Marketing Manhood

 I was moved, over 40 years ago, to commence the PhD which eventually turned into my first book, Hidden Anxieties: Male Sexuality 1900-1950, on discovering, initially via the letters from men received by Marie Stopes, how very less than confident in their own sexuality (how, indeed, uncocksure, if one might say so) numerous men were, at a period when men are popularly supposed to have been a rather more robust generation. 

This led down into rabbitholes of Victorian, Edwardian, and twentieth-century sexual quackery that have caused me, upon reading these articles ‘They’ve invented a spurious pseudo-disease’: why are so many men being told they have low testosterone? and The Growing Quest for Penis Enlargements to remark to myself that these are not new phenomena of modern C21st life but simply the latest iteration of something with a much longer history. Making money from worried men.

The Victorians (and indeed, pre-Victorians) were told that the threat to their manhood was masturbation, or if not deliberate self-abuse, involuntary seminal emissions. I have previously blogged apropos about the resurgence of similar themes in the 'No Fap' movement.

Quack pills and other patent devices were promoted as the remedy for debilitated men: Harness's Electropathic Belts, we observe, were as good for 'weak men' as for 'delicate women'.

Serge Voronoff put into practice his theories about implanting animal testicles in men to rejuvenate them - 'monkey-glands' became a theme in popular culture of the 1920s and 30s. However the results did not live up to the promises touted, except, possibly, via the placebo effect.

This is usually considered to be the reason for any benefits W. B. Yeats experienced from the Steinach operation (unilateral vasectomy) performed for rejuvenation purposes by Dr Norman Haire.

My attention has also been drawn to Vita Radium Suppositories for 'Weak Discouraged Men!'. (Not convinced that these would have actually contained any radium.)

But besides these fashionable 'cures' drawing on what appeared to be the latest cutting-edge scientific discoveries, the good old fashioned pills 'calculated to cure lassitude and debility', which were sent to Lord Peter Wimsey (and in this case, would have ended lassitude and debility for good and all: Gaudy Night, Ch 19) continued in surreptitious circulation. Also contraptions such as the Blakoe Ring.

Nor should the 'muscles-maxxing' pioneers Eugen Sandow and Bernarr Macfadden be left out of the story of male striving for self-improvement.

Fortunes have clearly been made, and are still being made, from these concerns.