Redundant Discourse of Desire: Performance, Performance, Performance

Cool support for the male worthiness trap that corresponds with the female beauty trap from Susan Bordo's 1999 The Male Body: A New Look at Men in Public and in Private. In ruminations on men's perhaps whistling-past-the-graveyard bravado about their cocks in the face of all-too-common flacidy she says

Look at Viagra -- not the drug itself but the way men (both users and doctors talk about it: performance, performance, performance. I haven't yet read one account in the newspapers or magazines in which a man talks about any increase in pleasure, either psychological or physical -- beyond overwhelming relief, perhaps renewed pride. It's harder. It's firmer. It can go all night. New York urologist Steven Lam describes one fifty-two-year-old patient (whose anxiety seems not at all unique, based on what I've read) who wanted Viagra as "insurance" in his relationship with a twenty-four-year-old woman. The man inquired at the same time, about a drug to deal with his baldness.

I mention baldness because I find it highly instructive. Although critics of the double standard rightly point to the unfairness of insurance companies paying for Viagra but not birth control for women, a more exact analogy is probably not with birth control pills but diet pills. ... Viagra for men, like diet pills and cosmetic surgery for women, is not about restoring reproductive function -- or even, to hear men talk, about restoring sexual pleasure -- but about meeting and keeping up with the cultural standards and expectations of masculinity and femininity.

Susan Bordo's The Male Body: A New Look at Men in Public and in Private, pg 42-43

You could kind of knock me over with that one. I've mentioned earlier Melissa Fine's concept of the Missing Discourse of Desire, wherein sex for women is articulated in terms of danger, accommodation, exploitation, reproduction, satisfaction of their partners, and so on but never in terms of her sexual pleasure. How odd, then, and yet how completely telling to find a similar gap in men's discourse. Because, seriously, if our criteria for successful sex is... well... successful sex rather than *enjoyable* sex then Holy Guacamole *no wonder* so much about our sexuality is hard to make sense of.

But what really gets me is how ingrained that grammar of worthiness comes through... of achievement ("achieving orgasm" anyone?)... of performance... of "getting" someone into bed, of "getting lucky," of proving yourself, of demonstrating to one's partner and one's self that one has the "prowess" to satisfy her... where the word "impress" might serve as well as the word "satisfy."

I dunno. Seems like there are some other words we might learn to use when we have sex, words like explore, respond, remember, anticipate, hold, taste, press, learn, ask, experience, share, signal, relate, quiver, melt, fountain, and -- that most forbidden word of all, evidently -- enjoy.

If you just want to impress a partner, though, there are probably better methods.

[Caveat: Once again photo behind the fold isn't very work safe. --fl]

[Also note: Professor Schwyzer has a closely related post, about the same book no less, called Shame, mystery, and vulnerability: a very long post about the penis and the longing for acceptance. --fl]