“Michael Douglas Takes Viagra” announced headlines in The New York Daily News and on sites like whyfame.com and hotfeeder.com, among others. “Michael Douglas Admits: I Have to Take Viagra” (The Daily Mail). “Michael Douglas: Thank Goodness for Viagra” (the Huffington Post).
And so on.
For the record, the exact quote was subtler (though the meaning seemed unmistakable), spoken during musings about his life with Catherine Zeta-Jones, the gorgeous (and quarter-century younger) actress he married in 2000: “God bless her that she likes older guys. And some wonderful enhancements have happened in the last few years — Viagra, Cialis — that can make us all feel younger.”
This was a man transformed, waxing poetic on the joys of fatherhood the second time around, that special feeling of knowing his was the “first face” his children see when they wake up and that sweet satisfaction from helping them get ready for school.
It could be argued that this new persona would never have existed but for the aforementioned little pill. At the very least, it seems to have played a role not only in fulfilling a marriage but also in the birth of the two children who turned the Hollywood playboy into a sentimental Mr. Mom.
With media images abounding these days of virile older men — Hugh Hefner, 85, and Crystal Harris, 25, announcing their engagement; 80-year-old Rupert Murdoch with his elementary-school-aged daughters; the 74-year-old Italian prime minister, Silvio Berlusconi, and that 18-year-old party girl — one has to wonder if Viagra has again worked its magic. (Do they or don’t they? Only their pharmacists know for sure.)
And now we have evidence that 54-year-old Osama bin Laden had what has been referred to as an “herbal version of Viagra” in his medicine chest at the compound where he was hiding out with multiple wives.
All of this raises the question of just what the far-reaching implications of Viagra (and similar drugs) are, beyond the specific medical achievement of providing a treatment, in the form of increased blood flow, for millions of men with erectile dysfunction.
More than any pill ever to be dispensed, Viagra has played to the yearnings of American culture: eternal youth, sexual prowess, not to mention the longing for an easy fix.
From the first announcement of the drug’s existence, fantasies went into overdrive; with the popping of a pill, lackluster marriages would be repaired. Or a generation of newly virile men would be on the make, hooking up with younger partners, maybe even getting a chance at righting any wrongs they had committed as fathers of young children years earlier. At the very least, everyone would be having great sex well into their twilight years.
It hasn’t worked out quite that way. Thirteen years after Viagra hit the market like a bolt of lightning (Dr. Jed Kaminetsky, a New York University urologist, said that at first he was so besieged with requests for prescriptions that he had to start seeing patients on weekends to keep up with the demand), we have not turned into a Viagra Nation.
Pfizer, the maker of Viagra, said that it has been prescribed to more than 35 million men worldwide. For many men, it has been a wonder drug, doctors like Dr. Kaminetsky agree.
But recently the market for Viagra-type drugs has stalled in the United States. Last year the total number of prescriptions for so-called ED drugs declined by 5 percent in the United States after growing just 1 percent annually the previous four years, according to IMS Health, a heath-care data and consulting firm. (Viagra prescriptions were off 7 percent; those for Levitra plummeted 18 percent.)
The drop seems all the more significant given that the population is aging, so there are surely more men who potentially need the drug.
There could be many reasons for the dip: effectiveness (it doesn’t work for everyone) or insurance payments, to name a few.
But another number is perhaps more telling: doctors widely observe that 40 to 50 percent of men who are given a first prescription do not end up refilling it. Perhaps the mentality is, as Dr. Kaminetsky suggested: “Having that blue pill is sort of like when they were kids but they walked around with a condom in their wallet: they may never have sex but they were ready.”
Abraham Morgentaler, the director of Men’s Health Boston and author of the book “The Viagra Myth,” said he was startled by the expectations that people initially poured into one little pill. It became, at least subconsciously, a panacea for all that was missing in their life. “Men look to these types of pills as a savior for other aspects of their lives where things are not going well,” he said.
But there’s only so much increased blood flow can do. Dr. Morgentaler cited two patients, one who stopped using Viagra shortly after he began and one who never used his prescription. The first man said that once he was able to perform again, he realized that the problems in his marriage went well beyond sex; soon after he began taking the drug, he and his wife separated. The second, a man in his 70s, said he and his wife realized the emotional connection was already there, so they decided not to use his prescription.
Neither has there been a boomlet of babies as a result of Viagra. In 2000, Ken Gronbach, a demographer, hailed the certain arrival of a “Viagra Generation,” a demographic of children who would never have been born but for the existence of the drug.
But population statistics suggest his predictions have not come to pass. Fatherhood rates among older men, always minuscule, have not risen since Viagra came on the market. According to the National Center for Health Statistics, they amounted to 0.3 live births per 1,000 men over age 55 from the mid 1990s through 2005 before dropping to 0.2 births per thousand in 2006, then rising to 0.4 in both 2007 and 2008, the latest year for which statistics are available. That puts birthrates of men over age 55 exactly where they were in the early ’80s.
The real effect of Viagra seems to be subtler. A 62-year-old man, who asked that his name not be disclosed, described in an interview how his experience helped change his attitudes about aging. The man, a widower who has been in a long-term relationship since 2004, said he initially looked to ED drugs as a savior. “This is going to give me back everything,” he said.
But that wasn’t the case. The man said he has ended up using the drugs on and off for the last 10 years. But he no longer believes they are necessary. “In some ways it’s a nice addition, but not so important that I need to have it every time,” he said. “We’ve sort of made an adjustment.”
Therapists and others who counsel people on relationships say that the very existence of pills like Viagra have heaped expectations on an age group that may have more concerns than just whether they can still have sex. (It’s stressful enough at 30. But 70?)
Leonore Tiefer, a clinical psychologist and sex therapist in New York, recalled two patients, a couple in their 70s, both widowed. Their experiment with Viagra had been unsuccessful. “They were eager for companionship but somehow they both felt they ought to be having sex,” she said. “I said you are supposed to be free of this kind of imperative at this point in your life. Why do you think you ought to be doing this?”
The ensuing dialogue, she said, went along the lines of the following:
“I thought you wanted to.”
“I thought you would have wanted to.”
It turned out neither one of them cared.
newyorktimes
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