Martin 'Yellow Dog' Amis:
But it all comes under the heading of — and this is what I’ve always been writing about — masculinity and what a paradoxical state it is. It’s a constant trade-off, and not with the conscious mind. The real paradox about masculinity is that it rests on potency and the ability to have an erection, and now that that’s chemically available, and — though no one’s whispered a word of it yet — what that will do to masculinity is truly revolutionary.
In what way?
Well it should take away the main cause of male insecurity. As someone says, "There will be no more wars."
—Philip Higgs—Martin Amis/Nerve

Ω{Years back I was a militant anti-smoker. As a teenager. It was a boot camp for the unpopular truth-holder. You're nuts. Shut up. Cars too. Shut up. Years back. Years and years. Lots of stuff. Not that it gives me that automatic scissor-clearance, but, you know.
I don't care about offshore Viagara or whether my Johnson's mammoth enough, that isn't the issue. It's the aftermath that concerns me.
A long time ago I said prostitution was a bad thing. Not because of the sex, but because it sanctifies money. Men with money can breed on, or, its functional equivalent, have sex with, women that without the money they couldn't, or women representing those women. Ipso facto, money makes the difference. Ipso facto, because breeding is a paramount feature of biological presence, money is sacred. To those men.
Amis is right about the dynamic but wrong about the terms. Masculinity, like feminity, like humanity, is a fluid category, it's just that the flow is so long-term and slow it seems static. It is not static. A sudden shift in reproductive fortune and the essential qualities of maleness, femaleness, human-ness, will have changed substantively.
The bower-bird carries this principle home to us, the bull-frog, the baboon, the octopus bring it as well. These mating gestures, these dances, evolved. They weren't there, then they were. Things change.
It is a truism that humanity's characteristics are locked in some inalterable template. Certain kinds of men benefit from that truism's acceptance. Certain kinds of men will benefit from chemically-enhanced erectile function. Others won't. The ones who choose not to will be marginalized to the edge of extinction.
Once again we get shoved into the crossroads at rush hour, nothing but traffic as far as the eye can see, forced into a binary dilemma whose terms are equally repellent. This is the same bogus 'progress' that has greased our way to the edge of full-species extinction.
Is it just collateral damage that the compensatory technologies employed to give the handicapped an equal footing tend to handicap the able?
There's still this sense of nobility and purity around Olympic athletes representing the best of human grace and ability, and consequent sanctions against performance-enhancing chemistry. But back in the real world anything goes. Which one's more important, in the long run?

There's an Escherian quality to this road we're on that's fascinating.}