Nobody doubts that our culture influences our sexuality and sexual expression. Germany seems to be a hotbed of pantyhose fetish Web sites, Japan has raised the schoolgirl uniform to high art, and male parliamentarians getting spanked can sometimes seem as British as high tea at Harrods.
But our cultural influences are not always good for us. That’s part of the “moral values” debate we’ve been having in this country for 20 years or so. The question is, what can we do to keep the culture from harming us? How can we resist the worst bits of it, and embrace the best?
While reading through some research on sex recently, one of the studies I encountered popped out at me. It raised the question “What is the problem with sex?”
Problem?
Sex is one of the most basic and fulfilling things we do. At least it should be. Assuming we’re not suffering from biological or health trouble, sex is a problem only when it clashes with the culture we’re in.
Sometimes these clashes can be personally dramatic. Last fall, in a psychiatric journal, British researcher and clinician Nilamadhab Kar described the cases of two men suffering from a condition known in the countries of South Asia as koro.
Koro, the anxious feeling that your penis is retracting back into your body, is often described as a “culture-bound” psychiatric disorder. Sometimes, episodes of koro come in waves, almost epidemics. Some victims believe that if the penis shrinks far enough into their bodies, they’ll die.
Whether or not dhat and koro are truly “culture-bound” is open to debate. There have been reports of European men suffering from koro after smoking too much dope, for example, and if my junior high track coach is any indication, the idea behind dhat is just about universal. I can still hear his barked orders telling us that if we masturbated within a couple weeks of a meet, we’d barely be able to lift the shot put...
