Viagra sales high but sex talk still taboo in India

PILLOW TALK: Indian sexuality has made some headway out of the closet but still has a long way to go.

          

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Ten years and still going strong, Viagra has celebrated a decade of controversial existence.

The popularity of the wonder drug has been so immense that it has been prescribed — according to some estimates — to over 30 million men worldwide.

In India, Pfizer has sold more than 18 lakh tablets, but that appears to be an extremely small portion of the 19 million men who suffer from Erectile Dysfunction. It can be thus considered that even in this age of globalisation, when prudery is increasingly being considered a thing of the past, Indians still appear to be in denial of their sexual problems.

The question that was being debated on CNN-IBN's Face the Nation was —10 years of Viagra: Are Indians in denial of sexual problems?

Discussing the issue were advertising guru Alyque Padamsee; Editor, Marie Claire, Shefali Vasudev; urologist and andrologist, Dr Ajit Saxena.

Let’s talk about sex, baby

Indian men used to be shy and embarrassed and would not even talk about sexual dysfunction, leave alone addressing it, something which could save a number of marriages. Though such matters are still enshrouded in secrecy, the trends now appear to be changing to some extent.

Dr Amit Saxena agreed and acknowledged Viagra to be the cause.

"I think one of Viagra’s biggest contributions is that it has made people realise that sexual dysfunction is a disease like any other and therefore it needs to be treated. We had penile prostheses, we had implants in the past, but very few people knew about it. Now with Viagra, people are coming out into the open and talking about it,” he explained.

Saxena added that there is also a growing trend of women bringing their partners to andrologists.

Viagra comes out of the closet

The anxiety about performance, the ambit of male sexuality, all these are part of being the mard, the masculine figure. There is an apprehension about drugs like Viagra that they are seen seen as a fundamental assault on masculinity and machismo.

Alyque Padamsee agreed that such a case was indeed true. He said, “Viagra is talked about in drawing rooms, just as the condom is talked about and as earlier, the Pill was talked about."