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Sexualities, Vol. 9, No. 3, 315-332 (2006)
DOI: 10.1177/1363460706065055

Spreading the Word, but What Word is That? Viagra and Male Sexuality in Popular Culture

Tiina Vares

University of Canterbury, Christchurch New Zealand

Virginia Braun

University of Auckland, New Zealand

Viagra was released in 1998 and, as Abraham Morgentaler so aptly wrote in his book The Viagra Myth (2003), ‘the world has not been the same since’. Representations of Viagra appeared in a variety of popular cultural and media texts and participated in the ‘craze’ known as ‘Viagramania’. Drawing on, and extending the work of Meika Loe, The Rise of Viagra (2004) in the United States, we explore some of the changes in depictions of Viagra and masculine sexualities in the New Zealand context under the framings: ‘Viagra-as-Joke’, ‘Legitimate Viagra’ (which includes ‘Romance Drug Viagra’ and ‘Masculinity Pill Viagra’), and ‘Party Pill Viagra’. We suggest that changes in popular portrayals of Viagra from 1998 to the present, as well as a decrease in the range of popular genres/forms in which Viagra appears, contribute to a narrowing in discourses of masculine sexuality in which the emphasis is increasingly on penile performance and enhancement.

Key Words: masculinity • popular culture • representation • sexuality • Viagra


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