July 15, 2007
At 24 years old, Olly Finding is a man about town. He works for a London PR company promoting “preppy” clothes, and is the sort of chap a girl could confidently introduce to her mother. He is a typical ex-public schoolboy; the only difference between him and previous generations of young blades is that the clubbing and girl-chasing favoured by his coterie is spiced up by plentiful supplies of Viagra. Olly says he and most of his friends are “hooked” on it.
He began using the drug for fun when he was at Bristol University. After his long-term girlfriend left him, he began using it more often, to ensure a reliable sexual performance with subsequent conquests. “I’ve had many good relationships, especially at uni,” he says. “I tried Viagra and had such a great time I became hooked. My girlfriend at the time liked it as much as I did, and so every now and then I’d take it to surprise her. It always led to fantastic sex.After we broke up I left it alone for a while, but I became self-conscious about my ability in bed, so I kept some on me in case I ever got lucky.”
His supply comes from a friend who became impotent as a result of glandular fever and got a prescription for the drug by a sympathetic GP. Olly claims the fellow student continued to tell the doctor he was impotent in order to secure a supply of Viagra to share with his friends.
“With Viagra you can do it four or five times in a row,” says Olly. “I’m sure I wouldn’t be completely crap at sex without it, but it puts your mind at rest that you’ll be able to perform.”
There is plenty of evidence that a generation of women is coming forward who would consider almost any form of sexual encounter. Hayley, a 24-year-old fast-track civil servant, said men in her social circle take Viagra because it counters the effect of cocaine and ecstasy, which raise lust but cause impotence. “By about 3am you might have run out of everything else, so you might get two girls and a guy, or maybe a bigger group, taking Viagra and going off to have sex for the next three hours. With Viagra, guys can do it again and again. It is part of a trend towards experimentation. People want to see what happens when you mix things up.”
Hayley believes, however, that most female users of the celebrated diamond-shaped blue pills take it merely to give themselves sexual licence – even though there is no evidence to suggest that it improves the physical sensation for women. And therein lies the root of a much deeper social problem: Viagra only works on men, providing mechanical “coupling” assistance only. It is not actually for couples and doesn’t make men into good lovers. For many women, it has merely highlighted the incompetence of their lovers. More crucially, it has laid bare a female secret that many men never knew. Penetrative sex does not necessarily give women the best orgasms – and, depending on which study you read, anything from a third to 52% of women never have orgasms in this way.
Since Viagra first went on sale nine years ago, more than 27m men in 120 countries have been prescribed it for impotence caused by age and illness. Millions more have bought it illegally on the internet and elsewhere for recreational use, and there is now concern about the wider social consequences of an increasing reliance on chemically-induced erections. An erotic act has been turned into a robotic one. “It’s like being 14 again,” said one middle-aged recreational user. “You get an erection and you are desperate to do something with it. You ejaculate and you soon want to do it again, then again. Apart from the side effect of blue-tinged vision, you also end up with extreme physical fatigue from too much sex. If the woman you are with is not up for it, things can get unpleasant. You can end up having a steaming row – and still have a hard-on.”
Armies of doctors, sociologists, sex therapists and counsellors warn that the drug encourages couples to buy into a “McSex” model of a “correct” way to have sex. This can damage relationships. A breed of men with sexual needs deeply unappealing to women is emerging – and many women, because of the ensuing pressure on them, now admit that penetrative sex never had the ecstatic effect that men imagine. The Viagra revolution has proved that although super-charged erections do a great deal for the self-esteem of men, for women they often create a trail of disaster. According to a study in The Journal of Sexual Medicine, half the men prescribed Viagra don’t go back for more. Lack of involvement of women in the therapy decision is cited as the main reason. Viagra is increasingly mentioned in divorce cases, yet black-market supplies still flood into Britain.
Until the 1980s, when doctors in the pay of the pharmaceutical industry began using the term erectile dysfunction to describe impotence as a medical condition, it was well recognised that such failures affected most men at some time in their lives, and that sexual performance generally declines with age. As erections happen spontaneously during sleep in healthy males, many doctors took the view that impotence was largely psychological, or a natural part of ageing.
Sexual function became an increasingly respectable subject for medical curiosity after the milestone publication of Alfred Kinsey’s report on men’s sexuality in 1948. He thought that women’s experience of sex was closely related to the performance of the male partner. However, scientific studies began to appear showing that, for many people, a complete absence of sex life was normal. A 1994 study concluded that 52% of American men aged 40 to 70 suffered varying degrees of impotence. Worryingly for the drugs industry, a lot of them did not seem to mind. A 1996 study at Keele University of 4,000 men and women with a median age of 50 concluded that 34% of men had such problems, and 41% of their partners found penetrative sex painful. Asked if they wanted help to re-establish a sex life, fewer than half of the respondents (of either gender) said yes. Since the advent of Viagra, the pharmaceutical industry has taken the view that such people don’t know what’s good for them.
