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Author: Admin | 2025-04-28
Argues valorizes and then sells the opportunity to perform phallocentric, heteronormative embodied masculinity (2002:138). Content analyses of ED drug marketing have demonstrated this process, showing how marketing images pose the drugs as vehicles for hegemonic masculinity and ideal heterosexual romance (Baglia 2005; Wienke 2006). Elizabeth Haiken (2000), a historian of cosmetic surgery, has located ED treatment in the context of cosmetic medical interventions marketed to allay masculine anxiety, such as penile lengthening surgery, male–oriented cosmetic surgery, and surgical and pharmacological treatments for hair loss.Other researchers have interviewed male ED drug users and their sexual partners to shed light on the social ramifications of ED treatment, finding that these medical treatments are often used as ‘masculinity pills,’ but are sometimes subsequently rejected as users craft new, less phallocentric or mechanistic ideals of masculinity (Loe 2004, 2006:31). For instance, Annie Potts interviewed Viagra–takers and their partners in New Zealand, finding great diversity in people’s experiences of both erectile dysfunction and its medical treatment; some completely supported, and others wholly rejected “the idea that erectile difficulties were ‘abnormal’ or ‘dysfunctional’” (2004c:492). Potts argues that individuals’ complex stories challenge the medical model of impotence, as well as the idea that sexual difficulties are concrete disease entities that can unproblematically be fixed with the proper medical treatment. They note that, “there is no standard experience of a ‘functional’ erection, even less so a ‘dysfunctional’ erection” (Potts 2004c:497). Studies of prostate– cancer–related sexual difficulty and its consequences for individuals’ performances of masculinity have come to similar
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