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It would be of considerable interest to know whether an early onset of sexual activity and a lifetime of higher frequencies among the early-adolescent males show any correlation with the age at which individuals become sexually unresponsive or impotent, and at which they cease sexual activity altogether.

Some information on these points may be had from Table 71 where the record for married males is shown up to the age of 50. At that time, 100 per cent of the early-adolescent males are still sexually active, and their frequencies are still 20 per cent higher than the frequencies of the later-maturing males. Nearly forty years of maximum activity have not yet worn them out physically, physiologically, or psychologically. On the other hand, some of the males (not many) who were late adolescent and who have had five years less of sexual activity, are beginning to drop completely out of the picture; and the rates of this group are definitely lower in these older age periods.
Figure 96. Comparisons of individual variation among early-adolescent and late-adolescent males

Based on single males.
Lines Adol -12 show frequency distributions for males who became adolescent by 12.
Lines Adol 15+ show frequency distributions for males who did not become adolescent before 15.

It is unfortunate that the number of histories now on hand from still older males is too small to allow further calculations on these points. It has, however, been possible to calculate correlations between the age of onset of adolescence and the age of onset of impotence for a small group of 69 older males. For these cases, the coefficient of correlation proves to be 0.30. If the results can be trusted on a sample of this size, the low coefficient indicates that there is in actuality no significant correlation. In other words, the fact that an individual has started sexual activity in early life and has had frequent activity throughout a long period of years is not necessarily responsible for the onset of impotence in his old age. Impotence is as likely to occur at the same age among those males who did not start activity until late and whose rates of sexual activity were always low. The ready assumption which is made in some of the medical literature that impotence is the product of sexual excess, is not justified by such data as are now available. Impotence is clearly the product of a great diversity of physical, physiologic, and psychologic factors, and in each individual case a multiplicity of factors is likely to be involved.

It will be recalled (Chapter 7) that impotence is in actuality a relatively rare phenomenon. The clinicians, especially the urologists and endocrinologists, see so many individuals who are badly upset by impotence that they may find it difficult to believe that the incidence of the phenomenon is as low as we find it in the population at large; but again it should be pointed out that a clinic is no place from which to get incidence data.

Impotence in a male under 55 years of age is almost always the product of psychologic conflict, except in those exceedingly few cases where there has been mechanical injury of the genitalia or of the portions of the central nervous system which control erection, or in those similarly few cases where venereal or other disease has interfered with nervous functions. There is even some evidence that much of the impotence which is seen in old age is psychologic in its origin. In a larger number of cases than has ordinarily been realized, there are psychologic problems involving sex which may not develop until the later years of an individual’s marriage, either in connection with his marital intercourse, or in connection with other sexual activities which the male begins in his more advanced years. Psychologically, impotence is also predicated among older persons because they so often expect it; and the psychologic fatigue which follows long years of sexual experience is a prominent factor in the development of incapacity in old age. It will be recalled (Chapter 7) that only 27 per cent of the male population becomes impotent by 70 years of age, and that much older histories would be needed to secure any large number of cases for a study of the relation of impotence to the age of onset of adolescence. Certain it is that among persons who become impotent by 70, there are histories of males who became adolescent at each and every age; but there are also histories of males who are still active after sixty or more years of sexual activities which were maintained at a maximum rate from the time they first turned adolescent at 10 or 11.

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