Buy Viagra and find health and happiness again.

Nearly every website about human sexuality will tell you that impotence is something all men experience at some time or another-that is, it’s “normal.” And if this is true then it helps explain the multitude of treatments, advice, and caution that have been recommended over the centuries: from the tiger penis and rhinoceros horn powder (and other natural “aphrodisiacs” like mandrake and yohimbine) to vacuum pumps, penile prostheses, and sex counseling and therapy.’ But it wasn’t until 1983 that pharmacology entered the market.

At the annual meeting of the American Urological Association, held that year in Las Vegas, British physiologist Giles Brindley took a gamble. He had been working on a treatment for impotence that required injecting a drug (phentolamine) directly into the shaft of the penis.s That Brindley had been experimenting on himself was not a big surprise (he was fifty-seven at the time and self-study seemed to satisfy the ethics committee); that he injected himself moments prior to his presentation and then pulled down his pants so that his colleagues could take a look-now that was a surprise. Thus the pharmacological era of treating impotence was born.

In March 1998, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved the release of Viagra (sildenafil citrate )-a highly anticipated prescription medicine, manufactured by Pfizer Pharmaceuticals, to treat erectile impotence. In the first month of its release, nearly 600,000 prescriptions were filled; analysts predicted that many people would buy viagra and it would be would be a billion-dollar product. As a result, Pfizer’s stock values soared, making Wall Street investors as excited as Viagra users.f By November 1998, however, the FDA confirmed that at least 130 deaths in the United States had resulted from taking Viagra. This news prompted changes in product labeling and calls for more careful screening by physicians, as well as raising suspicion over Viagra’s rapid FDA approval.

Seven years later, curiosity about Viagra abounds. Its use is ~idespread among straight and gay men alike. Even as questions continue to be raised not only about the drug’s safety, but also about its ability to improve the quality of erections, decrease the “wait time” after ejaculation, and increase libido, its use as a party drug (to counteract erection-debilitating recreational drugs like cocaine and ecstasy) has become sufficiently common to give rise to a street name: poke. Moreover, the overwhelming success of Viagra has spurred the development and release of at least two competing prescription medications here in the United States.! As a profeminist, I have been trained to be cautious, indeed skeptical, about how the marketing and mass media industry language claims, especially where gender, health, and the body are concerned. As a man rapidly approaching “a certain age” I was :especially intrigued by the ways in which Pfizer Pharmaceuticals marketed Viagra, by how the news media seemed to uncritically embrace the arrival of “the potency pill,” and by how everybody was talking about it.

As a commercial product, Viagra entered the American lexic6n quickly and is now the most recognized brand name in the United States after Coca¬Cola.> Considered as a word, Viagra evokes vitality, aggression, grace, and vigor (its phonemic resemblance to both Niagara and vagina underscores some of these connotations and encourages others).» The myriad ways in which we have come to equate Viagra with sexual performance aptitude are no less remarkable. Three examples: During the television broadcast of a Kiss concert, lead singer Paul Stanley becomes frustrated by the fact that his microphone repeatedly droops on its stand as the result of a loose screw. He looks out at the audience and remarks, “My microphone needs Viagra.” When a technician runs onto the stage to tighten it, Stanley adds, “But that doesn’t mean Pm not excited.” A television commercial for Pennzoil motor oil begins with a white-haired gentleman rattling a medicine bottle labeled “Vigoroso.” As he swings open the bedroom door his waiting (and appar-ently willing) wife unties the bow of her nightgown. The very next scene shows the same man swinging open the door to the garage where a classic sports car awaits. This time he is shaking a can of Pennzoil as the graphic reads, “Improve performance and engine reliability.” And in Eddie Murphy’s Dr. Doolittle 2, a pair of Galapagos tortoises who “haven’t mated in a hun¬dred years” are told by the famous veterinarian to crush up some pills and mix them in with their food. The next scene shows the male lasciviously (but with characteristic slowness) approaching his mate, warning her to “get ready.” Taken together, these snippets from popular culture reinforce how Viagra-known as the “Pfizer Riser” in advertising circles-has significantly impacted attitudes and expectations about male sexual health, aging, erectile dysfunction, and, importantly, treatment options?

In the process of becoming erect, the penis begins to expand and harden due to increased blood flow to the groin. Originally developed to relieve the chest pain occasioned by heart disease, Viagra works by dilating blood vessels, thus improving blood flow through the arteries. For most of the last century, researchers and therapists thought impotence was caused by psychological concerns; the fear of being unable to produce an erection (thereby perpetu¬ating impotence) has been called “performance anxiety.” Certain medical experts (including, in an institutional sense, Pfizer) claim damaged arteries at the base of the penis cause “erectile dysfunction,” relegating impotence to a structural problem that Viagra can treat. Psychological and relational dynam¬ics have been erased from the equation. The rhetorical change from the fem¬inized, psychologically and relation ally flaccid “impotence” to the masculin¬ized, structurally based “erectile dysfunction” has contributed much to this erasure.f And by propping up the stumbling male libido through chemical means, Viagra perpetuates the towering illusion that is the male sex role. In so doing, II wonder ifViagra temporarily trumps a potentially transformative moment for masculine sexuality, a critical moment when male sexuality might consider pleasure as important as performance.

Twenty years prior to Viagra’s well-promoted debut, James Harrison called attention to the physiological effects of sex roles in a paper titled “Warning: The Male Sex Role May Be Dangerous to Your Health.” In this study, Harrison implicates some men’s risk-taking behavior as the likely source for everything from automobile accidents to heart attacks.” Some ( though not all) of the men who die after ingesting Viagra foolishly combine it with a form of nitrate-a chemical found in chest pain medication and in the recreational drugs known as “poppers”-despite awareness of the danger. The risk of such behavior is further amplified by a related psychological trait: in the quest to maintain the image of toughness, Harrison argues, men and boys deny pain and often fail to seek medical attention even when absolutely necessary.I?
Even at the risk of death, how does the construction of erections persist in the performance of masculine sexuality? In other words, how is it that the erection-in the face of so many other changes on our sexual horizon in the past forty years-has maintained its position as the sine qua non of manliness and of male pleasure? I will consider these questions from a gender studies perspective: Gender studies dispute essentialist claims of masculinity and fem¬ininity, recognizing that the cultural characteristics of each are constructed and arbitrarily attributed.U An examination of how Viagra reifies the metonymy bf erect penis and masculinity, of how it “accomplishes” the mas¬culine, can tell us a great deal about how power is exerted and how social disparities are produced and maintained. In this website I argue that Viagra is manufactured to preserve a particular masculinity and to maintain a specific cultural order.
By taking a pill, men are discouraged from examining the incapacitating effects that stress, poor diet, and akoholj drug abuse can have on their health generally and on the vascular system specifically.12 Rather than exploring other possibilities for sexual fulfillment or reassessing their interpersonal rela¬tionships, men (and their partners) are instructed to “ask your d’octor” and “see if a free sample ofViagra is right for you.” Pfizer Pharmaceuticals, the manufacturer ofViagra, thwarts the possibilities for the improvisation of male sexuality at a time in our history when it is becoming more and more obvious that traditional performances of masculinity need desperately to be ques¬tioned even as they are revalorized. The raison d’etre of most new technolo¬gies is to improve the status quo, rather than transform it. As a reinscription of heterotopia’s penile-vaginal penetration, the arrival of Viagra may in fact be stalling the potential for new models of male sexuality. We tend to think that necessity is the mother of invention but, as evolutionary biologist Jared Diamond suggests, new technologies can create a society’s need for them.