Last summer, I was casually dating a 32-year-old magazine editor. (I’ll call him Steve.) He was healthy, in shape, and his dick worked fine. For the most part. When we were alone, there were never any issues, but then once, during a foursome with another couple, it just wasn’t happening. He said the presence of another guy was “distracting,” and he spent most of the evening watching idly from the sidelines. I took it as a one-off, until a couple months later, when the same thing happened. We were at a sex party, and a hot blonde was about to give him a blow job, when (allegedly) some guy across the room gave him a thumbs-up, triggering a literal boner-kill. In the cab home, annoyed, I yelled, “Ugh, sort your life out and get some Viagra!” He looked at me, heartbroken, like he’d just been offered a senior-citizen discount. Little did I know, I created a monster.
Last week, out of the blue, I got a text from Steve, who is now my ex. “Hey babe, I took your advice,” he said. “Why don’t you come over and help me test out my Viagra.” How romantic. Steve later explained that it actually wasn’t me, but rather his young, studly mechanic who convinced him to start taking erective dysfunction drugs. The whole thing sounds very homoerotic. “My mechanic swears by Viagra,” Steve said. “He’s in his late 20s, drives a Ferrari, and is on Tinder and all that. He told me he takes just a little bit every time he has sex. There’s nothing wrong with him, and everything down there works, but he just likes the reassurance.” Steve now emulates his Ferrari-driving mechanic and takes a small dose before every sexual encounter, explaining that he feels “like Superman.”
This is not uncommon, it turns out. Erectile dysfunction drugs—Viagra, Cialis, and Levitra, namely—are now among the most commonly prescribed, and abused, drugs in America. For years, Viagra and its competitors were associated mostly with the smiling silver foxes in those creepy TV commercials full of unsubtle innuendo (a man chopping wood, etc.), and, for the most part, erectile dysfunction was a taboo subject, one that men, who pride themselves on virility, preferred not to discuss. But in recent years, studies show, it’s become a thing for young men to take these drugs recreationally—without a prescription, and without any real symptoms of chronic ED. They’re not using the drugs to get an erection, but to supercharge their erection—to get harder for longer—or to combat the unfortunate effects a night of partying is known to have on one’s boner.
The stigma is waning, too. Just ask your local street pharmacologist for his deal on the Klonopin-Adderall-Viagra variety pack. I’ve personally watched two guys pop an ED pill in bed over the past few years, one in his twenties, the other in his early thirties, and both after long nights of drinking. Steve gets his Viagra through some sketchy online pharmacy, but this is just one of many illicit ways people get erective dysfunction drugs these days. Another is to purchase counterfeit, unregulated pills online.
What has caused this shift? And what are the long term sexual effects of taking ED drugs recreationally, before you really need them? I recently discussed this development with a 40-year-old male writer friend of mine, who was immediately critical. “Young guys today grew up watching porn, so they think their dick has to be rock hard from the moment they start fooling around, until the moment they cum,” he said. “If they go soft for even a couple minutes, it’s devastating. They don’t think of it as an opportunity to give head, or even to just stop and kiss for a minute.” Realistically, he said, it’s normal to waver between being hard, semi-hard, and temporarily soft over the course of a sex session. “It’s natural to go a bit soft sometimes, especially if you’re taking your time and enjoying the experience. No one has ever taught these guys that, and you never seen someone even semi-hard in porn.”
I found this explanation plausible. It’s common knowledge that porn has become a ubiquitous source of sex education for young people today. Porn is the most commonly cited culprit when it comes to the misrepresentation of female pleasure—you know, those theatrical, for-the-benefit-of-the-guy orgasms that female pornstars have onscreen. But porn may also set an unrealistic standard for men, in terms of penis size and performance: No softies make the final edit. And in recent years, as the porn superstar James Deen has explained to Salon, Viagra has become a staple on porn sets. “Nowadays it’s completely standard for guys to show up with their pills and say, ‘Gimme a 30-minute warning for the scene,’” he said. “When I first started, guys were like, ‘If you can’t do it without it, you shouldn’t be doing it at all.’”
“What I don’t like about a lot of the performers who are pharmaceutically assisted is that a lot of the passion is missing,” Deen went on. “They kind of have sex like robots. Their scenes will be emotionless, and I just don’t like emotionless sex.”
A young female friend of mine agrees strongly with this last sentiment. This friend, a 26-year-old photographer I’ll call Claire, is sleeping with a guy in his mid-thirties who’s a bit too obsessed with Viagra, in her opinion. “I was surprised he takes Viagra,” she told me, “because he’s in really good shape, he bikes daily and goes sailing, and he’s just really boyish looking. But the first time we had sex, he had a huge sheet of pills. He was constantly hard for three hours, and every time we had sex, thirty seconds after he came, he’d want to go again.”
Claire said he was popping the pills like candy, almost every half hour. “Eventually I was like, ‘Can I have some?’” she said. “So he gave me half a pill. I thought, because Viagra increases blood flow to the genitals, that I’d at least be pulsing down, but I just felt flushed and dizzy, and my sinuses really stuffed up. I felt like I was getting a cold, which he told me sometimes happens to him, too.”
Claire also felt that her fuck-buddy being so “up” on ED meds interrupted the natural flow of sex, similar to what James Deen described. “Sure, it’s good if he can stay hard, but there’s no momentum,” she said. “It never ends, and it’s not real. It’s like riding a statue.”
While it’s great that ED meds are gradually being destigmatized for the people who really need them—there’s a lot of pressure on men to be virile and sexually competent, and taking ED meds should never feel emasculating—the magical blue pill is not without its downsides, especially when abused. Young men taking these drugs to supercharge their boners, beware: studies show that recreational use of ED meds can lead to dependency issues, and may increase the risk of erectile dysfunction for psychological reasons. Basically, you can become physically dependant on Viagra, and then, if and when you don’t have access to the drug, you get nervous that you won’t be able to perform as well, psych yourself out, and potentially don’t get hard at all. Bummer. So if you’re tempted to fuck like Superman, think about the long game. And remember that sex isn’t as appealing when it’s mechanical. Having sex with a robot may hold appeal to some, but when you’re with a person, you want the experience to be genuinely passionate. Vulnerability is what makes sex powerful.
Karley Sciortino writes the blog Slutever.
Hair and Makeup: Ingeborg
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