How Viagra changed the way the world thought and talked about sex

In the annals of the frustrating fight against impotence, men have ingested rhino horn dust, performed elaborate dances, employed vacuum hydraulics, and chanted what one historian called “protective spells” that went like this: “Get excited! Get excited! Get an erection!”

But none of those remedies were as successful – or crazy – as what one doctor did at a urological conference in 1983. Before presenting his research to hundreds of doctors, Giles Brindley injected – yes, injected – his penis with papaverine (which caused an erection). On stage, he dropped his trousers to demonstrate the results.

“There was not a sound in the room,” a urologist recalled in a scientific journal. “Everyone had stopped breathing.”

It is quite possible that audience members, having “dispersed in a state of flabbergasted disarray,” did not exhale for another 15 years, when federal regulators approved Viagra – the little blue pill that made it a little easier, and certainly less humiliating, for men to make everything work as intended.

Viagra, approved 20 years ago on March 27, 1998, became a pharmaceutical and cultural phenomenon at a very odd moment – amid former US President Bill Clinton’s sex scandal involving intern Monica Lewinsky, when one of Clinton’s fiercest and oldest political enemies, Bob Dole, the conservative Republican senator from Kansas became an evangelist for the drug.

“Dole may have lost the presidential election,” Meika Lee wrote in The Rise of Viagra, “but this time he returned victorious,” capturing the country’s attention – and late night TV jokes – as “the one bringing respectable sexuality back to America and American politics.”