God's Doodle (19 page)

Base recreant to thy prince, thou dar’st not stand. Worst part of me, and henceforth hated most, Through all the town a common fucking post, On whom each whore relieves her tingling cunt As hogs on gates do rub themselves and grunt, May’st thou to ravenous chancres be a prey, Or in consuming weepings waste away; May strangury and stone thy days attend; May’st thou ne’er piss, who didst refuse to spend When all my joys did on false thee depend.

Desperately seeking solutions

Ernest Hemingway was only thirty-eight when impotency started to encroach. It led him to physically attack a fellow writer, Max Eastman, whom he wrongly believed was spreading tales ‘and playing into the hands of the gang who are saying it’. Until he died Hemingway was in denial. In his posthumously published ‘fictional memoir’,
True at First Light
, he wrote about the

old, well-loved, once burnt-up, three-times restocked, worn-smooth old Winchester model 12-pump gun that was faster than a snake and was, from 35 years of us being together, almost as close a friend and companion with secrets shared and triumphs and disasters not revealed as the other friend a man has all his life.

Sadly for Hemingway, whose attempted restoratives included doses of synthesised testosterone, nothing restocked his penis-rifle; at the end of his life all he could rely on extending was the metaphor.

There’s nothing more despairing for those who still feel what Eric Gill deemed ‘the seethe of tumescence’ but who have nothing with which to answer the call, try as they might, ‘as cocks will strike although their spurs be gone’ (Earl of Rochester). Which is why, throughout time, men have sought ways of stiffening their resolve. Rulers, despots and several popes have found that taking a young woman into their bed could work miracles – though not for the aged biblical King David when he was ‘stricken in years’ and ‘gat no heat’. His servants provided the fair virgin Abishag, but however hard she ministered to him, ‘the king knew her not’.

Not having access to fair virgins, most of history’s possessors of malfunctioning penises have turned to supposed aphrodisiacs to beget heat. Eating the genitals of animals, on the apparently logical assumption that like would help like, is a practice as old as history in all cultures. What became known as the ‘doctrine of signatures’ – which stated that something with a resemblance to something else could be of benefit to it – in genital terms included types of fish, some at least penis-shaped and all redolent of the smell and slipperiness of sex, with eels (naturally) and oysters (the best-known vulvar aphrodisiac) heading the list. Fruits, vegetables and roots with some male
genital
similarity also had their advocates: penile asparagus, celery and carrots, for example, testicular artichokes, truffles, broad beans, tomatoes (the ‘love apple’ of the sixteenth century), orchis bulbs (once, in fact, called dogstones) and apricots – ‘a-prick-hot’ a popular Renaissance pun. Garlic, onions, spices and black and chilli peppers were also sought because they quickened the pulse and induced sweating (like sex) – and onions and nutmegs, thought doubly effective because they were testicular as well as hot. The man-shaped roots of ginseng and mandrake, the latter known since biblical times and in the Middle Ages said to grow only where the seed of a hanged man had fallen (a tale that pushed up prices), were highly prized, as were figs (another of the few aphrodisiacs seen as vulvar in appearance, once cut open) and mushrooms, regarded as a symbol of intercourse, the stem thrusting up into the cap like a penis into a vagina.

The East still has faith in traditional sexual stimulants. Asia’s once plentiful seahorses are in sharp decline largely because the Chinese so believe in their sexual efficacy (not only fish but persuasively erection-like in swimming upright) that they pulp them in their millions to make an aphrodisiac broth; in Indonesia the cobra is becoming increasingly scarce because concoctions of its penis are more popular than Viagra. And China’s conviction that seal penis, tiger penis, bear penis and rhino penis can salvage a faltering erection has contributed to bringing these species to the brink of extinction. The rhino is hunted not just for its genitals but for its horn – the ‘doctrine of signatures’ at its most logically illogical – as once was the narwhal in the West for its tusk, often sold as unicorn (another tale to push up prices).

