It has got me beat, why, when getting older and the morning glory finally in retreat, allowing a bit of a sleep in, that men’s obsession with flagging tumescence is called a ‘dysfunction’. The scientists in cahoot with sexologists have pored for years over glass test tubes to come up with a solution that will make the ageing male re-born again and cure him from flaccid flesh, drooping donger and dismissive dirges from partners. The expert doctor will now prescribe a pill to try and crank up the tired and ageing engine of love and lust once again.

We all know why doctor’s waiting rooms are seeing more and more men, looking a bit shy and sly. The grey haired male heads are now buried in Women’s Weekly trying to fill in the remaining left out clues on the cross words or count the differences in the two pictures. Life hasn’t always been easy.

All those relationship and marital battles, the kids gone astray up North bumming around on Noosa’s beaches with strumming guitars and silly girls with oafish boys. What about the maintenance and restorations, additions, extensions on houses and costs of kids, all those years of mortgage payments and sometimes also on partners and wives long gone.

Oh, that fatal dipping back in once life, the reminiscing on things gone by, and was all this for the insane drive and biological need for the going up and down. Is that what has driven us all along in life? Is this why we are sitting here in a doctor’s waiting room, all lost and chewed up? Is it to pursue us men forever on?

Better stick to this puzzle making words from rows of letters, see how many I’ll get in before seeing the quack and get script on Viagra again. I wonder what the Doc does in his old age, no doubt very generous in his own prescriptions.

Would all this worrying about rigidity in pyjamas next to partners be some giant con to get the pharmaceutical companies out of trouble? I believe there is now a Viagra for women as well; many scientist have worked feverishly on this for a long time. They believe that this new kind of female Viagra makes the blood flow to the pelvic area and works wonders. Tests, so far done on rats, have shown it to be safely tolerated and the Pharmaceutical Companies a doubling of profits is assured if we can make ‘normal’ women feeling they have a ‘normal dysfunction’ as well. Just like us blokes.

There are vague references made to men, as they get older, having vascular problems, smoking or drinking etc, all very normal and lack of tumescence a result of those chosen life styles. Never ever, do they say that getting older might mean that things slow down a bit and that the flaccidity problem is a result of healthy ageing and pretty normal.

Oh no, around the world, hundreds of millions of men are bombarded with advertisements on how normal it is to have ED, and this is the triumph of money over common sense, it is a DYSFUNCTION and therefore ‘not normal’. Millions don’t want to be feeling they have a dysfunction and hence the queue to the doctors and the handing over of billions to the merchants of Viagra, Cialis, Ram Rods, Pole Vaulters and others.

It seems that the mature man perhaps ought to take matters in own hand, step back sceptically and re-consider the issues a bit more thoroughly.

Could it be that advancing age is blessed with well hidden benefits of not having to be driven by those ridiculous up and downs, up and downs again? It is not as if, afterwards, one ends up in Kalgoorlie or Vienna. No we are still in the same spot and our partner will soon be snoring, a bit tired and the Viagra now is calling for revenge but will settle for a solid bout of thirty six hours of indigestion.

Gee, what rotten luck. The Sudoku has been done in the May 2002 New Idea. Don’t doctors ever think that patients might like something a bit more recent?

Just a good cuddle is what we are all really wanting more than this struggle with rigid or sloppy bits and being dependants on a pill. It’s our entire fault, the stupid chasing of something that has gone, changed for something else, youth that is gone, thankfully gone!

Who would want to go through all that again? Surely by now we could be looking forward in at least not having to worry about erections at bedtime and forgetting the Viagra. We finally have the house paid, plenty of knives and forks, all the things at last in the right place, made a few friends and got it made, with pictures of smiling grandkids as proof. The ride-on mower and two door fridge.

And afterwards, that glass of red, post dinner and on the comfy settee with partner in opposite armchair, nothing doing, not TV or Vid, nor noisy kids or tumbling dryer and dishwasher. Just be sitting there. How glorious.

That’s it, we are fed up with being taken as a sucker, enough is enough. We have done our heaving and hoisting for pleasure, procreation and progeny, more than enough for the time being. Put it all to pasture for a year or so, go for hugs and kisses, smell the roses and enjoy time left. No worries, yippee!

Doctor will see you now.

Yes, doc, I have got such a persistent cough………..

Gerard Oosterman

Of Dalliances and The Dunnee Men.

