The Viagra Brigade

by Jacob Bernstein Info

Jacob Bernstein is a senior reporter at The Daily Beast. He has also written for New York magazine, Paper, and The Huffington Post.

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Another story he tells involves meeting with a couple who’d broken up. The man admitted that erectile-dysfunction drugs played into his infidelity. “Part of what he said was that he had a Madonna-whore complex and she was the woman who he’d watched give birth to his children. So you take a man who’s middle-aged, who’s lost desire for his wife, and then add Viagra into the mix. I don’t think it justifies his behavior but you can understand him being seduced by it.”

Laura Berman, a sex therapist in Chicago who works on the faculty of Northwestern University, says it gets even more complicated when you deal with women who are post-menopausal and don’t necessarily want to return a husband’s interest.

In many cases it’s hard to blame them.

Study after study shows that American men are getting fatter and fatter, and their ballooning weight hasn’t made them demonstrably more concerned with their partner’s sexual needs, which are different than their own.

According to Berman, women typically take longer than men to reach orgasm (7.5 minutes for men vs. 20 minutes for women, according to one study she cites). And it’s a discrepancy that only increases with time.

Says Berman: “She’s not even warmed up. There’s a disconnect there.”

Or as Judith Regan, the former editor-publisher and purveyor of the tastes of millions of American women, puts it: “I think there’s a lot of women who are married to older men who now have to perform and they find it annoying. They didn’t get married to have sex with these geezers. They married them for money, houses, and companionship. Sex with them is an irritation.” (As Regan sees it, women are “almost” as horny as men, though somewhat more selective about sex.)

Adds Abraham Morgentaler, MD, an associate clinical professor at Harvard Medical School and the author of The Viagra Myth: The Surprising Impact on Love and Relationships: “The pills and treatments have allowed men to regain their sexual abilities and that allows men to be in a different social area and have options they didn’t have before.”

He says that many older men pre-Viagra didn’t stray from their wives when they were unhappy because they lacked self-confidence. If they couldn’t “perform” they thought they were undesirable. “When men feel unable to perform sexually, they are more willing to stay in an unsatisfying relationship, they feel like they don’t have the goods,” he says.

“Men are as faithful as their options,” Regan concludes, adding that there is a bright side to the whole thing. “Without it, rich octogenarians would not marry young women.

“Think of Viagra as a positive for these women. Without it, where is the incentive to buy them clothes, house them in mansions, finance implants and guarantee alimony and child support? Without Viagra these women might have to work at Walmart and forgo botox. What kind of world would that be? Viagra provides financial security to hundreds of otherwise largely unemployable women. It's a beautiful thing.”

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Jacob Bernstein is a senior reporter at The Daily Beast. Previously, he was a features writer at WWD and W Magazine. He has also written for New York magazine, Paper, and The Huffington Post.

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