History abounds with measures more desperate. Men have swallowed virtually everything imaginable – alabaster, pearls and metals including gold – as hardening compounds.
Assyrian
women rubbed a man’s penis with oil containing flecks of iron; some Roman men, on the advice of Pliny the Elder, ate excrement; Elizabethans and their French brothers tried urinating through their wife’s wedding ring or through the keyhole of the church in which they married; in the early twentieth century hundreds of men (including Freud and the poet/playwright William Butler Yeats) subjected themselves to vasectomies on the advice of an eminent Austrian physiologist who was convinced it would ‘reactivate’ them (and cure baldness). Hope springs eternal, which is why impotent men in some primitive tribes in the Amazon still ask their comrades to blow on their penis, in the way one blows on a fire’s dying embers.

From the eighteenth century, the medical profession in the West took the view that toning up the man would tone up his below-par penis. In consequence men undertook regimens of fresh air and exercise, tonics and beef-steak, cold baths and scrubbing with rough brushes. Penises were cleaned out like a blocked chimney with surgical instruments; corrosive chemicals were deposited at the prostatic end of the urethra. ‘Electro-therapy’, heavily advertised in the newspapers, was popularly prescribed; by the early twentieth century it was fashionable for well-to-do men with erectile problems to wear a battery-pack belt that passed a current to their genitals, which purported ‘to improve sexual vigour by massage’. The first suction and vacuum pumps became available to force blood into the erectile tissue, kept there by a constriction ring.

With the rise in the standing of surgeons in the nineteenth century, the idea that animal genitals could be the key to impotence made a comeback, with a twist. The doyen of European physiologists, the seventy-two-year-old Charles-Édouard Brown-Séquard, injected himself with a composite of dog and guinea pig testicles and caused a sensation by claiming that doing so
had
enabled him to ‘visit’ his young wife every day without fail. As the century turned, others, the serious and the charlatan, went the whole way to xenotransplantation – in America, John Brinkley used the testicles of Toggenburg goats; in France, the Russian Serge Voronoff used grafts from chimpanzees and baboons. In fact, Voronoff had begun by transplanting human testicles – into millionaires – but demand exceeded his limited supply of executed prisoners and he had to find another source.
¹³

Thousands of men around the world in the 1920s went under the knife for the supposed benefits of what were known as ‘monkey glands’ and by the 1930s there was triumph in the air, with monkey glands being claimed a success by both those carrying out the procedures and their recipients. Sadly, the whole affair turned out to be a massive example of the placebo effect at work – and just as Brown-Séquard succumbed to a cerebral haemorrhage soon after his astonishing announcement (his young wife having run off with a younger man), xenotransplantion died a death.

Throughout recorded history men have helped half-hearted erections with a variety of external supports; in the 1950s surgical techniques were developed to put the supports inside the penis. Bone and cartilage weren’t successful, but twenty years on silicone was: a pair of pliable rods could be implanted in the spongy columns of the penis – with the drawback that it was permanently extended, needing to be bent down when dressed, bent up for sex, and a man was always aware of its presence. Inflatable models with some mechanical parts have overcome the problem, but more men opt for the complex alternative, an implant with a separate fluid reservoir located in the belly, attached to a squeezable ball inserted in the groin or in the scrotum like a third testicle.
¹⁴

It was in the 1980s that a reliable non-invasive treatment for impotence emerged – by accident. French surgeon Ronald
Virag
inadvertently injected papaverine (an opium alkaloid for treating visceral, heart and brain spasm) into an artery leading to his anaesthetised patient’s penis instead of the artery he intended, and was taken aback when his patient’s penis sprang to attention. Virag was rather upstaged by the British urologist Giles Brindley, who was intentionally investigating penile artery dilation as a treatment for impotence. He did more than report to a convention of fellow urologists in Las Vegas the success that he’d achieved with the beta blocker phenoxybenzamine (a treatment for hypertension): he showed them. Having injected himself before taking the platform, he walked among his audience, erection in hand, to prove that no implant was involved. Soon others were promoting dilatory compounds for self-injection (yes, a small prick for a bigger one).