The discovery of Viagra began in the 1980s with experiments on muscle relaxants, most notably when a British urologist, Giles Brindley, proudly demonstrated his own chemically-induced erection at an American Urological Association meeting in Las Vegas in 1983. “I had been wondering why Brindley was wearing sweatpants,” said one urologist who was present. “Suddenly I knew. It was a big penis, and he just unveiled it and walked around the stage.” Brindley had injected himself with the muscle relaxant papaverine, an early indication that such compounds helped to keep blood in the penis.
Internet Pharmacy - Buy Pharmacy at reasanoble prices.Internet Pharmacy provides confortable and easy way to order pharmacy via internet.Others began trying to promote the notion of injecting stiffening compounds into the organ, a technique abhorrent to all but the most desperate.
Meanwhile, Geddings Osbon, who ran a tyre-repair business in Georgia, had surprising success with the sale of a vacuum pump he had invented to deal with his own problem.
Urology as a medical speciality also grew in status as male sexual dysfunction became perceived as a disease. Medical insurance in the US covered urology but not sex therapy. In the cash-driven US health system, urologists needed to persuade men they were abnormal in not wanting more sex – that way they would keep new patients coming through the door. The rising tide of obesity, heart disease and diabetes has, however, done much of the work for them – mechanical failure related to ill health now accounts for much of the impotence epidemic.
There is no question that large numbers of increasingly young, chronically sick men are distressed by their sexual incapacity. In Britain alone, there are estimated to be more than 1.5m male diabetics. The disease causes impotence in up to half of them. It is easy to see where the market for a treatment might be, and by the mid-1990s, the stage was set for the entry of Viagra.
Although it was originally promoted as a treatment for elderly men rendered impotent through chronic illness, Viagra is more effective in healthy men, producing a capacity to have repeated orgasms. The story of the discovery of Viagra has now entered the annals of popular science: Pfizer, the company that developed the wonder pill, was looking for a heart-disease treatment that would lower blood pressure. The healthy men who took part in the initial trials of the secret compound shyly revealed it had produced the unexpected, but very welcome, side effect of super-charged erections.
It was already known that sexual-arousal messages from the brain spark the production of cyclic guanosine monophosphate (cyclic GMP), which relaxes pelvic muscles and allows the penis to become engorged with eight times its normal blood supply, the necessary volume to sustain an erection. Pfizer’s compound was sildenafil citrate, subsequently named Viagra (a combination of vigour and Niagara). Sildenafil suppressed an enzyme called phosphodiesterase type 5 (PDE5), whose normal role was to break down cyclic GMP and cause the erection to subside. Without this breakdown of cyclic GMP, the possibilities were very exciting indeed.
Pfizer knew they had a potential goldmine on their hands, but they were terrified the slightest marketing slip could leave sildenafil dismissed as a sleazy love potion that respectable people would not want. Development of the compound continued in secrecy until The Sunday Times revealed to the world in a front-page story in 1996 what had happened at the company’s laboratories in Kent: the discovery of what would become the fastest-selling drug in history. Pfizer was horrified. The company blocked all questions from the newspaper as they set about managing the launch of their money-spinner.
Bob Dole, then 75, the Republican presidential candidate in the 1996 American election, was the first public face for Viagra. He had already led campaigns telling men to get regular checks for prostate cancer, a disease causing impotence from which he himself had suffered. Although he was not required to say he was impotent, he appeared on American TV adverts clutching the arm left withered by a world war two combat injury and indicating nothing else about him was withered since he had discovered Viagra.
In 2002, Pfiizer began using the 37-year-old Texas Rangers baseball star Rafael Palmeiro as the front man for an American TV advertising campaign.
Although Palmeiro also never had to claim he was impotent to receive his reported $500,000 fee, the message was clear enough: if even the most virile of sporting heroes could benefit, then so could the average healthy man.
Although the drug is only available on the NHS for a limited range of impotence-creating conditions, including spinal-cord injury, diabetes and prostate cancer, everyone knows it will work on nearly all healthy males beyond puberty.
Since Viagra was launched, two other similar drugs, Cialis and Levitra, have been marketed by Pfizer’s competitors Eli Lilly and Bayer. The problem is, however, that away from the drug-fuelled hedonists who flock into nightclubs, the existence of this new breed of potency wonder cures has promoted the goal of penetrative sex and orgasm as the definition of “normal” sex, highlighting enormous differences between men and women. “Male sexuality is penis-centred,” said one middle-aged man who took part in a study of the emotional effects of Viagra on couples in New Zealand. “Men have to shift the focus from penis to mind. Such control comes with experience and maturity.”
Brain imaging is providing clues about the different patterns of sexual response between the genders, but obtaining clear information about the gulf between how different individuals view sex is proving difficult. John Bancroft, the former director of the Kinsey Institute for Research In Sex, Gender and Reproduction in Indiana, acknowledges there is a vigorous debate in the medical profession about the effect of applying a male model of sexuality to women – not to mention the risks of medicalising sexuality by marketing a “normal” pattern of activity.
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