for the goose. I was at first awed to be doing it to the gander, and then amazed and amused to be able to overcome the lack of habit. This had mixed results. In any case, when violence occurs late in the process of arousal, it now happens to figures far away–as if my self–conscious new postconscious were stating, “This is all a show.” Everything that happens is ultimately for the sake of the shiver that ends the play. I recognize the grip of goal-driven porn underneath the alterations.
Given our savage, impatient acculturations and current conditions, some sadomasochism still seems undoable. But who knows. So much has already changed, from my teens when I had so timid a fantasy life (and so benumbed a body), through the long period of my conjugal life when I was scarcely aware of my occasional recourse to repulsive fantasy, to these recent midlife recognitions and interventions inspired by feminist principle and theory. Sexuality is a long busy story. This is surely not the end of this aspect or any other of my sexual memoirs.
I wish such an essay had been available during my first despair, and I hope others will find themselves writing their own. It’s a new genre of autobiography that needs to be explored sensitively and critically.
The woman whose face is unseen has become more stubborn about her own satisfaction. Over this time, she has added flesh to her strong hips, muscle to her arms. When I am in doubt, she too resists. Sometimes she leaves the garden entirely. And the voice may be metallic but it wants to know only, courteously, “What would you like to do?”
Tags: impotence, lost libido, Lust, Porn