Mike Ditka wants to help you score

TV ads for impotency drugs are targeting sports fans and beer drinkers, and they have a new message: If you're not taking a pill to help your sex life, you're not a real man.

By David Amsden

Mar 19, 2004 | Mike Ditka is staring me down, trying to intimidate me with his icy, unblinking blue eyes. The fleshy finger of his left hand is extended and aimed, pistol-like, directly at my face. The guy looks ruthless. Cruel. Downright menacing. Which is a little bizarre, actually, considering that Mike Ditka -- one of the NFL's most notorious badasses, a Pro Bowl tight end, a Super Bowl-winning head coach, a man whose very stare lets you know that he is The Man -- is putting on this red-blooded act because he's concerned about my penis.

All this, and I'm just sitting on the couch.

Here I am, watching TV, my programming interrupted by one of those ubiquitous commercials for Levitra, the erectile dysfunction (ED) drug for which Mike Ditka has recently become spokesman, lending his famously "smashmouth" persona to promote a product about as manly as Monistat 7. And there he is, Mr. Man, taunting me to "take the Levitra challenge," chiding, "How tough can it be?" In other words: Mike Ditka is calling me a pussy because his penis doesn't work and, well, he wants to know how mine's doing.

And I'm so used to this that it takes a moment to register as strange.

Viagra may have just celebrated its sixth birthday, but it wasn't until recently, starting this past football season, when Levitra, and then Cialis, made their national debuts that malfunctioning penises became truly embedded in the American ethos. If you've sat on your couch watching TV for longer than 10 minutes lately you know what I'm talking about: pitches for puttering penis cures assault you with the same commando-style aggressiveness as those for bullet-proof SUVs and babe-magnet beers. For instance: In Levitra's Super Bowl ad, Ditka scoffs at baseball players, calling them chumps in comparison to football players who have the "toughness" required to "stay in the game." Clearly this is a not-so-sly jab at Rafael Palmeiro, the Texas Rangers slugger and Viagra spokesman, but it's certainly a strange dig when you think about it: Ditka is saying (follow me here) that he's manly enough to be sensitive enough to admit that his penis doesn't work well enough.

It's kind of funny, yes.

It's also audaciously brilliant marketing. The suits at GlaxoSmithKline, the pharmaceutical giant responsible for Levitra, are in a sense trying (with some success) to make impotency synonymous with virility: the perfect gimmick for a country whose sexual identity is so schizophrenic that we demand T&A from all TV programming yet get in a tizzy over a microsecond-long peek at Janet Jackson's actual goods. The initial ads for Levitra were some of the most peculiar in memory: A guy who has the Marlboro Man's rugged handsomeness and indeterminate age (maybe he's 35, maybe 65) finds an old football in the shed, dusts it off, and tries to toss it through a tire swing. But ... he hits the rim! Poor guy. Cue Levitra's logo (a virile orange flame); cut quickly back to the man: Lo and behold, the ball is going through the hole like there's no tomorrow! His girlfriend/wife comes out to join in the fun! What a babe! Can't be older than 35! They put the ball through the hole together! Over and over and over ...

As laughably literal as it was (a friend of mine joked that Levitra was for men whose penises always just miss locating their partner's vaginas), the ad was effective in A) making its point without having to actually make its point (and therefore being able to avoid mentioning the disquieting possible side effects like dizziness, nausea and those rare four-hour-long erections); B) linking impotency with über-masculinity in the same manner the Marlboro Man did with smoking many moons ago; and C) making Levitra seem cool in a grisly, macho sort of way. "Our goal with that ad was to mobilize men to take action," says Michael Fleming, director of product placement at GlaxoSmithKline, who claims that the spot caused a 36 percent spike in men asking their doctors about ED. Whether that's true or not, one thing is certain: The ad was so effective that it seemed like the folks behind Cialis, the ED drug that lasts a whopping 36 hours, had no idea how to top it when they entered the fray in Levitra's wake.

I mean, just look at the Cialis ad (flashing right now on my TV screen, only two minutes after Levitra's!): A husband and wife -- notice the ring -- sit peacefully in separate old-fashioned bathtubs, perched atop a pristine country hill, touching hands, blissfully taking in the view. The viewer is asked, by an omniscient voice: "Are you ready?" Basically, Eli Lilly is attempting to market hot sex the same way Hallmark markets eternal love: gauzily, delicately, completely nonsensically. The two tubs are like a modernized version of the separate beds in which the '50s sitcom couple sleeps. And what's with the tubs, anyway?

When I pose this question to Carole Coupland, spokesperson for Eli Lilly, she first makes a point of saying that, no, the ads were in "no way" affected by Levitra's machismo marketing strategy and that, no, Cialis has no plans for any "train-through-tunnel type stuff in the future." Then she explains the logic of the commercial: "It wasn't as if we hired any tub consultants, or anything like that. The tub was chosen because it was an arresting image, the kind of thing you see and think: Wow, I'd love to be there!" (Oh ... OK. My only guess had been that Cialis had given this couple so much repeated pleasure -- 36 hours! -- without diminishing performance that they had to stick the old guy in a tub of ice to cool off.)

And yet: The fey little Cialis ad becomes almost as super-masculine as Levitra's, thanks to the fact that during nearly every commercial break on nearly every major channel you can watch the two duking it out for some sort of ED Awareness Award (just imagine that trophy).

TV, especially sports TV, has up to now been a kind of last bastion of clichéd portrayals of masculinity. You saw that men liked beer. That men got lots of bleached, tweezed, halter-topped babes (often because men drink so much beer). And that men drove really big trucks (because, in part, they could hold lots of bleached, tweezed, halter-topped babes). It was an inane vortex, no doubt, but it was also a kind of absurd sanctuary where men could slump into the sofa cushions, do absolutely nothing, and still feel like masters of the universe.

Next Page: Maybe these ads reveal just how few men are able to express themselves sexually

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