Los Gatos Weekly-Times

Viagra reflects America's preoccupation

By Carl Heintze

As a male, I have been watching with fascination the hullabaloo over Viagra. No. That's not Vigaro. Vigaro is for grass. I'm speaking of Viagra, a pill designed (to put it delicately) to enhance males' penile longevity. Take it an hour or so before you need penile viability, and you ought to come out, if you will excuse the expression, all right. Well, mostly all right. It works in about 70 percent of cases, better than average.

What interests me is not so much what Viagra can do for males with penile problems as the fact that in the first week after it went on the market, doctors wrote 75,000 prescriptions for it, presumably all at the request of males. That's a lot of work for the nation's urologists, the specialists who are most likely to see men with problems of impotence.

My guess is that this is the tip of the iceberg.

Of course, it is not outside the realm of possibility that some wives might have gotten a prescription on their own because their husbands were too shy to do so.

That, of course, is a large assumption on my part. But it is interesting to speculate on how many wives would hand a pill to their husbands and tell them to get on with it. How many more would slip it into their coffee like a Mickey Finn?

But then I shouldn't speak for women, who appear to have a similar problem at times. At least the makers of Viagra seem to think so. They're working on a similar drug for the female of the species.

However, the drug-makers have a disclaimer: The drug doesn't soup up one's sex drive. Some men don't seem to understand this. Instead, Viagra appears to have been sought after by some men for the wrong reasons. It's not an aphrodisiac. It doesn't increase sexual drive or enhance the libido. It just deals with one of the principal factors in impotence: blood pressure.

One needs a good steady supply of blood to, well, perform adequately.

What interests me about Viagra, however, is not what it does so much as how much it reflects America's constant preoccupation with sex.

Seeking to maintain male potency (as opposed to male impotence) makes sex in America seem what it has become to a lot of Americans, a kind of sexual Olympics. It's not just that one can "do it"; it's that one does it better. Sexual athletics becomes ever more important than the reason sex was invented: to give humans a way to express their love for one another and at the same time to create an image of themselves in their offspring.

Beginning with Alfred Kinsey and continuing on down through Masters and Johnson to that modern day bible of sex, Cosmopolitan magazine (a recent issue was headlined: "How to get any man you want"), Americans have analyzed the mechanical aspects of sexuality until there doesn't seem much left to learn about it.

We have even been presented with the possibility that the president of the United States has been treated to oral sex in, of all places, the Oval Office.

Whether he has or hasn't, the fact that this refinement of sexual athletics has managed to make even that bastion of discretion, The New York Times, leaves one to wonder what next? Home movies of Monica and Bill?

Whatever happened to discretion? And more important, whatever happened to plain old love? For just as love can be expressed by passion and sexual activity, so it also is possible to love without a lot of heavy breathing and exercises in the bedroom every day or night.

There's a different kind of reward for love--intimate talk, cuddling, stroking and joking--but you won't find many manuals about that among the bestsellers that grace today's bookstores. Perhaps that's because unlike the mechanical aspects of sexual expression, tenderness is not easily taught. It's learned; it's the end result of spending a lot of time together, rubbing off the rough edges, smoothing down anger with concern, easing frustration with understanding.

Sexual stunting and penile prowess are not a big part of this kind of relationship. This kind of relationship understands impotence better than a pill.

Or at least that's how I see it.

And never mind about my sex life. After all, I'm not the president of the United States.

Carl Heintze is a regular contributor to the Los Gatos Weekly-Times.

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