Maya Jaggi: FIRST PERSON
Carmen Legge is 35 years old. She is a successful insurance broker, she has long red hair, she owns a BMW, she has her own flat. And she has a boyfriend who “wants it four times a day”. In short she has everything that Bridget Jones, protagonist in Helen Fielding’s book Bridget Jones’s Diary, might think important.
That is where their similarities end. Legge is a heroine who suffers not from a dearth of men but a surfeit. Fed up with their wanting “only one thing” and pining for more imaginative companionship, Carmen ditches the boyfriend and places a small ad for a “clear-thinking male” for “good times, days out, nights in”. The bottom line: “Must be intelligent and impotent.”
Published in Germany three years ago, the novel in which she is the main protagonist, Gaby Hauptmann’s In Search of Impotent Men, has sold one-and-a- half-million copies. It has also spawned a trail of imitation ads in lonely hearts columns and has since been devoured in 20 other countries, selling more than 2,75-million worldwide.
Hauptmann, a journalist and television producer, is clear about why she wrote it. “Experience,” she says. “I’m 41 years old and I had my first boyfriend at 16. That’s a long time to gain your own experience and to compare it with other women’s. One thing I found in common was that if you’re in bed and you don’t want sex, and he does, there has to be a big discussion. He’ll say, `You don’t love me any more’, or you’re insulted and told you’re frigid. The next morning at breakfast, he’ll have a long face. But the other way round, the woman says, `I understand, you work so hard, have a beer and we’ll talk.’ Men don’t accept a normal no. They feel their whole personality is being rejected, that it’s an attack on their manliness.”
The novel casts a satirical eye on the experience of Hauptmann’s post-Pill generation, for whom protection from pregnancy may have removed one reason for refusing sex. Hauptmann says: “You have to say you have a headache, but that’s the wrong way. Women shouldn’t have to explain when they don’t want sex; men don’t.”
The idea was sparked by a succession of “very serious” magazine articles on male impotence, and by witnessing a cluster of male ducks pursuing a lone female on Lake Constance, near the Swiss border, where Hauptmann lives. “The five male ducks wanted to copulate and they were all pecking the female duck in the neck. I remember thinking, I wish you were all impotent. And I thought, I’ve also been like that duck. In hotels in the evening, if I go to the bar, I’ve never left without some man wanting to go with me, never mind that he has a wife and children. But at least I can say no.”
Those seeking serious reading on male erectile disorder should look elsewhere – though audiences for the author’s readings often include “old men wanting tips on how to be cured”. Hauptmann adds: “Clearly, it’s another thing if you’re really impotent; it’s not easy in a partnership; there can be neuroses.”
Some among Carmen’s bevy of suitors blame their impotence on mothers or wives. But for the pick of the crop – garrulous romantics prone to long country walks and champagne breakfasts – loss of potency is a chance to stop being predatory and explore a Teutonic New Manhood, in bed and in the kitchen. “If you don’t have this 12cm any more,” says Hauptmann, “you have to think about what else to do with your woman, about communicating in a different way.”
As Carmen falls in love and seeks a cure for what she had initially deemed an asset, it is clear the novel is less in praise of impotence than of rethinking partnerships. Underlying it is the observation that sex – specifically penetrative sex – occupies a far more important place in men’s view of relationships than women’s.
While Hauptmann concedes the women’s movement has insisted since the 1970s that there is more to sexuality than the phallus or penetration, Hauptmann is not convinced men have been listening. “I’m not against sex, I’m against male attitudes to sex,” she says. “For a man, potency is still power, force, a sign of themselves. Women want sex but not only sex. Often it’s great to have someone’s arms around you, to be caressed. But for most men it’s a starter; a man wants more after that, he wants to be satisfied.”
And while men see relationships “through a zoom lens”, the novel says, women prefer a “wide angle”. For Hauptmann: “Women look more for what we have in common – do we like the same music, the same sports. It’s a big mistake. We look for a man for life, who’s probably not a man for bed. Perhaps we should have two.”
Though Hauptmann’s generalisations can be wearing, plenty of women identify with Carmen’s quest for “a man who worships her, not his penis”. She has become something of an agony aunt in Germany. She hopes her book is “a bridge for communication; through it, many people can talk over their own problems”.
It could also be a dampener on the putative panacea of Viagra. While the Penthouse publisher Bob Guccione indulges in triumphalism (“Feminism has emasculated the American male … Viagra will free the American male libido”), some counsellors suggest that if a relationship is bad, treating what may only be a symptom is unlikely to help.
Hauptmann’s book caused a minor outcry in Germany for stating that an estimated one in 10 men are impotent. Now, she says, “you have the impression everybody is impotent, because they all want Viagra”. For her, the drug is “a big toy; something a man wants for himself, not his relationship”.