And then came Viagra (which had nothing to do with the near-anagrammatic Ronald Virag), which like papaverine and phenoxybenzamine relaxes the smooth-muscle cells of the penile blood vessels – but with the enormous advantage of only having to be swallowed. Viagra, the first approved oral treatment for erectile dysfunction, coined from ‘virility’ and, hyperbolically, ‘Niagara’, became the fastest-selling drug in history. (Among the first customers were hard-working males in the porn industry, the drug enabling them to ‘maintain wood’ without the help of ‘fluffers’, young women whose job was to lick them into shape just before the director called ‘Action!’) And it seemed that without pain, inconvenience or prolonged treatment impotent men could at last with certainty hold their head(s) up high . . .

A PRICE TO PAY

A MAN MAY
be distraught when he can’t get an erection – and terrified when he can’t get rid of one.

A prolonged and agonising erection – priapism – happens when the blood in the spongy cylinders of the penis that engorge during arousal doesn’t return to the circulation, which normally happens after orgasm. Four to six hours later the blood trapped in the penis has the consistency of thick oil – and if a doctor doesn’t remedy the situation by sticking in a needle to let the blood out, there will be damage to blood vessels and nerves that might make getting an erection impossible. If left untreated for twenty-four hours, gangrene and even amputation may follow.

Priapism can be a side effect of certain medical conditions or of recreational drug use. But almost any effective impotency treatment can cause the predicament, including over-pumping a penis or leaving on a restricting ring for too long, both of which can also result in permanent impairment. And priapism may not be the only, or the worst, outcome of
attempting
to encourage, strengthen or prolong erection.

The overwhelming majority of aphrodisiacs are ineffective and harmless; some are dangerous. Most of these work by irritating the mucous membrane of the urinary tract and genitals to assist the necessary blood flow; a very few are psychotropic, which is to say they work on the mind to induce sexual desire – yohimbine, made from the bark of a West African tree, is the best known. And all are powerful poisons, including such innocent-sounding plants as crowfoot (a member of the buttercup family), periwinkle and henbane, as are mandrake, toad venom and Spanish fly, made from crushed southern European blister beetles. The mimicking of the natural sexual response comes with various side effects (in the case of yohimbine, panic attacks and hallucinations) but sometimes with greater costs, including gastrointestinal bleeding, renal failure, lung or heart damage – and even death. So deadly are some aphrodisiacs that they are illegal in most parts of the world, but they, or compounds containing them, are frequently smuggled or, like everything else, found on the Internet. The deadliest aphrodisiac of them all, made from the testes of the blow-or pufferfish, is not illegal in China and Korea, to which its use is largely confined. A gland in the fish contains tetrodotoxin, which is a hundred times deadlier than cyanide – and the merest trace left after its removal means certain death. Some three hundred men succumb every year.

It’s unlikely that anyone has lost his life directly from a penile implant, though lurid and unlikely stories of inflatable devices being activated in public by mobile phones or bleepers, or exploding and causing haemorrhage and death, regularly appear on the Internet. What is true is that nearly three-quarters of those who’ve had a device fitted have not been happy with the results – for them, bio-hydraulic sex really isn’t like the
real
thing. In the early days, inflatable models were prone to malfunction, leak or break; and in the parlance of several lawsuits, device components were said to ‘migrate’. Implants have become more reliable (though they remain liable to cause infection); Viagra, however, has made them a minority choice, usually for those made impotent by prostate cancer surgery and beyond chemical conjuring.

And yet Viagra and its similar competitors have not proved to be the Holy Grail for all men in search of a viable erection (for a start, two in ten men find no such thing results). The tablets should only be used on medical advice – and not by those being treated for hypertension, high cholesterol, liver or kidney problems, diabetes or obesity. Most at risk are those with heart disease on drugs containing nitrates: the potency tablets work by releasing nitric oxide in the penis and the interaction of related compounds can cause a catastrophic drop in blood pressure. Men without medical conditions commonly experience varying degrees of dizziness, nasal congestion or nausea, or more unpleasantly, temporary visual disturbance. But for those with the identified conditions the price can be sudden hearing loss or blindness, respiratory failure, stroke or heart attack. Or death. There are no definitive statistics, but in the dozen years since Viagra came to the market, hundreds of the twenty-five million men worldwide who have popped pills for potency have popped off in the process.