Lust, Impotence, Porn

When I lost my libido I knew it immediately. Not that there were physiological warnings beforehand. There were none. I had been going about as frisky as ever; I hadn't been more tired at the end of the day. No, the first time it was a classic unexpected fiasco, as Stendhal called it. Suddenly sensation was gone; emphatically absent.

Still, what is one fiasco? When my husband and I were young and early in the habit of love-making, when I was unused to regular orgasms, I used to miss often. This thought-that I had a past of uneven accomplishment-didn't occur to me until after the second fiasco. After a long lag, a second failure followed the first: the next time we tried to make love. After the second time I was eager for explanations and solace. In recent years I had never missed an orgasm twice in a row. That shouldn't sound boastful: it certainly didn't when I groaned to myself, over and over, "I've never missed an orgasm twice in a row." Orgasm had become a matter of almost unconscious planning. If I'm not interested-if I'm seriously fatigued or angry or simply not in the mood (rather than just wound up)-we don't try. When you're long married and long-bedded, small nonverbal signs go a long way.

Q-I'll call him Q-gives off his own silent signs as well. Some nights when I am feeling a little keen I'll find him watching a late movie instead of coming to bed; and since he knows I need a lot of sleep, that's a sign he wouldn't be interested. Mutual forbearance-unless we are both fairly sure of success-goes far to explain why 1 have lovely sex with my husband. Not to make a fetish of orgasm, but it had been a fact of our midlife. The intensity varied, but it was firmly there. My libido had long felt as much a piece of my identity as the color of my eyes.

The second time I was worried. (The first time I simply fell asleep right away, tuckered out.) A list of possible causes emerged. There are days in any ambitious, involved life when ego-centered obstacles to pleasure mount up too high to leap over. No, I wasn't angry at Q. If he had made me mad, we wouldn't have been trying to make love at all. No, I wasn't especially distracted, although my day had contained an editor's letter refusing a submission. Sensitive to my own moods, I feel capable of knowing when the total jangle of the day has gotten so chaotic that it's absurd to pursue any goal but sleep.

No, my day had not been stressful enough to serve as an explanation, no matter how darkly I retold its accumulated frustrations. We had alleviated a lot of them in the debriefing session that Q and I often held while driving home from work. Years ago we set up the habit of venting. I was then working for the haughtiest university in the world and Q was dealing with his own institutional malice. As soon as we get into the car, whoever is in higher dudgeon goes first. By the end of the session we have almost invariably located the enemies and hung them by their thumbs. That doesn't necessarily mean we are calm enough afterward to manage sex. I see this turning into a commentary about labor under capitalism. Sex and work- or rather, impotence and the conditions of work-are subtly connected. (This might partly explain why the level of impotence in this country appears to be rising, especially among the young.)

This time, the second time, the failure was, starkly and utterly, mine. It was as though my body had been anesthetized, but only from the waist down. Sudden muscular tugs, gone. The slowly cumulating energy for sex, gone. Even the basic daily comfort of crossed legs-which I had complacently assumed would accompany me through life with or without Q-gone! Sensation didn't come back the next day, or the next, or the next.... There was no sign that it might ever return.

So here was my body benumbed, for no reason I could guess. That your body has failed is perhaps the least-wanted conclusion in the explanatory repertory-worse for me than the idea of my mind in trouble. I would then have preferred to be depressed or angry rather than physically ill. Perhaps it's because "the body" is so rarely uninfluenced by the mind that the idea of its having a life on its own is terrifying. My mind-body wanted to make love. I had never needed to know how much. When my body refused to perform in its wonted way, it threatened "me" the way illness or craziness might do. I failed to be me.

What saved our marriage early on, before I got the knack, was that Q either didn't notice that I wasn't coming very often, or else he expected it, as what girls were like. One sensational orgasm that he had provided long before we thought about marrying had reassured me that I was competent and heterosexual, and I just hung in there, waiting. That was fortunate, since after around 1,000 couplings I got into the habit. I could accomplish at worst a modest basic orgasm. We had floated on confidence-along with patience and delay-ever since. Over the years being able to count on orgasm has been another reward for getting older together. Obviously no one changes a winning formula much. My sensitivity, once aroused by the raptures of the missionary position, stayed virginally astounded by the same old same old. This has had the unexpected benefit of stretching our simple pleasures over many years, with only serendipitous minute variations. It still feels vanilla, but that's a contented Puritans estimation. I can't know, because not even my closest friends discuss such things. I am no longer astonished by the idea that physiological compatibility can deepen over time. (I choose anonymity, in fact, not least to preclude becoming notorious for this marital-progress narrative.) Success in long-term monogamous relationships must actually be quite common. It is first-time lovers at any age who are ignorant about the mind-body of the particular other: particular sensitivities, tastes, dislikes; not to mention deeper apprehensions and phobias. And boys are encouraged to be selfish, ignorant, awkward. First times must be relatively dreadful, and any culture that idolizes them-as ours does-shows its fundamental Puritanism and youth-centeredness. Cultures truly interested in pleasure don't romanticize inexperience. But we aren't told any of this often enough, so the cliché that passion declines is harmfully fixed in people's minds.