………. or how things pan out for Gez

Not having sewerage connected was normal in Australia during the time of European immigration from early days till the 1960’s. The enormous distances between houses and suburbs and the sheer spread of just a few hundred people over many kilometres of land made the provision of infrastructure such as a sewerage system too expensive for many suburban areas at that time. The way out was for the local Council to provide a ‘dunnee pan’. This pan was a heavy metal container coated with pitch or bitumen and actually smelt quite fresh and spicy when just delivered. A bit like an industrial harbour foreshore, with moorings and thick ropes, tarred anchors and pylons. This pan would be used in a small outside room of about a couple of square metres and called the ‘dunnee’. An outside toilet, sometimes politely called by the upper shore, ‘the outhouse’. You have to go sometimes, don’t you?

The dunnee pan would be covered by another outer metal shell with a hinged wooden lid. With some imagination this could then be seen as a toilet. However, when lifting the lid, no matter what it looked like from outside, the smell and darkness from inside was broodingly brutal and left nothing to imagination. Not many would linger reading poetry or Thomas Hardy.

The pan would be collected once a week by burley blokes in blue singlets and verdant armpits, who would come before dawn and summer heat, to heave the sloshing but lidded pan on shoulders and put on the truck with the driver having a Lucky ciggie. Coarse oaths would be renting the still morning air and heavily shod feet would crunch the concrete path along the side of the veranda.

This dunnee pan would be capped by a lid secured on top with a metal band that would lever the lid tightly around the container, not unlike some preservatives such as sour Kraut or apple sauce of the present day. This was a job purely reserved for the dinky-di locals and much coveted. It was well paid and had all sorts of lurks, including dalliances with lonely women and early ‘knock-off’ times when finished. I am not sure if the smell added to their appeal, but rumours had it that many a woman, widowed, single or even married, was left happy after an early visit from the ‘dunnee man’.

Large families were given a ‘special 2 pan treat’, this usually meant giving very generously at Christmas time.( A couple of crates of beer would suffice.) Any large family that were too stingy at Christmas would soon find a lonely single pan again. Those dunnee men were often kind rogues but a law onto their own, revered and respected by many, but feared by some. The ‘dunnee man’ is now part of folklore and Tamworth Country music, but long gone since.

Our family was more than large and dad had to make some adjustments to a down pipe outside the dunnee that would carry rain water from the roof to the open storm water drain at the front of the street. Despite our generosity towards the Shire’s dunnee men at Christmas time, we never had more than two pans a week. For our family this was not enough. I never did find out how our neighbours coped, they had six children as well. We were on friendly terms but not that friendly that you could ask; what do you do with your poo? In any case, their concern was more focussed on the fan tail pigeons’ shit on their shiny new roof tiles, all caused by my brother John’s flock of sixty birds… It would be unwise to mention anything to do with poo!

It was not as if our family were too copious with ‘solid stuff’, no, it was the sloshing around of the liquid waste that was the problem. Of course, being right next to neighbours it wasn’t as if one could go outside at any time and urinate in the garden. This is what happened though. When the height in second pan became critical, and the dunnee man still a day or so away from collecting, that the boys were told to do as much as possible at school or wait till late at night and then in the garden in the dark.

In the summer this caused some olfactory concerns and when this ammonia like stench could no longer be hidden or blamed on Dad’s fertiliser for the veggie patch, that Dad did a piece of engineering that is still admired until this day, alas without his presence.

As I already said before, there was a metal downpipe running on the outside of the dunnee that carried rainwater from the roof to the trench at the front of the house. Dad simply cut a small hole in the fibro on the inside of the dunnee directly abutting the downpipe and conveniently next to the pan. This hole was also made on the inside of the downpipe, accessible now from within. Both holes corresponded and synchronized brilliantly. This hole was then used by all the males (six in total) as a urinal taking the piss straight down the downpipe and to the front of the house in the open stormwater trench. This trench was usually overgrown with weeds. Generous rains would wash it downhill and finally into concrete stormwater and into the Georges River. Council used to come along three times a year to get rid of the weeds and mow the grass around it.

Well, our trench was the most luxurious green and lush looking of the whole street. It would have won a blue ribbon for excellence if that nature strip could have been entered into the Royal Easter Show. It wasn’t till some years later that sewerage was connected and my mother’s dream of ‘own bathroom’ with inside flushing toilet was truly fulfilled.

My father was a genius. With the toilet indoors, the dunnee man receding into history; we were all riding high in the achievements wrought so hard by this migrant family of six children and parents.