Erectile Dysfunction

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resulted in the French Revolution." The outcome for Dole was less dire, though perhaps not much more dignified: He became the butt of comedians' jokes and scored a cameo in a Pepsi commercial in which the World War II vet and prostate-cancer survivor ostensibly became aroused while watching a Britney Spears video.

("Easy boy," he counseled a barking dog in the ad).

The ambivalent response to Dole was and is telling: "Western culture," writes McLaren, a history professor at Canada's University of Victoria, "has simultaneously regarded impotence as life's greatest tragedy and life's greatest joke." In discussing impotence from Roman times (when a hard man was good to find, regardless of the object of his affections) to the Middle Ages (when Church officials would order suspect husbands to perform in front of clergy) to our current era of little blue pills (whose furious rise in sales has already started to decline), McLaren has written a path-breaking history of masculinity.

Where previous scholars have generally understood "maleness" as "natural," he stresses that it has often been explicitly tied to sexual capacity.

Hence, men's centuries-long anxiety about sexual failure - and a quickness to blame any performance issues on women, who, when...

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