Authorities about erections
Citing a number of authorities, Tiefer examines how many men’s beliefs around sexpality in general, and sexual performances in particular, are genitally centered. These beliefs include (1) men are always (or should be) willing to participate in sexual activity and are responsible for initiating, teaching, and satisfying both partners and themselves; (2) women prefer intercourse to any other kind of sexual activity; (3) all good sex culminates with intercourse; and (4) sex’ is serious (not play) - the ability to satisfy a woman depends on a “proper” erection and ejaculation and is something that must be proven on each occasion. The inflexible male sex role relies on the potency (both material and imagined) that comes with a hard penis. It is an essdltial part of the script. These beliefs point to a desire for the continuous performance of sexual health that itself suggests a construction of “normalcy.” Arid, suggests Tiefer, it is the taken - for - grantedness of that construction - a blueprint, a script - that makes the medicalization of sexuality so palatable I to men in particular.
These reviews of “dysfunction construction” by Irvine, a feminist historian, and Tiefer, a feminist psychologist, reveal some of the undetlying complexities inherent in the splintered field of sexology. In its man costumes, American sexology simultaneously pursues both scientific legitimacy and a larger audience for its services. Dangerous assumptions perpetuate the former and inhibit the latter of these two objectives.
Essentializing occurs when a single aspect of biological sex is taIled upon as the definitive - or, perhaps, vital - aspect of that sex. With regdrd to sexuality in particular, female sexuality has withstood decades (if not centuries) of speculation regarding the source of pleasure.s! What has remainJd unexamined is the source of pleasure in men. In a discussion of masculinity and sexuality’ Andreas Philaretou and Katherine Allen maintain that “contemporary men need to negotiate a reconstruction of their sexuality. ”
For the vast majority of men in the United States there is do question that it is the erect penis that provides the agency to their sexual pleasure. What is more, many men believe the erection is essential - heterosexually speaking - in order to provide pleasure for women. Lynne Sdgal writes, “[Western] culture has increasingly impressed upon men the importance of female orgasm - a man must, as it were, stand firm as the instrument of repeated female orgasm.”Because masculinity is so closely aligned with sexual adequacy and sexual adequacy with erectile capability, suggests Segal, there is no “room for maneuver,” either in creating a masculine identity or in experiencing the pleasurable aspects of the male body without theipromise of an erection. Essentializing is dangerous.
A coalition of healthcare - industry institutions - s - pharrnaceutical companies, insurance companies, the American Medical Association, medical technology manufacturers - are economically driven to expand both their authority of diagnosis and treatment and the quantity of services availablt Speaking on behalf of what Irvine would call humanist sexology, Tiefer tlaims that changing sexual scripts is one feature of a therapeutic approach. Through this approach, Sexuality can be transformed from a rigid standard for masculine adequacy to a way of being, a way of communicating, a hobby, a way of being in one’s body bein1one’s body - that does not impose control but rather affirms pleasure, movement, sensation, cooperation, playfulness, relating [emphasis original]
This is a worthy goal. What needs to be evaluated and critiqued, however, is the continued separation of mind and body that seems to drive the discourse of sexology I in general. In fact, the implied bifurcation of humanist as “mind” and scientific as “body” is, in itself, a perpetuation of this Cartesian philosophy.
It has become a sort of cultural joke that men don’t go to the doctor. But the reason behind this conscious decision is more than a bit baffling. Or is it? Doctors, wў are led to believe, are rational. Science, we are led to believe, is objective. What could be more appealing to men - the rational, objective gender - e - than the promise of empiricism? Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain provides a hint at the subordinate position the privileged male (Hans Castorp) might be avoiding in an encounter with the gaze of a domineering physician:
There are, ilt seems, contradictory allegiances at work when it comes to men and health! - producing what Janice Radway calls an ideological seam. Somewhere between idealized roles of American masculinity and the practices of the Ihealth - conscious virile male is a fault line that disallows an intersection. Masculinity abounds with the “conflicts, slippages, and imperfect joinings” tHat characterize Radway’s seams.V For many men, the strategies for performing hegemonic masculinity coincide with tactics for avoiding the objectifying scrutiny of the penetrating gaze of the powerful medical eye/I. Furthermone, Sander Gilman has pointed out how the category of disease contributesi to the boundary creation between the “healthy observer” (whether physician, nurse, or layperson) and the “patient.” As a result, this constructed image of patient is “always a playing out of the desire for a demarcation between ourselves and the chaos represented in culture by disease.”
As mentioned earlier, cultural expectations for masculinity are inextricably bound to self - imposed expectations for a healthy body. According to Donald Sabo and David Gordon, the development of a sociocultural model in the 1960s helped identify gender (along with race and socioeconomic status) as a significant variable in health and illness. In the 1970s, feminist theory not only revealed the ways in which gender affects societal perceptions of health and Illness, but also the ways in which the field of medicine has been corrupted by centuries of masculinist partiality.
