Mike Ditka wants to help you score

Well, not anymore. When Viagra came on the scene ED still seemed like an embarrassing ailment, largely because Pfizer hired an old, cold guy like Bob Dole to spread the love. Now the onslaught of ED ads -- and their fierce competition to one-up each other -- has (accidentally) exposed a glaring truth that many of us liked to ignore while zoning out in our living rooms: Men drink too much beer. Sexual malfunction ensues. Hence the purchasing of automobiles to compensate for chronically flaccid penises. Which, well ... just doesn't quite do the trick.

The executives at Pfizer, GlaxoSmithKline, and Eli Lilly have (unwittingly) pulled off a vaguely feminist agenda: a national unearthing of male vulnerability, and not just among super-sensitive urban types; they've exposed the (literal) soft spots of those stoic dudes in the middle of the country as well. The toughest, most challenging men to reach when it comes to such persnickety issues are now ready to ask for help en masse. They're admitting that, truth be told, they're not the bedroom stallions they've been purporting to be.

Which is kind of endearing, actually.

It's also important. The very fact that these ads are so omnipresent highlights a barely hidden subtext of their overall goal: These drugs are being marketed not only to those men who need them, but to those who merely want a little extra help in the erectile department, too. (I'm in my 20s, still shaking off my adolescent husk, and I'll admit that I'm a bit curious about Levitra, if only because I developed a slight crush on the impotent guy's girlfriend in the commercial; I'd be embarrassed to tell you this if I didn't think that millions of others feel the same way -- if I didn't open up GQ magazine, which is these days aggressively targeting men my age, and see a "test drive" of both Cialis and Levitra.)

Of course, the companies won't confess that they're selling lifestyle drugs, but the whole trick is that they won't ever need to. Zoloft, after all, entered the market as a drug for the clinically depressed, the sort of pill swallowed by your fragile friend who only listened to the Smiths and talked constantly about suicide -- the kind of person (kidding aside) who really needed help. But then last year the drug was quietly approved by the FDA for treating "social anxiety disorder," something that in earlier eras was diagnosed as "shyness" or "sadness," and cured with a prescription of "you'll get over it." The term "erectile dysfunction," meanwhile, is already malleable enough to apply to any penis that acts the slightest bit finicky (e.g. all penises). Zoloft is having enormous success for a simple reason: We humans are a pretty sad lot. Levitra, Cialis, and Viagra are now exposing something else: We humans have pretty tepid sex lives, too.

But is this really just because many of us American men can't get it up anymore? Can it be that simple?

In some cases, yes, it is, and in those instances these drugs are truly wonderful. (I'm sure that if I'm not blessed with, say, Saul Bellow's stamina in my twilight years, I'll probably give one of these pills a go.) When Carole Coupland at Eli Lilly tells me that they interviewed "thousands of men and their partners," with the goal of "helping them become spontaneous again," I must say that I'm genuinely touched. At the same time, I can't help but think these cases are the minority. Though it's unlikely that a study will ever be conducted to support this, my theory is that the majority of men asking their doctors if a free trial is right for them are doing so, in large part, because of a more complicated reason: They're stilted; they have no idea how to communicate what they really want in bed.

Men are a notoriously dense species, but one whose oafish exterior is offset by a jittery undercurrent of wants and needs just as fragile as you find in any female. So maybe what these ads and drugs are surreptitiously pointing out is just how few men really have a grasp on how to express this side of themselves and, with it, their true bedroom wishes.

I'm really not making such a leap here: We are a country where the unabashed force driving all mass media is the concept of sex, whereas anything hinting at actual sex is demonized. Hence the NC-17 rating given to Bernardo Bertolucci's "The Dreamers" because the film shows a close-up of a (flaccid) penis, as if staring straight at that diabolical part of the body would cause untold damage to the same masses being inundated with ads promising turbocharged erections.

Simply stated: When it comes to sex, we are a masturbatory nation, far more comfortable being aroused by thinking about doing it than actually doing it.

Sex, as anyone who has done it knows, is a funny and awkward endeavor, and that's part of what makes it such glorious fun: you feel vulnerable, sliced down the middle, all your pros and cons out on the table, saying: Take it or leave it (but please, please take it). The same way that all of us find ourselves depressed, the fact is that every man, to one degree or another, finds himself at odds with his penis over the course of a sexual life. ("At times the urge intrudes uninvited," St. Augustine wrote during the third century A.D. "At other times, it deserts the panting lover, and, although desire blazes in the mind, the body is frigid.") Maybe the cause is too much booze. Maybe it's fear of wanting something sort of kinky from someone who seems sort of square. Maybe it's being so emotionally overwhelmed that your physicality goes momentarily haywire. What the current onslaught of ED drugs overlooks is that the cause of the "problem" may be more important than the supposed solution, and that embracing, rather than shunning, our vulnerabilities may be as effective as popping pills.

But let's be real: That's an awfully sissy way to look at things, especially when Mike Ditka appears on my TV, yet again, telling me to stop being such a pansy, and to go out there and get a goddamn erection.

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