MAN'S GREATEST SECRET REVEALED! AND WITH FATHER'S LITTLE HELPER, HE'S GOING TO BEHAVE BETTER FROM NOW ON, RIGHT?
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"Then I tried to rape her again. In terms of pure technique, of rape knowhow, my second bid was a definite improvement on my first. Different class, really. This time I came at her from behind a writhing, wriggling rush. The element of surprise took a more central role here, because Selina was fast asleep at the time. You don't get much more surprisable than that. Having learned the night's lessons, I did the rape-smart thing: I flattened her body and prised her legs apart with my own in a reverse-tweezer action. It worked, too. Fabulous, I said to myself. She's utterly at my mercy. Brilliant. All I need now is a hard-on ..."

-- Martin Amis, "Money"

Relax. Martin Amis is only describing, in rather noir terms, a farcical moment in a bad night that involves two consenting adults. You can look it up.

Direct your attention, rather, to the last eight words of Amis' heartfelt internal monologue. He is speaking of those very private and special moments when, what with one thing or another, boys cannot quite manage to be boys. The whole unspoken tragedy was caught in nonfiction terms by the Hollywood reporter Vernon Scott, who once interviewed a tearful Marilyn Monroe in the Beverly Hills Hotel:

"Once in a while I meet a nice guy, a really nice guy, and I know it's going to work ... And we have a few drinks, and we go to bed. Then I see his eyes glaze over and I can see it going through his mind: 'Oh my God, I'm going to f--k Marilyn Monroe,' and he can't get it up."

I can think of at least two reasons why this most delicate of subjects has not heretofore been seen as fit material for Page One. The first is that impotence was men's greatest secret. The second is that it was one of womanhood's greatest secrets. But now, with a pharmaceutical magic bullet, it's a condition that can be cured, and therefore it's out in the open. The Viagra factor alters the whole equation.

Among the innumerable reasons to scorn the creationists' "argument from design" is that no intelligent, let alone loving, Creator could possibly have "designed" the male reproductive system in its current form. We, the paragon of animals, the Mister Monster, have always been acutely aware that our own boss, this tiny megalomaniacal tyrant, might fail to turn up. Erections were less wondrous works of the Almighty and more like cops: often there when you emphatically didn't require them and sometimes absent when you did. I once knew a woman who recounted a sexual episode with one of the totally famous studs of our time. "And how was it?" I inquired diffidently. "Oh," she replied with an air, "a bit like trying to get an oyster into a parking meter." Or, as Amis puts it elsewhere in "Money," "They're very difficult. They're not at all easy. That's why they're called hard-ons."

Richard Pryor is the only public performer I can think of who ever made a joke about this calamity occurring, not to someone else, but to himself. His riff on "whose dick is this" was a barn-burner. But the mirth was edgy and nervous. The same with the porter's scene at the opening of "Macbeth," where the greatest plumber of human nature wrote some lines about the sorry effects of drink: "Provokes the desire but takes away the performance ... Makes [a man] stand-to, and not stand-to." One of Shakespeare's permanent themes is the fragility and impermanence of kingship; in these verses he stepped aside to satirize the very hydraulics of patriarchy. As they say in the theater, there are no small parts -- only small players.

Ten years ago, Hugh Drummond, Hippocratic correspondent for Mother Jones, wrote an essay on the medically generated sure-fire erection. The technology was then at the prototype stage, with various wrinkly prosthetics on offer, but Dr. Drummond wrote a hugely "sensitive" piece on what he saw as a looming danger. Ponce de León's search for the Fountain of Youth, the savagery of the spice trade and therefore of slavery, the exploration of the isthmus for the properties of chocolate -- he read off the whole history of imperial expansion as a metaphor for the quest for a sturdier member. But this admonition against phallocracy was, I thought, one-sided. Men may seem insufferable when they are confident, but they do not behave better when they are sexually insecure. The grotesque element in pornography, and the subtext of a lot of fascistic propaganda about ruthless maledom, is deeply connected to the fear of exposure in this regard. It's often found in the evidence of rape victims who have been assaulted and defiled in every way but one. One of the many assailants of the Central Park jogger, who had been defiled in every way imaginable, admitted in court that he had to feign his manly role.

Writing in a mocking vein about Viagra in the New York Times, Maureen Dowd yearned aloud for a pill that men might take that would change their chemistry an hour after sex. I think she mentioned flowers, phone calls, tenderness. Yes, yes, by all means. But perhaps she misses the hidden value of unexpected, unwanted failure. As Dr. Drummond wrote, "Maybe the capacity for impotence was all that was left of a certain critical vulnerability for the male ego. And maybe the capacity to accept that vulnerability was the last hope for a certain kind of humanity."

Perhaps this is too soft and fuzzy a prose for something so near the core. Men behave badly enough as it is. But will they behave better because of a capsule that, when swallowed an hour before, will give them not just the time but the definite inclination?
SALON | May 11, 1998

Christopher Hitchens is a columnist for Vanity Fair.

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