Bonk (16 page)

You may well be wondering why a neutered dog would need prosthetic testicles. A vet quoted on the Neuticles Web site says the product “helps the pet’s self esteem.” I called Neuticles founder Gregg Miller to chat about the surprising notion of pet self-esteem. He talked about the day his bloodhound Buck was neutered. “I’ll never forget it. He had just come home from the vet. He woke up. He went to clean himself, he looked down, and he looked back up at me. He
knew
they were missing. He was depressed for days.” Miller concedes that Neuticles’s healthy sales figures (157,000 pairs sold worldwide) may have more to do with male pet owners’ hang-ups than with pets’—a fact supported by the not infrequent attempts to order Larges for, say, a beagle.

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s far as I’ve been able to ascertain, the earliest genitalia pushers were the Chinese. (In this case, the gonad tissue wasn’t grafted, but dried and made into pills or potions.) The
Chinese Materia Medica
of 1597, by the naturalist Li Shih-chen, promotes the penises of dogs, wild cats, and otters as treatments for impotence. Certain types of otters are deemed more effective than others: “In hunting for them women in spring go into the wilds in groups and the otter getting their scent jump upon them and cannot be removed except by throttling them to death. The penis of such an animal is considered very valuable.” I had assumed that this was because the behavior denoted exceptional bravery and virility, or possibly because the throttling produced an impressive erection, but then I had to revise my theories, for Li concludes his entry with the following enigmatic fact: “The penis of an animal found dead clinging to a tree trunk is most costly.” It’s possible Li’s grasp of otter biology was patchy. The freshwater otter, he writes, “is always male, and…it cohabitates with the gibbon.”

Tiger penis as a cure for flagging libido is a more recent addition to the Chinese pharmacopoeia. A 1993 report by the animal rights watchdog group Earthtrust describes a restaurant in Taichung, Taiwan, selling tiger penis soup to male diners for $320 a serving. (One penis makes soup for eight, the head waitress helpfully told a foreign television reporter.) However, there is no listing for tiger penis in the
Chinese Materia Medica
. Medicinal uses for the tiger’s bones, flesh, fat, blood, stomach, testes (for scrofula), bile, eyeball, nose, teeth, claws, skin, whiskers, feces, and bones in the feces are listed, but none for the penis. Likewise, rhino horn
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is listed as an antidote for typhoid, headache, carbuncles, “boils full of pus,” and “the evil miasma of hill streams,” but not impotence.

It is interesting to note that tiger penis is often taken in a potent wine, or brandy, which in and of itself might do the trick, should the man be suffering from simple performance anxiety. “Just prior to sex,” states the Earthtrust memo, “the consumer takes a slug.” It’s clear I’ve been spending too much time with the
Materia Medica
, for upon first reading this, I pictured a man taking a garden slug as he might an aspirin. (Not entirely far-fetched: the sluglike sea cucumber, like almost every other penis-shaped creature on the planet, is rumored to be an aphrodisiac.)
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Personally, I’d start with a prescription attributed to Aristotle. Seemingly under the sway of some ancient Gamebird Advisory Board, the author begins his list of potency restoratives with “pheasants, woodcocks, gnatsappers, thrushes, black-birds, young pigeons, sparrows, partridges, capons.” The fowl eventually yield the stage to the chief “provokers” of erection: “watercresses, parsnips, artichokes, turnips, asparagus, candied ginger, acorns, scallions, shell fish,” all to be used “for a considerable time.” At some point, their efficacy probably became moot, as the men grew obese and sex began to take a back seat to the next shipment of gnatsappers.

d
r. Hsu has a friend who owns a traditional Chinese medicine shop in Taipei, and he kindly agreed to take me on a field trip there. No gonads were for sale, and just one variety of penis: that of the deer. It looked like an antler, but Dr. Hsu was insistent. “Deer penis,” he kept saying, as though dictating a letter. The proprietor would disappear into the back room and return with a stack of lidded cardboard boxes, like the shoe salesmen of my youth. Seahorses, fossilized oysters, antler chips, dinosaur teeth (“Just because they’re hard,” sniffed Dr. Hsu). The last remedy the proprietor brought down was a bundle of dried leaves stacked like bills and tied with red cord. “Goat eat this leaf, mating one hundred times in a day,” Dr. Hsu translated for me. The proprietor handed the sheaf to me.

