Irish Times - Why we should be the last to see a joke in Viagra
Monday, September 21, 1998
OPINION/Medb Ruane
If Irish society were examined through its film, literary and
media cultures, apart altogether from religious and legislative
mores, a casual observer could only conclude that sex and
sexuality Irish-style occupy a narrow range from the cringingly
awkward to the downright dysfunctional.
And it's not just a question of how the command to "Brace
yourself, Bridget" progressed to the perhaps more
sophisticated invitation "Will you come into the field, Bridie?"
posed in William Trevor's The Ballroom of Romance.
This weekend's bravura outpouring of sometimes amusing
reports wondering whether the anti-impotence treatment
Viagra will become the recreational drug of the late 1990s
pulses tacitly with the entirely unfunny assertion that
pharmacological answers can solve the grittiest aspects of
social and cultural ineptitude. That is not just glib, but in a
country where drink and sex have a long and tortuous
relationship, quite traditionally naive.
Exactly how traditional remains to be seen. With Viagra
licensed by the EU last week, and set to be available in Ireland
before the anniversary of Eamon de Valera's birthday on
October 14th, the State now faces the challenge of identifying a
precise policy on whether and how to democratise sexual
health for men. Its response will also set future precedent for
the female Viagra equivalent which is to start undergoing
clinical trials.
In both Britain and Germany health ministers have enabled
Viagra to maintain its marketing mystique by refusing to allow
its prescription through their respective general medical
services. Had they wished to perpetuate the mistaken belief
that Viagra is an aphrodisiac, they could hardly have picked a
more certain strategy.
The stated reasons for the no-cash-no-pill policy are financial.
But the effect is to remind many impotent men that on the
measures which seem to most reflect a man's sense of identity -
sexual prowess and economic value - they are doubly so.
That sex existed in Eamon de Valera's Ireland is a matter of
record, but on some evidence hard to believe. Looking back,
the culture is in the position of teenage children who find it
difficult to imagine that their own parents ever had sex at all.
No positive images of sex or sexuality present themselves from
those times, which in practice lasted until at least the early
1970s, when Ireland's membership of the EU began to enable
citizens to challenge aspects of restrictive sexual controls for
the first time.
If there was sex in de Valera's Ireland, as we must conclude, it
was officially a practice entirely divorced from pleasure. Until
Ireland joined the EU, the standard response to any means of
artificially assisting or encouraging pleasurable sex and sexuality
was to either ignore it or ban it out of hand.
Public discussion was forbidden. More Pricks Than Kicks, the
1934 book by Samuel Beckett, was banned on the strength of
its title alone, although that came from Jesus's words to St Paul,
"It is hard for thee to kick against the pricks." From then on,
Beckett's heroes became the image of the wholly impotent
man, short on both sexual prowess and economic power. They
went on to help him win the Nobel Prize.
Viagra has won the Pfizer company more free advertising than
it could have imagined, yet Viagra is only a treatment, and one
with limited application, not an answer to society's dreams. But
the debate around sexual dysfunction can stand as metaphor
for civic ease and unease; desire frustrated can image a place
continually inhibited from realising itself.
In the various games of memory dodgems played by writers,
historians and film-makers, the state of the nation is often
measured imaginatively as much by its sexual health and
prowess as by its political or economic power. The
looking-glass picture of sexual discourse that created - apart
from blissful exceptions like Joyce, Merriman and a few others
- tells of desire denied, of sexuality warped by drink or
celibacy or too much child-bearing, and undercut by a sense of
failure, anger and, too often, violence. It is within that specific,
painful, cultural context that the present debate takes place.
The questions in Ireland are only beginning, and already the
debate is losing its focus on the 180,000 men who suffer
impotence at some point in their lives, and live with all the
psychic and social losses that entails. Yet the most remarkable
feature in the debate so far is not the reported maximum
potential cost of œ20 million to the GMS if Viagra prescriptions
are admitted to its scheme, but the news, presented as a virtual
arithmetic footnote, that 162,000 men who are impotent are
not expected to consult their doctors about the condition. On
the evidence so far, they will not be encouraged to do so.
Sexuality is still a sore point in Ireland. Although the culture as
we actually live it has moved on, somewhat, the cultural
memories we share as a series of communities is almost without
exception one of sexual doom and gloom. Ordinary people are
now rewriting the story of sexuality Irish-style, yet the version
which goes public still owes more to the days of old Ireland,
when the country was from most perspectives economically,
socially and culturally impotent.
Those old stories remain familiar. We read almost daily of
appalling abuse and rape cases, we see Patrick Kavanagh's
Tarry Flynn renovated by director Conall Morrison as a
desperate struggle between individual longing and social
conformity; from Kate O'Brien and Neil Jordan to Pat
McCabe and Mary Dorcey, harrowing tales of repression
track the consequences of unsanctioned desire.
The link in this uniquely Irish chain of being is Mr Brian Cowen,
Minister for Health, whose function in the current Viagra
debate is uncomfortably close to that of the parish priest at a
dancehall in 1950s Ireland. He now has the power to influence
who may or may not make love, who may or may not
experience human intimacy. And all for the cost of the
Government grant to the GAA at Croke Park.
If the Minister decides to adapt a no-pay-no-pill policy,
Beckett's worst fears about the mythical impotency drug
Bando, expressed in the novel IT]Watt, will resonate
uncomfortably, linking past with present with a continuity no
one can welcome.
"For the State, taking as usual the law into its own hands, and
duly indifferent to the sufferings of thousands of men, and tens
of thousands of women, all over the country, has seen fit to
place an embargo on this admirable article, from which joy
could stream, at a moderate cost, into homes, and other places
of rendezvous, now desolate."
Desolate indeed. |
