Friday, March 25, 2005
What about Binky?
Like Bob Dole, I’d like to take this moment to talk with you about erectile dysfunction. And prepare yourself, because I’m going to use this embarrassing term several times in rapid succession, just as if I were an advertiser in prime time or during a break in a televised sporting event. Imagine that tire swing and the guy throwing the football. But I have no unseemly confession to make, and nothing to sell you. I’m not pushing the little pill that promises to revive that wished-for peppy feeling—to “keep that spark alive,” as the Viagra ads say, or if you prefer, in the words of the Cialis ads, to prepare you in the event that “a relaxing moment turns into the right moment.” No, just the opposite. Erectile dysfunction, I believe, can be a good thing. Erectile dysfunction can be a blessing of old age, a long-awaited release from the tireless tug of war of sexual attraction, of desire and regret—mostly, of desire.
That chance for freedom has now been ruined for many.
I have a friend—I’ll call him Binky—whose sexual urges drive him to distraction on an hourly basis. Binky was always that way. Now he works in a hip Chicago business connected to style and fashion, and that doesn’t help matters. When I first knew him, Binky waited tables at a large restaurant whose proprietor had a predilection for leggy blondes. Regardless of his luck with the female waitstaff, Binky couldn’t sleep at night. His body raged with desire. The lack of sleep and the constant state of distraction kept him from remembering customer orders and requests. These problems depressed his tips, and poor cash flow prevented him from dating all of his coworkers. The consequent state of frustration made him suffer from one of the dangerous side effects of male enhancement drugs, one they mention on TV but that I probably can’t describe to you over the radio. Suffice it to say that even after four hours of constant suffering, he couldn’t afford to consult a doctor.
At Binky’s current job, his boss passes him over for promotions because he seems to lack ambition. The real problem is that he can’t stop thinking about—you know what. But he tells me that he has begun to slow down just a little and had been looking forward to a late-career burst of productivity, when it dawned on him that male enhancement drugs, which seem to spell salvation for the rest of mankind, will offer him nothing but a free pass on the superhighway to damnation well into his nineties, and he’ll never accomplish anything in life.
Binky once thought that marriage would be the cure-all. He would find a beautiful and fascinating bride, they would have a few children, and he would be forced, if nothing else, to concentrate his efforts on earning enough money to keep the whole operation afloat. It didn’t work. He was a responsible father and, for quite a while, a faithful husband, but none of that mattered. He couldn’t turn off the desiring machine, and that was the real problem. “It’s not about sex,” he told his wife. Not even a monastery on the inaccessible slopes of Mount Atlas would have helped, because there, even as he sat alone in his room with a crust of bread, all the voluptuous demons would have danced naked or in costume on the tables of his mind.
And now comes Viagra. Not so long ago, old men could be written off as worn out, harmless—bluffers at best, mere flirts—moneybags, maybe. That sounds sad. But as a young man, you understood that they were, at long last, masters of their own bodies. At last, the rider rode the horse and was free to look about him and choose his way. You could see, as your own stallion galloped past, the contented look of a man who was free to love the people around him. But give him that pill and the horse bolts. I said to Binky, “When the time comes, just don’t take the pill.” “But I’ll want it,” he said. “That’s the hell of it.”
You know, it’s not that I don’t see the value of these new drugs. But when I see the youngish male models on television exulting in their restored powers, I want to say, “Good for you! But what about Binky?”