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Among the three sources considered here, Newsweek was the first to mention Viagra. In his September 1996 article “Attention: Aging Men,” I Geoffrey Cowley explores the burgeoning market of structures, elixirs, injections, and concoctions available (or being developed) in order to perpetuate signifiers of masculine youth. His article reveals the extent to which hormone treatments and cosmetic surgery for aging male baby boomers have bedorne big business. Order viagra, of course, is not the only technological solution for erectile dysfunction, but it is widely available, cheap, and subtle. Many of the early articles surveyed cast a blight on the alternatives, all but dismissing them as cumbersome, costly, and, perhaps most damnable, unromantic. Before Viagra came along, a number of devices-developed by what would be considered legitimate medical industries-treated erectile dysfunction. Testosterone therapies, vacuum treatments, penile implants, prostheses, pumps, and pharmaceutical injections and suppositories have all claimed to successfully treat ED. “Success” here is relative. Viagra’s success rate (depending on who does the reporting) has ranged from 45 to 90 percent. The alternatives claim a similar rate of success. Nonetheless, the language in these news stories all but dismisses the value of these devices and/or their legitimacy.

In a November 1997 Newsweek article titled “A Pill for Impotence,” John Leland writes, “Until recently, the only options would havq involved body-shop mechanics, either a surgical implant or a pump of the sort advertised in the back of men’s magazines.”18 In this example, the mpntion of body shops and men’s magazines gives an underworld if not “uriderclass” quality to a particularly sophisticated surgical procedure and a noninvasive, comparatively inexpensive, and successful mechanism. Each produces and sustains erections. By comparison, “Viagra is something very different,” writes Douglas Martin in a May 1998 article for the New York Timks, “much easier to use than previous generations of suppositories, injections) and vacuum pumps. “19 The appeal ofViagra is in its purported simplicity: just take a single pill and wait thirty minutes for an erection. No surgeons, no devices. Masculinity is maintained best by reducing the austere architecture to its bare

necessities. Look Ma, no hands.

In this example, from U.S. News & World Report) it is the patient (rather than the author of the story, the physician, or the pharmaceutical company) who rebuffs the use of surgical procedures or machinelike devices to restore his erectile function.

The doctor said [the patient] could try mechanical contrivances like a vacuum cuff of pump. Or he could have bendable rods surgically implanted. Or, using a small, !fine needle, he could inject alprostadil, a drug that mimics a natural substance! produced during sexual stimulation, into the penis, to encourage blood flow. [The patient] did not care for any of these options.I?

Is it any fonder men don’t enjoy going to the doctor? These other therapies “act” upon the would-be user. Moreover, in order to be effective, these remedies Imust exert force on the male body, as Jane Brody writes in the New YOrk Times, There II are half a dozen other effective remedies. But unlike the others, Viagra is a pill, ,making it a far simpler and more discreet remedy than its rivals, which indude drugs injected or inserted into the penis and devices implanted and injected [my ernphasisj.