When a commercial for a male enhancement drug came on the other night while my family and I were watching television, my 10-year-old daughter said, “They shouldn’t show that on TV.”
Mildly dismayed, we asked her why. “You know,” she replied coyly. When we prodded, she added that the advertised product made a man “bigger” and “stronger” in the be+++room.
When I was 10 years old, I thought women got pregnant from kissing. My daughter already knows how babies are “made” and what options men can pursue to bolster their procreative capacities. So much for the birds and bees speech.
I’m concerned – or at least feel like I should be – but I don’t know what to do about it. There’s no sense in humbugging or sanctimoniously speculating about what the world is coming to. My wife and I don’t believe in sheltering our children, and we don’t think they’re better off home-schooled or forbidden to watch TV. There are some dangerous and disturbing things out there, but we don’t believe in pretending otherwise. We think it’s better for our kids to have some idea of what’s going on rather than being naïve.
The fact that young kids know about penis enlargement and extra boom-boom in the bedroom is disconcerting, but I don’t know why we were surprised. It’s almost impossible for our kids not to notice, since the ads for and news about this stuff are everywhere.
Not long ago, Rush Limbaugh was busted at the Palm Beach International Airport for turning up with a bottle of Viagra without a prescription after a stag binge in the Dominican Republic. During the recent presidential campaign, a brouhaha occurred when a McCain spokeswoman said birth control pills should be covered by health insurance just like erectile dysfunction treatments. McCain waffled, and Bill O’Reilly led the charge in his defense, claiming that drugs like Viagra address a medical condition and birth control pills do not. And then we learned that the CIA is doling out Viagra as part of our War on Terror.
It used to be that when we heard the acronym “IED” it referred to an “improvised explosive device,” probably in Iraq. Now, in Afghanistan, the acronym signifies something else altogether. It stands for “inverted erectile dysfunction,” and apparently it’s the most successful tactic the CIA has found for winning the hearts and minds (and loins) of local Muslims – or at least, Muslim men.
Aging Afghan patriarchs with several wives are now our anxious allies. If a chieftain or patriarch has an erection lasting more than four hours, one assumes, they just add more wives or call their local CIA “mojo” huckster for a pass to the nearest U.S. military hospital.
It is said that the average man thinks about sex once every six or seven seconds, and I admit that there was a decade (or maybe two) where I probably fit that description. As a youngish 40-something, I still enjoy sex and don’t need pharmaceutical props, but I’m glad the topic is no longer a 24/7 obsession. I’d like to think I’ve evolved or at least crossed a threshold that permits me to occupy my brain with more substantive matters. I suspect I am a better man (and certainly a better human being) for it.
And with my now multi-tracked mind I say that when my daughter finally comes of age, I hope that impotent blowhards will no longer be running the Republican Party, that birth control options for the young will be afforded the same political urgency as the fading libidos of their elders, and that our country will no longer be peddling “sexual steroids” to chauvinistic warlords as a way to gain allies.
Then perhaps my grandchildren will be able to watch television without being bombarded by the trials and tribulations of modern phallus worship.
Local freelance writer E. R. Bills can be contacted at erbillsink@yahoo.com.