“Thank you,” I said. “But I don’t really need any.” I turned to Dr. Hsu. “Would you explain to him that I’m just doing research?”

A jolly-looking man browsing in the store walked over and joined our group. “You should ask for Emperor’s Formula,” he said. Dr. Hsu explained that an emperor during the Chin Dynasty, seeking to cure his impotence
or perhaps just doing research
, dispatched four hundred young men and women to an isolated island and instructed them to “try all the leaves and have fun!” The man and Dr. Hsu exchanged a few words in Chinese. The man looked at me, smiling.

“I’m just doing research.”

d
r. Hsu spent the drive back making sure I understood the limits of traditional Chinese medicines for erectile dysfunction. “Any formula,” he said, “is not better than Viagra.”

Viagra has an interesting history here in Taiwan. (And an interesting name: Ver Er Gang has been translated for me, variously, as “powerful and hard,” “firm and strong like steel,” and, my favorite, “steep and hot.”) The week before the pill was to formally go on sale—as opposed to informally, on the black market, where it had been selling briskly for some time—women’s rights activists took to the streets of Taipei, protesting its release. “Viagra has destroyed harmony at home and caused extra-marital affairs because wives cannot satisfy their husbands’ sexual demands,” one women’s health advocate was quoted as saying in Malaysia’s
Sunday Sun
. A gynecologist at Taiwan Adventist Hospital, where Dr. Hsu works, was also quoted, urging doctors not to prescribe the drug until they’ve been shown “written approval” from patients’ wives.

I later learned that Viagra’s release Stateside prompted a similar outcry from a faction of American women. Meika Loe, author of
The Rise of Viagra,
quotes five or six letters to Ann Landers. The sentiment runs more or less along the lines of No Name in Abilene, Kansas: “Please tell those smart-aleck scientists and those big drug companies to work on a cure for cancer and quit ruining the lives of millions of women who have earned a rest.” Though Landers replied that these women represented a small percentage of her Viagra mail, the letters suggest that a little therapy tossed into the mix might not be a bad idea.

Of course, Pfizer Taiwan sailed ahead anyway. Its profits here and in mainland China have been, as they say, steep and hot. Perhaps the only locality where Viagra has proved a disappointment is the Wolong Nature Reserve in Sichuan Province. Wolong is home to part of China’s dwindling panda population, as well as a group of captive pandas in a breeding research facility. Pandas have trouble reproducing in captivity. Some researchers describe it as a libido issue; some 60 percent of captive pandas show no interest in mating. Others seem to think that the males have erectile deficiencies, for in 2002, a middle-aged panda named Zhuang Zhuang was dosed with Viagra. “No result on him at all,” the BBC quoted Wolong deputy director Wang Pengyan as saying.

Wolong researcher Guo Feng, also quoted in the BBC piece, took issue with his colleague. “You can’t say Viagra has no results on pandas. That panda basically has no capability. In the last few years, we’ve given Zhuang Zhuang many chances but he simply can’t do it.”

It was unfair to single out Zhuang Zhuang, for male pandas in general are bumbling lovers. “The male giant pandas do not know where to put it,” a zoologist named Chen is quoted as saying in
Inside China Today
. “Sometimes they climb on the females’ heads and start pushing.” Seeking to enlighten clueless male pandas, Wolong staff set about making an instructional video, which the media gleefully dubbed “panda porn.” The BBC even referred to the footage as “explicit,” though given the animal’s thick fur and diminutive penis
*
—erect, about as big as a man’s thumb—it’s hard to imagine that the pandas were able to glean much detail from the tapes. Likely more of a This End Up sort of deal. The staff tersely reported “improvement.”

p
andas aren’t the only ones for whom Viagra doesn’t do the trick. About a fourth of the men who try it continue to have trouble getting hard. What’s to be tried, short of a trip to Dr. Hsu’s operating room? A few things. One can inject erection-producing drugs directly into one’s corpora cavernosa, if one is the sort who takes kindly to sticking needles deep into one’s penis. The injections prompt a speedy, impressive boner that typically lasts a couple of hours. Less typically it lasts a lot longer, transforming its owner from Hercules to Priapus
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and requiring an awkward visit to the emergency room. A newer, kinder, gentler way to deliver these drugs is via a urethral suppository known as MUSE (Medicated Urethral System for Erection).

