Agony rather than ecstasy

One of the most interesting conversations I have ever had took place in a Carmarthen pub. There were three of us, the others a builder and a policeman. At one point the policeman told us the weight of a severed human head: it was 14 pounds, and he should know, he went on, having had to carry one in a hat-box. The conversation then turned, somehow, to impotence, which we agreed was something all sensible men should welcome. ‘Be a chance to talk to the wife,’ said the builder. Unfortunately not every man can be a philosopher king in the Black Horse.

Professor Angus McLaren’s book sets out to be an account spanning two millenia of the anguish caused by impotence and of the various profitable quackeries practised by the medical profession in its treatment, up to, and including, our own time. But despite its title, it widens into a history of sexual attitudes, and as such could have been one of the funniest, and saddest, books ever written.

The fact that it isn’t is due to such sentences as this. McLaren, a Canadian professor of history, is discussing the work of Masters and Johnson, those masters of DIY who got the physics department to build a sex machine to their design, then filmed wired-up women using it in a university research laboratory:

By teaching techniques of orgasmotherapy, starting with an education in masturbation, they claimed it was possible to ignore cultural conditioning and circumvent the psycho-analytic preoccupation with the psyche that might demand years of treatment.

In other words, forget your childhood, pal, press the right buttons and you’re away. Yet ignore the jargon for a moment, just look at the structure of that sentence, and listen to the rhythms of the prose. An academic wrote that, an educated man, and one, alas, let loose on the young.