Was it because of today's St Valentine's celebrations that there has been an avalanche of email advertisements for virility enhancers recently: "hotties love megaschlongs," "add inches so she moans for more," etc? After all, we live in a society in which sex and love have become virtually interchangeable, as expressions like love-rat or love-cheat suggest; while even lovemaking now means "having" sex.
Or is an obsession with male potency an expression of some deeper discomfort? In a highly sexualised society such as ours, it is inevitable that the worst thing a man can imagine is loss of potency. The market is crowded with products designed to combat erectile dysfunction, and many more that prey on the male fear of this ultimate catastrophe. Impotence, it seems, robs a man of his most cherished characteristic, his ability to "perform". (In our sexual division of labour, of course, women are preyed upon by those who promise to help them defy the effects of time, renew their skin, eliminate "tell-tale" wrinkles, drink the elixirs of youth, as a last resort, repair through surgery the ravages of the years.)
The primordial importance of "potency" reflects what "developed" societies claim to know: that sex drives virtually all human relationships. Sex has ceased to be a matter of "private life"; sex is something people feel obliged to "get", conspicuously, in the same way that they get an income. Without it we are sex-starved, just as the inhabitants of the desolate places of the earth perish from hunger. Sex resembles money, in that the quest for it is inexhaustible; like money no one can ever have too much; and no one knows what constitutes "enough".
If there is such emphasis on male sexual power, this serves perhaps to deflect attention from all the other areas of our experience characterised by powerlessness. People speak constantly of their social and political impotence. Who is going to listen to me, who cares what I think, or, in the face of gross and inadmissible evils, gun-crime, drugs or violence - what can I do about it? Yet this form of inadequacy does not elicit the same horror as sexual debility. Our incapacity to influence the social and economic circumstances of our own lives ought, it might be argued, to be a matter of the gravest consequence. Instead, this is the object of a fatalistic acceptance: participation rates (pdf) in elections, news programmes elicit declining interest, newspapers decrease their coverage of world news, and people fall into "apathy". This apathy is, however, not the moral failing it is sometimes described as. It is a measure of our impaired ability to influence our destiny.
This form of depowerment has become more intense in an age of globalisation, centralisation of power, inaccessible bureaucracies, the separations of citizen and state; the distance between consumer and producer, the culture of clientism, and above all, of market-dependency: the principal agent of our apparent enfranchisement turns out to be yet another instrument for disabling human potential. Our powers leach away under the growing influence of a buy-in culture; and money assumes the power we have lost.
This context of political and social powerlessness gives sexual potency a primordial role. Virility, machismo, possession of cojones - these are compensatory, a displacement from our helplessness in so many other aspects of our life. Sexual potency serves as consolation for other, vanished competences. Sex is expected to yield satisfactions it cannot: fulfilment, completeness, transcendence, salvation. Most cultures have furnished other outlets for needs that ours has permitted to lapse. The capacity for collective commitment to social improvement, radical change, bettering the world has been annulled; and the future is inscribed deterministically in the present. All we can expect is more, much more, of what already exists: no wonder sexual power must provide consolations for other, forfeited energies.
Since we regard sexual self-expression as the highest attainable goal, we have readily viewed Islamic zealots as motivated by sexual frustration; as though societies in which sexual self-expression is regarded as the highest goal were not scarred by sexual crime, rape, paedophilia and acts of excruciating sex-driven violence. Sexual impotence is the worst thing that can happen to a man only in a society in which almost every other avenue of power is closed - except, of course, the tyranny of domestic violence against women and children and bullying at work.
It requires only a limited appreciation of other cultures to perceive that many have been, and remain, capable of providing rich and complex lives for their peoples without sanctifying sex. Those that have made a virtue of abstinence - Hindus, for example, who regarded the conservation of semen as a source of both moral and physical strength - are not failed societies, just as lifting taboos on sexual continence has not necessarily liberated those who have preached it. Sexual abstention may also be a powerful generator of other energies, not all of them negative, as some who have renounced sex for spiritual reasons attest.
Belief in the maintenance of sexual potency at all costs is also an aspect of our reluctance to acknowledge the benefits which time brings as well as the well-rehearsed losses. If sexual desire weakens; if men have greater difficulty in "getting it up"; if this is a sign of feebleness and shame, it could also be accompanied - but rarely is - by an accrual of powers in other areas of life. Whatever happened to wisdom? What is wrong with detachment? Why devalue the joys of relationships that have ripened rather than cooled? Why not cultivate friendships that have endured? Why not delight in the beauty of a new generation without arousal or the longings of spent desire?
Above all, why not recover all the other powers that have failed us or been squandered, the elided potencies - belief in our ability to control our collective destiny, the enabling power of shared dedication to peace or social justice, which can never be attained by individuals alone, but only by pooling of our energies in the interest of some larger, more generous undertaking?
Sexual impotence is a small disadvantage compared with the vast depowerings of our scattered and diffuse individualisms. St Valentine's Day, a celebration of love, becomes, in this context, just another occasion for what is a continuous festival of market-driven, disabling sex.
