Getting Viagravated!

By Charles W. Moore

Some 30 years ago I thought the late Malcolm Muggeridge had gone off his rocker when he declared that modern Western society was "the most horrible and degraded that ever existed on earth...," that we had "established a deliberate system of promiscuity...," and that: "The purpose of [sex] is procreation, the justification of it is love; if you separate sex from procreation and love, very rapidly you turn it into a horror." Lately, I'm more inclined to agree with him.

A case in point is the mania over availability of Viagra in Canada. Last year, when Viagra hit pharmacy shelves south of the border, you couldn't pick up a magazine, open a newspaper, or watch the T.V. news without encountering yet another story about the wonder drug for sagging libidos. Now it's "deja vu all over again" here in Canada. If you ever doubted our culture's pathological obsession with sex, doubt no more. As TIME put it, "Could there be a product more tailored to the easy-solution-loving, sexually insecure psyche than this one?"

The whole phenomenon strikes me as sad and pathetic. Has society really become so intellectually vapid and undignified that it can get into this much of a lather over a pharmaceutical sexual aid? One is left pondering the significance of vast numbers of lives so conceptually impoverished that the sex act looms that large in their sense of priority. The sheer banality of it all is tiresome and depressing.

It has been said that "If a man isn't a socialist at 20, he has no heart; if he is still a socialist at 40, he has no mind." We might paraphrase that thought to read: "If a man is preoccupied with sex at age 20, he's probably normal; if he's still preoccupied with sex at 40, he never grew up."

Evidently, arrested adolescence is pandemic in our culture. Canadian men are flocking to drugstores in droves, eager to cough up $15 per fix of Pfizer's pharmaceutical falsie.

"Sexual freedom has led to erotomania hitherto undreamed of," Muggeridge wrote presciently in 1969. "Sex is the mysticism of materialist society, with its own... sacred texts and scriptures -- the erotica which fall like black atomic rain on the just and unjust alike, drenching us, blinding us, stupefying us. To be carnally minded is life"

Today, the notion of free recreational sex is rarely challenged -- certainly not by the popular media. It is taken for granted that college students will have active sex lives, and the same assumption is increasingly made about high school children. In terms of liberal-humanist ideology, there is no legitimate rationale to impose legal or social restraints on anyone's voluntary sexual expression, to inhibit their unlimited "right" to enjoy pleasurable experiences, so it is regarded as egregiously unfair, even tragic, when the vicissitudes of age and physical infirmity pour proverbial cold water on the bacchanal.

Viagra-induced coital bliss is not without its hazards, however. There have been deaths related to use of the drug, especially in men on nitroglycerin medication for cardiovascular disease. Lesser side-effects include headaches, visions problems and blackouts. Reportedly, some men are so desperate for sex that they don't care. "I've had a lot of patients say, 'If I have to go, that's the way I want to go out,'" commented Dr. Ira Sharlip of the American Urological Association.

"Men value sexuality over general health. They are going to have this regardless of the consequences." said Dr. William Steers, urology chairman at the University of Virginia.

In more than a few cases, Viagra-"rejuvenated" older men have left their wives of similar age to take up with younger women or prostitutes. On the other hand, one wife (in Italy I think) reportedly committed suicide because her Viagra- fortified husband wouldn't leave her alone.

Many toxic symptoms of postmodern culture are traceable to the ethos that unconstrained sex is an adequate means of achieving satisfaction: infidelity, promiscuity, teenage sex, prostitution, extramarital pregnancy; sexual abuse of children; rape; pornography and "erotica"; rampant homosexuality; AIDS and other sexually transmitted diseases; epidemic marriage breakdown; popular culture's prurient sex-mongering. Sex Addicts Anonymous has 490 chapters in the United States and 27 in Canada.

Family "values," so to speak, informed by religious principles, cultural tradition, behavioral taboos, and the rule of law, design to keep human sexual expression within healthy boundaries. A wise Anglican bishop friend of mine observes: "The sex act should be the dessert in a multi-course meal that includes veggies and whole grains too -- not sensual junk food that quickly becomes addictive and fails to nourish the body or the soul."

And if you're over 50, as 80 percent of Viagra clients reportedly are, and need a chemical to jump-start your libido, chances are nature is telling you to cut down on those sexual calories.

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