And then there is the vacuum constriction device, a.k.a. the penis pump. This consists of a plastic tube, into which one puts one’s flaccid penis, and a pump that pulls the air out of the tube. The resulting vacuum effect sucks blood into the organ, which is then trapped there by a constrictor ring. The penis pump was invented by a tire professional named Geddings Osbon, whose own frequent flats drove him to get creative with the company pneumatics.

As an indication of how thoroughly Viagra has deflated Osbon ErecAid company profits, witness the sad slogan “Make Your Second Choice Your Final Choice.” One journal review from last year stated that penis pumps are suggested “mainly to elderly patients with occasional intercourse attempts.”

Further along the fringes, there is acupuncture. While I was visiting, Dr. Hsu introduced me to a man who treats erectile disorders—though mainly premature ejaculation—with acupuncture. Hsu said 44 percent of men treated with acupuncture report improvement. This is less impressive than it sounds, as 38 percent will report improvement if you give them a placebo treatment.

Acupuncture for impotence is more common on the agricultural scene. “Typically one treatment…with the moxa-needle technique is sufficient for impotence,” writes the author of a paper on treating “overused” bull studs. Though it was not altogether clear whose impotence was being referenced—the bull or the man kicked in the balls by the bull as he tries to stick needles in its pizzle.

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he simplest, safest, cheapest treatment put forth for erectile dysfunction is to strengthen one’s pelvic floor muscles. The late gynecologist Arnold Kegel was the first to discover the beneficial effects of pelvic floor muscle toning. Initially, Kegel’s exercises were viewed strictly as a boon for women.
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They helped reverse incontinence, and they helped women have more—and/or more intense—orgasms. Kegel promptly dubbed them Kegel exercises and went on the road to promote them, inextricably linking himself to pelvic clenching and ensuring an obituary that would gloss over all other salient aspects of his career.

In 2005, a group of professors at the University of the West of England reported in
BJU International
(
British Journal of Urology
) that Kegel exercises could cure erectile dysfunction. After three months of twice-daily Kegeling sessions, a group of impotent men showed significant improvement as compared with a control group. An “independent blind assessment”—the logistics of which I cannot begin to contemplate—determined that 40 percent of the impotent men, compared with controls, had regained normal erectile function. In a further 35 percent, the condition had improved. The paper points out that Kegel exercises were more effective in the younger study subjects, subjects whose erectile dysfunction was less likely to stem from the usual band of brigands: diabetes, atherosclerosis, fibrosis.

Impressed and curious, I sent away for the instructional video referenced in the paper, which was produced by Grace Dorey, one of the paper’s authors, and a physiotherapist named Kevin Foreman. The video begins with an introduction by Dr. Foreman (who has a Ph.D., not an M.D.). He wears a peach-colored tie and sits against a backdrop of a plain curtain. Neither his chair nor the table he sits at can be seen. Not even a lone potted plant has been recruited to share the frame with Dr. Foreman and his tie. The colors are garishly distorted, so that Dr. Foreman is the pink of an Easter ham.

Dr. Foreman explains that one pair of pelvic floor muscles runs along the sides of the penis like guy wires and helps hold it erect. Another pelvic floor muscle encircles the penis and, when tightened, puts pressure on the dorsal vein and helps trap blood inside the penis. Toning these muscles should, in theory, help men have firmer, longer-lasting erections.

The how-to portion of the video starts innocently enough, with anatomical drawings on a sketch pad. Viewers are instructed to simultaneously squeeze as if pretending to stop the flow of urine and “tighten the back passage as if to prevent wind escaping.” I recognize this particular euphemistic phrasing from one of Ms. Dorey’s patient instruction booklets (a list of which she had emailed me):
Prevent It! A Guide for Men and Women with Leakage from the Back Passage.

Abruptly, the scene shifts to a man’s naked hips on a rumpled white sheet. He lies on his back, knees up, thighs spread, back passage clearly visible. Understandably, the man’s face is out of the frame. A catalogue description of the video states that the exercises are demonstrated by “a male model,” but I suspect it’s Foreman. A budget so small that it cannot accommodate a potted plant does not easily accommodate modeling fees. Though I could easily be wrong. I could be talking out of my back passage.