Reporting for IPS, Johanna Son paints a sharp picture of how gender and sexual ideology combined with conservative and religious forces oppose two sexual health technologies in a controversial fight.

“Why is Viagra so desired and condoms so repulsive in many cultures?” asks Michael Tan a reproductive health activist and chair of the University of the Philippines anthropology department.

Paradoxically, whilst one is broadly accepted socially for improving and extending male’s sexual performance, that’s Viagra, the other is shunned away for encouraging promiscuity. Whilst one is an essential tool in the fight against HIV, that’s condom, the other, which gives a second sexual life to many over 50 and is often used in combination with recreational drugs, contributes to fuelling the epidemic.

The difference extend to the legislator and Son quoting Tan noted that “the U.S. Food and Drug Administration took six months to approve Viagra in 1998, but four years to give its approval for the abortion pill. In Japan, authorities approved Viagra for public use in a few months, but it had taken 35 years to approve the use of the oral contraceptive for women.” And several years for the second-generation female condom to be approved by the FDA, even after being approved by the WHO.

Two tools, both implicated for good and bad with sexual activity, could not be so far apart if it wasn’t for gender, religious, and cultural values that put Man’s pleasure and requirement to perform and reproduce at the centre of a paradox that make the less vital for public health more acceptable and accepted.

Can the mild indifference that surrounds the use and promotion of Viagra from all corners of the civil society and the polity be explained by deeply rooted values that would even pervade the strongest bleeding heart liberal?

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