Sexual healing
Alice Cairns
12/09/98
South China Morning Post
2
Page 19
For many years, impotence was not taken seriously by the medical profession, mainly because doctors were too embarrassed. The few who did try to do research sometimes had their papers on the subject turned down by medical journals.
Sufferers brave enough to try and discuss the problem with their doctors were usually fobbed off and told to resign themselves to an unavoidable condition.
Today, a pill called Viagra that is supposed to cure the problem in one dose has become the fastest-selling drug ever. Researchers in the subject are no longer the pariahs of their profession, but much-envied pioneers.
Last week, an American production company chronicled the alternative therapies available pre- Viagra . Tonight, the BBC's Horizon programme Sexual Chemistry traces the history of the drug (Pearl, 11.05pm).
So much for Americans being the ones who like to bare all and the British being reserved; unlike last week's programme, this one is not afraid to show the main subject of the documentary, the penis, close-up and in detail. This straightforwardness makes the problem much less personal.
In the American programme, we saw each impotence patient undergoing treatment from the neck up only.
Here, all we see is from the abdomen down, and this makes it far easier to agree with the basic premise of Viagra treatment, that erectile dysfunction is mainly a physical not a psychological problem.
Until doctors began to accept that this was the case, there wasn't much chance they would find a way to sort out the problem. As the voice-over (by the great British actress Juliet Stevenson) puts it, "For a long time, when the penis went wrong, it was not treated liked any other part of the body."
The trouble with Viagra 's astonishing success is it shows that although, of course, the penis is just another part of the body, the way patients feel about that particular part is not strictly comparable with other bits of the anatomy.
It is hard to imagine men besieging their doctors and pharmacists to get a pill that could help the deaf and people with normal hearing become as sharp-eared as bats.
In the second, more interesting half of the programme the attention turns to a far more controversial subject than male impotence: sexual dysfunction in women. Erectile dysfunction is, at least, pretty easy to recognise. With women, quite often even the patients themselves don't recognise the early physical manifestations of desire.
Apparently one-third of women experience a lack of desire at some point. At a recent conference in the United States on women's sexuality, the experts couldn't even agree whether or not this was a problem at all.
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