Anastasia of Sexualité has an interesting post on an unexpected-to-me consequence of the introduction to Viagra.

...However, just when sexual therapists have prepared to put down their diplomas and clean up their offices, the wide use of the blue pill seems to have spawned female patients, majority of them partners of avid Viagra users.

These females are now rushing in despair to their sex therapists to get an explanation as to why this little blue pill can arouse her husband when she could not no matter what she did.  A lot of questions along the same line of thought are now being discussed in the privacy of the offices of sexual therapists.

It appears that Viagra has not really displaced the sexual therapists after all.There was only a change of clients, from the male species suffering the erectile dysfunction symptoms to the female species who are suffering from busted egos and insecurities.

She said it here.

The good news is I’m guessing that to the extent women are concerned about this a sex therapist can probably help them work it out in very short order.

1) On the one hand, as the sex class men are indoctrinated to value themselves in direct proportion to their ability to, well, be sexual. On the other hand men, assumed by heteronormativity to be the ideal against which all other sexuality is measured, learn almost nothing about how thoroughly enjoyable sex without penetration can be. Consequently we tend to back off, sometimes sharply, from all sexual activity if we’re even afraid we might not “perform.”

2) The kind of erectile dysfunction that Viagra treats has a lot more to do with anatomy than psychology. Yes, it won’t make you have an erection if you’re not at least somewhat organically aroused (for that you need something really direct like Caverject) but it’s main effect is on the cardiovascular system, not the brain.

3) Consequently if someone (the article says women but obviously it could be any partner of a man with erection difficulties) is beating him or herself up about desirability in the face of Viagra they’re doing so unnecessarily. Between the psychological self-defeat of erection difficulty on the one hand, and the benefit of anxiety relief due to Viagra’s hydraulic effect, it’s just hard to see why a caring and/or sympathetic partner needs to feel responsible for prior difficulties.

4) But that’s with caring partners. Side B of Viagra, though, is that as the sex class men are expected to be able and willing to have sex even when other considerations that would be seen as reasonable libido-suppressors in women — things like stress, alienation, or alienation of affection, for instance… or even maybe pressure from a partner for sex! And the advent of Viagra undermines the excuse of physiology.

I know, I know, as the no-sex class heterosexual women are never supposed to have desires unless their partners initiate it but… um, yeah, about that. But a) almost everything we “know” about sex we know about people between roughly ages 15 and 30 but after about age 40 everything we “know” starts becoming even less true, and b) nothing anybody has ever said, anywhere, about libido imbalances and its consequences has required that the imbalance be men high, women low. So…

5) As reality continues to intrude on our still-rigid definitions of masculinity and femininity and who’s “supposed” to initiate, I’m guessing that sex therapists are going to begin seeing even less expected and also more serious confrontations arising from greater availability of drugs like Viagra.