Bibliography

[the_lady_lily]

Impotence: A Cultural History - Angus McLaren

The New Yorker did a literary review article a while back about books which looked at impotence and other such things, and being me, I thought a lot of them looked jolly interesting, and worth having a look at.

I have to say that McLaren suffers from that universal problem of the historical overview work, which is 'let's start in antiquity and work up to the period I actually want to say something about'. This meant the first chapter was rather winceworthy for me, the professional classicist - McLaren had obviously read around the literature and got a feel for what was going on, but his use of sources was totally pell-mell and chronologically problematic - I can't imagine anyone within the field letting him get away with that kind of source analysis. So that put me on my guard a bit, which was probably a good thing on the chapter on medieval Europe, which suffered the same kind of gleefully hopping about sources for the sake of trying to do an extensive chronological survey.

McLaren became much more sure-footed when the time spans each chapter was trying to consider got shorter, about a decade or so, in the second half of the book. This looked at modern concepts of impotence, the battle between the 'sex therapists' who put this down to psychological issues and the 'medical' end who want to treat it as a purely physiological problem that can be solved with the right dose of chemicals. The final chapter is a very insightful treatment of Viagra, which ties together all the threads from the more modern period that the book covers very insightfully.

The general ideas of how society has constructed impotence (and, conversely, what a healthy sex life should look like) and how impotence plays into the construction of masculinity is very interesting, and very sound for the later chapters. But it's the first chapters that let the book down, the ones that try to make cultural history sound serious by nodding to the ancients, which is just bloody irritating if you are me. Also irritating is McLaren's way of talking about 'feminist' scholarship as if it is somehow a bad thing, when his whole approach to the topic of impotence would have been impossible without it. Grrr.

Interesting, but don't put yourself out to get your hands on it.

Comments

[friend-of-tofu.livejournal.com]

That sounds potentially interesting but far too annoying. Does he actually mention the Ancient Near East (with it's extensive literature on impotency) at all, or is it the usual thing of "antiquity=classical"? I don't know if it's better or worse for it to be ignored than got wrong.

[the-lady-lily.livejournal.com]

No, he's very much interested in focusing on the West, and his concluding pages make it clear that he knows he's left out a massive chunk of stuff, and someone should really do a global synthesis, but he knows his limits. So at least he acknowledges it, which it something.

[friend-of-tofu.livejournal.com]

Fair enough, if he acknowledges that. I do think that leaving stuff like the sha-zi-ga incantations out of a cultural history of impotence is a bit like leaving, I dunno, John the Baptist out of the life of Jesus, though.

[the-lady-lily.livejournal.com]

Well, as I say it's quite clear that he should have focused on the Western twentieth century, but I can see the publisher's demands driving the rest of it.