Where can I find this bread

[metta 0]

The Greeks consumed aphrodisiacs that included nettles, chickpeas and crushed beetles...........

......... Medieval recipes were equally lip-smacking: the brains of male sparrows mixed with goat fat, roasted wolf's #######, rocket (which "stirreth up lust"), or bread that had been kneaded with a woman's buttocks.link

Whither went my manhood?

Last Updated: 12:01am BST 28/04/2007

Robert Douglas-Fairhurst reviews Impotence: a Cultural History by Angus McLaren

In the 1980s it was reported that in parts of West Africa enraged mobs had killed a number of "####### snatchers": witches who had been accused of leaving their victims as smooth between the legs as Action Man.

The Song of Love, 1914, by Giorgio de Chirico: the rubber glove is a Freudian symbol of impotence

The Song of Love, 1914, by Giorgio de Chirico: the rubber glove is a Freudian symbol of impotence

Like many stories involving impotence, it provoked winces of sympathy as well as comic sniggers, especially from men who recognised that in cultures where ideals of "manhood" were based more on sexual potency than on, say, being good at crosswords, "####### snatching" was more or less equivalent to "body snatching".

The sad truth that emerges from Angus McLaren's cultural history of impotence is that this amounts to just about every Western culture since the Ancient Greeks. Impotence may have produced a far richer vocabulary than headaches or piles - pillock, fumbler, bungler, and dozens more - but when it comes to explaining why they have no lead in their pencils, men's creative energies have usually been diverted in a single direction: finding someone else to blame.

Early witch hunters in Europe warned how easily simple spells could cause impotence in otherwise virile men. By the Renaissance, these causes had expanded to include idleness, abstinence and over-soft beds.

Victorian men, while fretting over whether their vital juices had been drained by masturbation, could also comfort themselves with the thought that modern life itself was responsible, with its stresses, strains and "the constant jarring of railway trains".

Freud located impotence in the lingering ghosts of infantile desires, while more recently the focus has drifted back to the body, the new label "erectile dysfunction" suggesting that it is just a local and easily fixed engineering problem, like faulty hydraulics in a plane's landing-gear.

Along with its supposed causes, cures for impotence have largely followed the fashions of the day. The Greeks consumed aphrodisiacs that included nettles, chickpeas and crushed beetles, while according to Ovid the "right molar of a small crocodile worn as an amulet guarantees erection in men". Medieval recipes were equally lip-smacking: the brains of male sparrows mixed with goat fat, roasted wolf's #######, rocket (which "stirreth up lust"), or bread that had been kneaded with a woman's buttocks.

By the end of the 17th century, doctors were advising their patients to bathe their testicles in vinegar "until they cabbage" (ie grow), although, given that the patient would have had an equally good chance of turning his testicles into cabbages, it is difficult to know whether such advice was offered in good faith or simply to scam the desperate.

The same is true of Victorian doctors who prescribed electric belts combined with "Restorative Powders and Seminal Replenisher", or later medical interventions that tested the patient's nerve and wallet in about equal measure: circumcision, injections of monkey glands, testicle transplants, vacuum pumps, silicon rods and finally what McLaren nicely calls the "hard sell" of Viagra.

Given the battering that men's genitals and egos have taken over the years, all supposedly in the service of sexual pleasure, the wonder is that anyone would confess to having a problem at all.

For McLaren the answer is simple: "impotence" is less a medical condition than a set of ideas that different cultures have turned in different directions. Like other aspects of sex - orgasm or masturbation - which have been investigated since Michel Foucault's influential History of Sexuality, impotence reveals how changeable our ideas about sex and masculinity are.

That's the theory, anyway, although like many cultural historians McLaren isn't always good at taking his own advice.

It is odd, for example, to be told that "Determining the sexual feelings of the 'typical' 19th-century male is, of course, impossible" so soon after we have been blithely informed that "the Greeks believed a dainty ####### was not only more attractive but more serviceable" and that "the Romans, however, preferred big penises", as if the ancients were any less complex in their sexual feelings than our more recent ancestors.

This is a fact-packed and fascinating piece of research, so it is a pity that McLaren's determination to show how "impotence" has changed over time sometimes threatens to turn his study into little more than a form of Foucault Lite.

Actually, much of the evidence assembled here suggests that, when sex fails to rear its head, depressingly little has changed in the past 2,000 years.

Men still assume that they cannot be proper men unless they can sustain a proper erection. Women are still routinely accused of failing to excite them, or threatening their masculinity, or otherwise being unable to fulfil men's expectations. Both are still subject to advertising designed to persuade them that love is inseparable from the worship of what one Playboy editorial, whooping triumphantly over the invention of Viagra, referred to as "the great god #######".

Faced with that sort of pressure, it is difficult to get to the end of this study without feeling increasingly sympathetic towards the Victorian wife who, "when her husband was in the midst of his sexual attempts... frequently essayed to divert her mind by reading, asking him from time to time if he were through".

[JayJay 4]

Oooh it's even better now - they've got it down to two letters. E.D.

I think it's pretty crazy how every modern disease has been reduced to the letters of the words making up it's name.

"I have E.D."

It's a bit like saying: "I have B.H.D. Syndrome".

That would be short for "Bad Hair Day" Syndrome. The roots of the problem, in both cases, ought to be looked into more carefully rather than lumping them in a nice little two or three letter "condition".

This whole ####### argument is quite interesting, mostly because it really doesn't make as much difference as men seem to think when it comes to going to bed with a woman...