Viagra hard confinement
Shortly after Viagra debut, dozens of news stories surfaced that addressed the possible risks of taking the drug.83 Although the willingness to endure side effects lies somewhere on the continuum of risk - taking behavior, risking death must surely occupy the extrerne.w Within a couple of months of Viagra online release, news stories addressed the allegations that some Viagra users had underestimated the risks involved when combining sexual exertion and a weak heart. More problematically, a significant number ofViagra users died within hours of taking the popular new pill. This news - aggressively downplayed by Pfizer - prompted headlines like “Dying for Sex” in U.S. News & World Report, “Just How Safe Is Sex?” in Newsweek, and, most emphatically, “Six Taking Viagra Die” in the New York Times. But even as the drug’s safety record raises questions, there is a rhetoric in these news stories that distinguishes between legitimate and illegitimate risk among Viagra users. This rhetoric, I will argue, divides risk into either (a) legitimate or anticipated risk - risk that is approved as characteristic of hegemonic male norms and expectations; or (b) illegitimate or unanticipated risk - risk that is contrary to hegemonic male norms and is, in fact, suggestive of subordinate masculinities.
By July 1998 - barely three months after Viagra’s release - the FDA had received reports of seventy - seven deaths.sf Major side effects occurred by the hundreds, according to the FDA, including nonfatal heart attacks, strokes, and impaired vision. Even as the public was made aware of these side effects, Pfizer’s consumers revealed their biases. In Newsweek a sixty - four - year - old Maryland man remarks with characteristic masculine bravado, “I think about [the risk]. But the tradeoff is worth it.”86 In the New York Times a man opines, “Some of these old guys will drop dead from it. ”
In a May 1998 New York Times article, Jane Brody reports how “in the wave of enthusiasm surrounding this drug over the last two months, many physicians and their patients have ignored its limitations and side effects” and that “millions of sufferers are likely to forsake caution.”88 Published some nine months after Viagra came sailing into the harbor of the public’s awareness as the “potency pill,” Shannon Brownlee’s U.S. News & World Report article, “Dying for Sex,”89 encapsulates the casualties attributed to Viagra and intimates the causalities. In particular, Brownlee is suspicious of the methods by which Pfizer managed the drug’s clinical trials and the FDA’s approval process. And by the time her report hit the newsstands, the FDA had confirmed that at least 130 Americans had died after taking Viagra.w Brownlee’s article is not the first among those surveyed to report on Viagra’s impedi - ments, but it is the first to provide critical analysis that points out the possible obliquities practiced by Pfizer Pharmaceuticals and the FDA. Brownlee’s thesis is twofold. She first argues that Pfizer’s clinical trials failed to include patients with heart problems: The company went to full - scale clinical trials, using sildenafil to treat impotence in more than 3,000 men. The researchers were careful to exclude men with serious heart conditions or high blood pressure, or those who had had a stroke or heart attack in the past six months.
The second part of her thesis is that the FDA moved too quickly in approving Viagra, without its usual and necessary precautions: “The drug’s approval came just as Congress was concluding four years of congressional pressure on the FDA to approve drugs - even lifestyle - enhancing drugs - more quickly.”92 Brownlee’s article is supported by illuminative expert testimony. The rebuttals provided by Pfizer, however, are the most revealing; Pfizer is shameless in its refusal of accountability.
