Jagged Little (Blue) Pill
In April of 2000, Christopher Walken hosted Saturday Night Live. During the show, he would insist that Will Ferrell add “more cowbell” to Blue Oyster Cult’s rendition of “(Don’t Fear) the Reaper”; before that, though, he made an appearance in one of SNL’s satirical ads. Clad in a lemon-yellow sweater and perched next to Ana Gasteyer before a roaring fire—and speaking in a classically Walkenian growl—the actor engaged in a bit of confession: “In a marriage,” he intoned, the fire crackling behind him, “intimacy is important. Erectile dysfunction is a thief. It takes away something very precious.” Walken went on to announce that he and his fictional wife had discovered, together, the virtues of Viagra. “It worked,” he said, as Gasteyer smirked and the fire crackled and easy listening music played in the background. He paused. “It worked a lot.”
By the time that episode of aired, Viagra had been on the market for just over two years: enough time, it would turn out, for the little blue pill to dissolve into American popular culture so thoroughly as to be mocked on network television. Formally approved by the Food and Drug Administration 20 years ago, on March 27, 1998, Pfizer’s drug became instantly ubiquitous and, thus, instantly unavoidable—one of the medical elements of what the journalist Ariel Levy “raunch culture.” There it was in aired during mass-televised sporting events. that delighted in winky double-entendres. And in . And in . Viagra—and, later, drugs with different names but a similar effect—changed the way some Americans have sex. More than that, though, it changed the way many Americans talk about sex. Viagra, the sociologist Meika Loe in 2008, “has truly contributed to our intensified sexualized society.”
