ABSTRACT
The "Viagra phenomenon" is the most visible, and studied, expression of a broader global process of medicalization of male sexuality. By analyzing documentary material and interviews with medical experts in Italy, this chapter examines that medical discourses are far from being just a cog in the medicalization machine. Medical discourses work at transmitting cultural scripts which reinforce normatively gendered expressions of sex focused on a phallocentric coital imperative and on a naturalized notion of male sexual desire, assumed as always present and unproblematic. The chapter discusses how, in making sense of their clinical experience with ED, the specialists mostly rely upon the dominant discourses on male sexual health and masculinity embedded in erectile enhancement medications (EEM) as gendered technologies, thereby contributing to their reproduction. Diagnostic expansion is outspokenly supported by medical experts when they portray the two extreme poles of the age range: the oldest patients, and the youngest ones.
