A man is with his female partner; foreplay is going well.
It's time for more. But suddenly, a problem occurs.
She looks at him expecting him to increase his efforts, but nothing happens.
He has suffered what the French writer, Stendhal, termed, 'a fiasco'.
He feels ashamed and desperate.
He sees himself as a laughing stock, not quite a man, not fit for a relationship.
His partner is worried too.
She suspects he doesn't find her attractive anymore, never really loved her,
or is perhaps, deep down, gay.
If it happens repeatedly, she might start to wonder if they should even be together…
In a great many cases, the cause of impotence is not physical, but psychological;
and it isn't a lack of desire-- it's a mis-founded notion of respect.
The man, certainly, is turned on, but his desire is joined up with a fear.
He's worried, somewhere inside, that he's imposing something unwelcome and dirty
on a partner who couldn't really possibly want something so crude as much as he does.
Sex seems, somewhere in his unconscious, sinister and debased--
something one might share with an acquaintance one doesn't really know or respect much,
or can explore alone with a porn site.
But it wouldn't be fitting for a soulmate one properly loves.
After an entirely erroneous, but nevertheless, powerful sense of kindness and consideration
for the beloved's imagined feelings,
the man holds back from pursuing what he'd really like,
and takes early retirement for his own sexuality.
One of the most basic facts about the relationship between children and their parents
is that there is love, but can be no sex.
A young boy receives care, consideration, and tenderness from his mother,
but of course, nothing remotely sexual.
From this very sensible arrangement, one problematic idea is born.
The thought that a mother, and more broadly, women who are as lovable and admirable as she is
must be without sexual desire.
However naïve that sounds, that's how it can seem to a young boy who gets a lot of things wrong,
and whose attitudes have a surprising afterlife, even in the adult mind.
A mother may be witty, clever, and very attentive to a boy's needs,
but she doesn't, surely, have any libido.
This necessary and beautifully protective illusion is what can lead men to suspect
that the more a woman has a status akin to their mother, the less likely she is to be fully sexual.
The answer to this admittedly, hugely naïve, but properly distressing fear
is to reassure the impotent males' unconscious of a basic fact--
that of course his mother was a sexual being.
She, like almost all women, loved sex, probably had plenty of it, and even more in fantasy.
It was simply that out of care and consideration for her son, she didn't let on;
out of love, she tactfully made out:
she was, as it were, a virgin.
Rather than simply seeing impotence as a problem to be treated with pills,
we can recognize that it's primarily a condition to be addressed by an idea.
The thought that rough, crude, intense, unihibited sex isn't simply a low, demeaning activity
that men are interested in, and nice women aren't.
It's a hugely positive, psychologically enriching, and not at all sinister process that everyone,
male and female, benefits from.
The emotions around sexuality that seem so opposed to civilized, respectable life--
the ruthlessness, crudeness, and occasional moments of brutishness--
are not negative.
They are utterly compatible with kindness and love, more generally.
When impotence strikes, it may be time, in the nicest way
for the male unconscious to enter fully into adulthood,
and recognize and honor the plain truths of male, and female, sexuality.