In Wang Shuo's 1989 novel Playing for Thrills, which is set in the late 1980s, one character makes a joke about the use of aphrodisiacs, to which another replies that “now that our Chinese citizens are leading better lives, male virility has suffered.”Footnote 1 This observation captures, in a nutshell, the central premise of Everett Yuehong Zhang's The Impotence Epidemic, which is that in the post-Mao era there has been a sharp surge in concern about erectile dysfunction, which in turn is directly related to shifts in sociocultural conditions. Approaching this phenomenon as an anthropologist well-versed in politics, cultural studies, and critical theory, Zhang focuses not on the physiological factors that may cause impotence, but rather on a host of sociocultural, experiential, and ideological considerations surrounding the phenomenon.
An important piece of the puzzle, Zhang argues, involves shifts in norms and expectations, in that during the Maoist era, many Chinese men felt that it would have been decadent and self-indulgent to seek medical treatment for sexual matters, whereas during the post-Mao era, growing economic prosperity and attention to material comforts helped legitimize discussions of sexual pleasure, thereby making it socially acceptable to raise impotence as a legitimate concern.
Zhang notes that in clinical settings in the United States and, increasingly, in China, the preferred term is erectile dysfunction (or its Chinese equivalent, boqi zhang'ai), but he prefers to retain the term impotence (and its Chinese equivalent, yangwei), both because this term underscores a link with traditional Chinese medical discourse and because it foregrounds the same set of sociocultural connotations that clinicians are trying to avoid in using the more precise term erectile dysfunction.
Zhang's study approaches this complex topic from a variety of different perspectives, ranging from contemporary reappropriations of traditional Chinese medical concepts to a widespread skepticism, in China, of pharmacological remedies such as Viagra. His primary thesis, however, is that many contemporary cases of impotence are not primarily “neurovascular” in nature, but rather can be understood more effectively from the perspective of sociocultural assumptions and personal experience. For instance, he posits that many cases of apparent impotence may be best explained as the result of a self-reinforcing feedback loop wherein lack of sexual experience leads to lack of confidence, which in turn makes it difficult for men to acquire the requisite experience that could further buttress their confidence. The core of Zhang's book involves a set of detailed discussions of patients whom he interviewed at two clinics in Beijing and Chengdu, where he did the majority of his fieldwork. In these analyses, Zhang very effectively contextualizes his informants’ physiological concerns with a nuanced consideration of their social background and their familial status.
Zhang's otherwise excellent study, however, is marked by a presumption of heteronormativity, and devotes little attention to questions of sexual orientation. In his introduction, Zhang does note that he “was aware that impotence could also affect homosexual men, but no ethnographic evidence I had gathered made me confident about extending my research to cover such men” (p. 19). Perhaps some of his presumptively heterosexual informants have had unacknowledged homoerotic tendencies, or at the very least are not as straightforwardly heterosexual as he assumes them to be? We do not know, because he appears to have made little attempt to examine this possibility. Later in the book, meanwhile, Zhang defines “imagined impotence” as a situation in which men's “conviction that they were impotent was based on very limited physical contact with women or was merely a product of their imaginations” (p. 102; emphasis added). Why, though, was it necessary to specify that the men's limited sexual contact was specifically contact with women? Could not the same point have been made by simply stating that the men had had limited sexual experience, few or no sexual partners, etc., without having the “with women” qualification reinforce the study's implicit heteronormativity?
When Zhang does raise the theoretical possibility of alternate sexualities, it is in order to rule them out. For instance, in a discussion of a man in his forties who had never had sex or been married, Zhang states that the man told him “that he had been attracted to women” (p. 105), and then adds a footnote in which he specifies that “I have no evidence that he was lying or being ambiguous about his sexual orientation” (p. 240n1). Here, the strategic redundancy of this emphasis on the informant's presumptive sexual orientation (in that Zhang not only reports that his informant stated that he “had been” attracted to women, but furthermore finds it necessary to add a footnote specifying that he believes his informant was speaking truthfully) appears to mark a point of uneasiness within the analysis itself.
While there has been a surge of attention to issues of homosexuality in China over the past couple of decades, there nevertheless continue to be strong heteronormative assumptions and incentives, to the point that it is not uncommon for men who self-identify as gay or queer to marry women in order to meet social expectations. Under these circumstances, it would appear likely that, in at least a subset of cases, problems of male impotence may be caused not by a lack of sexual contact with women, but rather by a more fundamental lack of desire for women (with the lack of desire very likely contributing to the corresponding lack of contact). Of course, given the relatively small number of informants Zhang discusses in detail in his book, it is entirely possible that these questions of sexual orientation do not apply to any of them. On the other hand, the volume as a whole could have devoted more attention to these issues, and could also have probed more carefully the possibility that some of his informants may have been less straightforwardly heterosexual than they claim.
Ironically, the most explicit attention to same-sex desire in The Impotence Epidemic occurs in a discussion not of men, but rather of women. In a discussion of “alternative sexual intercorporeality,” Zhang argues that men may “satisfy their partners’ desire using other parts of the body—using fingers to thrust, letting women rub against their bodies, giving massages, and so on” (p. 129). A couple of paragraphs later, Zhang specifies that by having women practice these sorts of alternative sexual intercorporealities, men's “phallocentric fear of performance” may thereby be alleviated, which in turn may result in a “recovery of potency” (p. 130). In the following sentence, however, Zhang parenthetically cites “lesbian homoeroticism” as the one example of these “alternative sexual intercorporealities,” ironically implying that women's turning to one another for sexual satisfaction may help men regain their own sexual confidence.
