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Sociologists Pepper Schwartz and Virginia Rutter ask, “How might an erection be socially constructed?”19 They begin to answer this question by acknowledging specific cultural perceptions about the causes of impotence: the man isnit “man enough” or the partner isn’t attractive enough. The “macho male myth” requires that a penis always be hard and interest in (hetero )sexual opportunity always apparent. Schwartz and Rutter suggest that the theory of social constructionism becomes a more powerful tool when it takes the biological or evolutionary views of essentialism into account. Their integrative view of desire makes sense of how bodies, environments, relationships, and institutions link to determine the boundaries of human sexual possibility. They write:
Erections ‘are not always evidence of romantic interest, though our culture interprets them as such. But their absence or presence, which is a physical phenomenon, takes on great meaning thanks to Western culture’s prevailing beliefs and norms .. j . Growing up in a culture that considers erectile unpredictability a problem influences the way men in that culture feel about themselves and about their sexual partners, and the way sexual partners feel about them.
This fear oflunpredictability spurs most of the medicalization of sexuality. Moreover, the erect penis is firmly connected to issues of power, control, and immortality. lAs a result-and consistent with Western culture’s embrace of binaries-the erect penis is synonymous with masculine virility while the nonerect penis is a harbinger of weakness and efferninacy.u It is the erect penis, rather! than its flaccid counterpart, that signals phallic power. The flaccid penis is perceived as feminine precisely because it is not a firm structure; it does not take up the space that it is capable of taking. In chapter 4, I will address medfcal science’s inability (or unwillingness) to differentiate capacity from normalcy regarding sexual dysfunction. Here I’ll turn to a discussion of the way sexdlogy has responded to the limp, albeit willing, penis. Because Western notions of heterosexuality equate the occasion of an erection with the possibility of sexual intercourse, its absence represents the erosion of rriasculinity and, as a result, a crisis to be confronted for Western science. Before looking specifically at penises, however, it is important to review the History of modern sexology. I’ll do so by examining two works that examine the development and impact of modern sexology.
Janice Irvine traces the history of contemporary sexology in Disorders of Desire-? Beginning with the reports published by Alfred Kinsey, Irvine examines the evblution of sexual discourse around issues of normalcy and deviance. Despite unveiling the sexual variety apparent in the lives of midtwentieth-century Americans, Kinsey’s quantitative report sanctioned that which many already believed to be unalienable: that marital coitus was “[ s ]ocially the most important of all sexual activities because of its significance in the origin and maintenance of the home.”
Irvine describes how social scientists criticized Kinsey’s work for dismissing ethical, emotional, and contextual interpretations of sex. Be concentrating on the functional elements of sex to the exclusion of the relational, Kinsey fortified the position of science as the arbiter of issues pertaining to sex and sexuality. With regard to issues of national identity, Kinsey’s clalms of a universal “capacity” for homosexuality, “fueled the cultural panic! of the early 1950s.”24 At this time in American history, homosexuality was often conflated with communism in its supposed ability to undermine th9 family.
In large part because of the work of Masters and Johnson’ in the mid1960s through the early 1970s, Irvine pinpoints the emergence bf sexology’s status as a legitimate-albeit divided-profession. Beginning with Human Sexual Response in 1965 and continuing with Human Sexual 11adequacy in 1970, William Masters and Virginia Johnson established the “mechanics” of sexual normalcy in a way that America’s technologically focused citizenry was conditioned to accept. Corroborated by their “white coats” of officialdom in the pages of Newsweek, the duo of dysfunction established the ‘field’s credibility in the eyes of a public that, more and more, seemed to embrace “rigid scientism” as the method par excellence. Irvine explains how “a profession is most successful when it can reflect the dominant values of a society while simultaneously addressing public concerns”25 and that a market is established “only with the promise of simple and effective techniques and commodities that will ameliorate, if not solve, the presenting dilemma. “26 This emphasis on professionalism is important because it establishes how we come to accept knowledge. To rely on a sanctioned profession is to rely on its &tethods and techniques and, as a result, to become beholden to them. With sildenafil (Generic Viagra) (an accidental cure), Pfizer Pharmaceuticals has fulfilled-or has claimed to fulfill these criteria of “simple and effective.”
