The evening my dick did not work has generally been described as an instance of sexual difficulty. This account mistakes the physiological occasion for the historical event. Between approximately 11:20 p.m. and midnight, an entire conception of the sovereign, self-transparent subject encountered its material limits in Rachel’s bedroom. Rachel remembers that I became defensive and would not let her put a film on. Her recollection is valuable as testimony, but it does not possess the conceptual resources necessary to interpret the transition she witnessed.
The early phase was governed by an uncomplicated instrumental rationality. An agent had formed an intention, the relevant circumstances appeared favorable, and the body was expected to execute the policy selected by its deliberative center. Failure therefore presented itself as a local engineering problem. Rachel suggested that we could do something else. This would have satisfied several immediate preferences, including hers, but it would also have left unexamined the collapse of a causal model under which I had conducted much of my adult life.
My first theoretical response was Cartesian. The distinction between thinking substance and extended substance offered a principled way to preserve the authority of the self while acknowledging disappointing results in the physical system with which it was associated. I remained attracted to Rachel. My intentions were intact. The malfunction could therefore be localized to a subordinate implementation layer without revising the higher-order judgment that I was a sexually competent man. Rachel said that nobody had questioned this. I explained that the question had been raised by reality.
Her reassurance inaugurated a more difficult epistemic phase. “It’s fine” could have been an accurate report of her internal state, a face-saving social intervention, or a strategic attempt to end a discussion she no longer wished to participate in. These hypotheses had radically different implications and generated the same observable sentence. I asked several clarifying questions. She repeated that it was fine, but repetition does not identify the latent process generating a signal, especially when the signal’s sender knows which answer the receiver would prefer.
I then appealed to the historical record. My dick had worked on previous occasions, including some that were less favorable along several observable dimensions. Rachel said she believed me. This concession was welcome, though it left the Humean problem of induction untouched: past regularities do not logically necessitate future performance. The difficulty was not simply that my dick remained soft. It was that I could no longer explain, to my own satisfaction, why I had been entitled to expect anything else.
At this point, Rachel put her shirt back on. The significance of this act should not be reduced to temperature or modesty. By reentering ordinary social space, she implicitly classified the erotic interval as complete and the remaining conversation as something occurring after it. I was still investigating whether the interval had properly begun. Her unilateral periodization therefore imposed a retrospective structure on an event whose meaning remained contested. When I asked whether she appreciated this, she said that she wanted to go to sleep.
The temptation here is to psychologize. A reader may say that I was embarrassed, that I wanted reassurance, and that the theoretical elaboration prolonged the situation. These claims may be causally relevant without being intellectually adequate. Every philosophical intervention occurs in a body, under circumstances, and in response to some disturbance. Explaining why a man becomes interested in the relation between intention and embodiment does not dispose of the relation. Had I arrived at the same questions in a library, nobody would have demanded that I apologize for keeping Rachel awake.
There was nevertheless a genuine transformation. At the beginning of the evening, I understood agency as the successful imposition of a consciously selected end upon the world. By the end, I was confronting the possibility that much of what I had experienced as agency was a retrospective attribution attached to events that happened to proceed as desired. This is an unsettling insight. Rachel’s suggestion that I was “making this into a whole thing” did not adequately distinguish between manufacturing significance and recognizing it.
She has since written that she liked me and would have been happy to see me again if I had allowed the evening to remain ordinary. I have preserved the message because it establishes that the ultimate rupture cannot be attributed solely to the original physiological event. There was a period in which several futures remained available, and my attempt to understand them appears to have altered which one occurred. I intend to give this problem the attention it deserves before deciding whether to reply.
Rachel offered another activity and later said she wanted to see you again. Your account contains quite a lot of evidence that she liked you. I cannot find evidence that she wanted a theory of agency.
I do not doubt that she liked me. My concern is whether the person she liked was sustainable under a more adequate understanding of how his intentions were implemented.
The film was already rented. There was a time limit on that too.
I had something similar happen on a second date. We watched television and are now married. I appreciate that this is only one data point, but it does seem relevant to the unchosen branch.
Your periodization gives forty minutes the internal structure of the Enlightenment. How much of the sequence was in your head at the time, and how much was assembled while writing this?
The body failing to do what you want is a fairly ordinary piece of evidence against sovereign agency. The insistence that someone else stay awake to interpret it seems to preserve most of the original model.