North Korean Diplomacy and ED

                                                           David Guttenfelder/Associated Press

Who ever thought that ED would ever become a factor in North Korean diplomacy or that Dr. Ruth might be suggested as a special envoy to the newly chosen successor to Kim Jong-il, his son Kim Jong-un? This was the substance of New York Times science reporter William Broad’s recent piece in the Sunday Review section of the paper (“North Korea’s Performance Anxiety,” NYT, 5/5/12). “Today, the psychosexual lens helps explain why North Korea, in addition to dire poverty and other crippling woes, faces international giggles over it inability to ‘get it up,’” Broad comments about North Korea’s recent failed missile launch. Later he writes, “A psychoanalyst might see the shift from a blast off to a blast as weird kind of substitute gratification.” Plainly the North Koreans are not practicing the kind of sensate focus techniques that Masters and Johnson proposed in response to impotence problems. Under the theory that the naked will is useless in sexual matters, the Masters and Johnson approach involves taking the focus off the erection. Then there are the drugs like Viagra and Cialis which are used to take care of the physiological aspect of ED. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to realize that psychology alone may not explain the problems the North Korean’s have been experiencing. “A move to highly enriched uranium—or a mixture of the two bomb fuels known as a composite core—would let North Korea expand its ways of shaking the earth and perhaps, one day, of mounting warheads atop missiles to intimidate neighbors.” Kinsey was the Clausewitz of sexology and were he still alive today Harvard professor Samuel Huntington could easily have been called the Masters and Johnson of international affairs. But it’s unclear if either Clausewitz or Masters and Johnson, more or less Brezezinski or Shere Hite could find a solution to North Korea’s particular brand of dysfunction.