emmanuel reynaud holy virility the social construction of masculinity

state of excitement. Woman is no more ready to make love at
any hour of day or night than man― but she is generally
considered to be so. Her impotence is traditionally ignored; and
she is usually 'treated' with vaseline, butter or saliva, and more
or less by force. Modern sexologists have not let tradition down;
for example, Masters and Johnson assert:
«If anatomical anomalies such as vaginal agenesis or
an imperforate hymen are exempted and the
psychological disfunction of vaginismus is
discounted, it could be said provocatively that there
has never been an impotent woman. Woman need
only make herself available to accomplish coital
connection or even to propagate the race. Legions of
women conceive and raise families without ever
experiencing orgasm and carry coition to the point of
male ejaculation with little physical effort and no
personal, reactive involvement. During coition woman
has only to fie still to be physically potent. While this
role of total passivity is no longer an acceptable
psychological approach to sexual encounter in view
of current cultural demand for active female
participation, it is still an irrevocable physiological
fact that woman need only lie still to be potent.» [1]
It is difficult to see what concept is no longer an acceptable
psychological approach when medical science considers it an
'irrevocable' fact that woman expresses her desire
physiologically the minute she is on her back . . .
[60 / Holy virility]
Man: impotent or frigid?
Sexologists generally disguise the logic underlying their
theories by playing on words: in this way they associate what
they call vaginal 'lubrication' difficulties with frigidity (which is
often given the more medical name of 'orgasmic malfunction').
But why 'lubricate' if one does not anticipate any pleasure in
being penetrated? The lack of logic is apparent. The sexologists
do not define the same problem in man, the difficulty in having
an erection, as also being frigidity (or an orgasmic malfunction):
they call it 'impotence'. And yet the term frigidity would be much
more appropriate to describe the male sexual problem. Always
running after his 'potency', man thinks so little οf his pleasure
that, whatever happens to his penis, he often misses out
completely on his own orgasm. As the writer Christiane
Rochefort eloquently states: «it is he who, at the end of the day,