Give us this day our daily Viagra. Recreational use and male anxieties over erectile power

This article addresses the use of drugs like Viagra and others of the kind to produce erections, mainly among young men from Costa Rica. Although there is no hard data on how many men make recreational use of these drugs, this issue remains largely unexplored in Latin America. This article takes Foucauldian theory as its framework to analyse interviews with male consumers of these pills, and extracts of comments written on a blog about male erectile anxieties. From the analysis emerges the idea that, today, the penis is represented as a potentially tired and sick worker, needing outside help to "labor" properly. Discourses presented by pharmaceutical companies as well, as men of different ages, show the so-called 'virile member' as a part of the body that needs assistance and that gets its action models from pornography, video games, or cartoons.