In what I do expect will be my last post on erections for a long while, here’s my piece on Erectile Dysfunction and Sexual Connection at the Good Men Project.
Excerpt:
before we pop the little blue pill to make ourselves hard, we need to question what’s so “dysfunctional” about not being able to perform on command. We need to question our obsession with heterosexual intercourse, and broaden our understanding of what sex can be. We need to let go of the need to be hard and in control all the time.
Sex is not an athletic competition. We are participants in the creation of mutual pleasure, not solitary performers on a track or in a ring. And for a lot of us, the only way to really learn that lesson is to lose the one thing we were taught was indispensable.
And a great two-part response at Fannie’s Room to our Good Men Project MRA series. Here’s part one and part two.
I hate to charge in with TMI overmuch, but the blue pill has been the liberation of some pretty marginalized disabled straight (and perhaps queer but I wouldn’t know) male sexualities: diabetics, men with circulatory and connective tissue diseases, lupus, fibromyalgia, basically anything where blood and Chi don’t circulate freely. It’s akin to being a classical musician with a fussy period instrument, even the connoisseurs are only interested in Stradivari, and everyone else is getting down to rock. It is good to ask oneself what one intends to accomplish first, but the experience of a man who gets 1 date for every 100 women he asks (I am aware this is about average) and one relationship every couple of years is going to be different from a “babe magnet” and that of a visibly disabled man even more radically different.
You do realize that your students read this, right?
@Eurosabra, right at the beggining of the article he states “I’m not talking about men who have serious medical problems that make it impossible to get erections without pharmaceutical help”. Did you reat the artcile? Or did you judge his whole argument on the excerpt he gave?
I keep thinking that Hugo wants to join Robert Jensen in “exploring the feminist possibilities of impotence” and I don’t really think he wants any of us to get any exemptions from the failures of masculinity, the same way we are not given exemptions from masculinity. I read the article but couldn’t help thinking that the involuntary grace of illness-related impotence falls somewhere near the grace of involuntary solitude in his calculus, that men without erections are simply supposed to reform and purify themselves in thought, as nature precludes the deed. as men without (desired) heterosexual relationships and Nice Guys(tm) are supposed to do. An excessively Paulist view, but I’ve rarely gone wrong reading Hugo that way.
Eurosabra, not quite.
Bob Jensen, like many radical feminists, is troubled by intercourse itself. He’d rather we avoid PIV (or VOP) sex altogether, or at least make it rare, because of the capability it has to harm women and because of what it represents. I’m not in that camp (my views on that are here). Rather, the benefit of temporary impotence for me was to shift me from performer to participant and to expand my sexual repertoire so that I was more focused on mutual pleasure than on penetrative sex.
I’m not in the “only good penis is a soft one” camp (not that there are many in that camp, mind you.)
Men are so cute when they get their tightie whities in a bunch over their limp noodles. I’m of the “er–it’s probably soft for a reason–why don’t you give me some of the good stuff instead?” school of thought on this particular issue. There’s more to sex than constant pounding. That gets SO boring! If I wanted that up my hoop all the time I’d get a job breaking up concrete with one of those jackhammer thingies, thank you.
Of course, I’m not with the radfems, either. Fair’s fair. If he does a good job he should get off too. There’s just so much more to sex than THOSE thangs.
Jeez Louise. You had to offer up a link to a debate about Dworkin and Daly. And that MsSuckMyRadFemLemons person!! Should I go there?
Nah. I’ll leave Jim’s slightly-out-of-context interpretation of (mostly) Reconstruction Era lynchings alone, too. Even “Osiris Envy” and the Myth of the Well Endowed Black Male is probably too far off topic here.