The Age of Fitness by Jürgen Martschukat
Author:Jürgen Martschukat [Jürgen, Martschukat]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781509545650
Published: 2021-03-24T00:00:00+00:00
Electric belts, rejuvenating surgery, and the psychologization of sex in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries
Yet neither in the world of sport nor sex are performance-enhancing interventions a recent development. This is apparent, for example, if we trace the relationship between sex and performance back to the late nineteenth century. The âspermatic economyâ of the Victorian era was coming to an end at the time. In continuity with the premodern theory of humors, this spermatic economy declared semen the bearer of the highest form of vitality, placing it at the center of the social order. Men should be sparing with their seed: a careless approach would jeopardize their energy and vitality, which only they, as men, possessed, but which they needed to reproduce and cope in a competitive world. In the nineteenth century too, then, vitality was imagined in sexual terms, but it was not necessary, and was indeed inadvisable, to constantly demonstrate and thus frivolously squander this vital force. On the contrary, male moderation was crucial. The evidence of the highest form of male achievement was to father a child and provide for a family. Male potency was chiefly a matter of reproductive capacity.29
The sexually moderate and providing father persisted as a male ideal, and as the hub of social order, into the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries.30 But the âfirst sexual revolutionâ around 1900 lent growing social significance to other male characteristics, namely physical strength, youthfulness, and sexual aura. Body fetishists like the American Bernarr Macfadden, and strength athletes such as Friedrich Wilhelm Müller from Königsberg, were only too happy to display their hardened bodies. They were the new idols and the first male pin-ups of their time. Müller was to gain worldwide fame under the stage name of Eugen Sandow. The name Eugen (âthe well-bornâ in Greek) highlights just how much bodily aesthetics was entangled with performance. This entanglement was integrated into a Darwinist system of competition and selection, a system that had been regarded as fundamental to human existence since the late nineteenth century.31
Genetics was booming at the time. Nevertheless, henceforth the issue of potency or impotence focused less on procreative ability, and more on sexual performance. The latter was considered an expression of male power and energy. These, however, were considered to be at risk from modern âovercivilizationâ and neurasthenia in particular. George M. Beard, medical luminary par excellence in this regard, referred to âsexual neurasthenia,â which he claimed was sapping modern menâs reservoir of sexual energy.32 It thus seemed merely logical that at the end of the nineteenth century diligent physical exercise, cold baths, and the right diet were just as prominent as numerous remedies, ranging from an array of powders, through the electric belt, to a vaccine against fatigue (which was at the very least an object of investigation).33 These were intended to strengthen the man and preserve his youth. Fatigue had in any case become the central problem of the modern achievement-oriented society, whether during sex or at work.
But potency aids were just
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