Getting it up in China: from Horny Goat Weed to Viagra

By David Moser

“No, not dull at all,” he said. “Actually, the specific topic is…” and then he switched to English, “ED — Erectile Dysfunction.”

“Well, I’m not sure I’m up for it,” I replied, also in English, though I don’t think he got the pun.

Before I came to China 15 years ago, I was led to believe that Chinese culture was very prudish, and that TV was absolutely devoid of sex. I soon discovered this assessment was not quite accurate. In fact, in some ways the Chinese were more matter-of-fact about the subject than the supposedly freewheeling Americans. I remember being astonished way back in 1988 to turn on the TV and see a commercial for a herbal breast cancer remedy, in which there were shots of fully exposed female breasts.

TV ads for disposable diapers or baby products often showed baby genitalia in full view. Department stores back then even sold large plastic boy dolls sprouting tiny little anatomically-correct penises. One can imagine the uproar even today if such a doll appeared on the shelves at Wal-Mart in the US.

Later on in 1994 I remember turning on to a fully-fledged sex education program on Beijing Television. A grandmotherly woman with thick glasses sat next to nerdy Mr. Rogers look-alike answering viewer letters about subjects like premature ejaculation, foreplay, and masturbation. The two of them spoke in a droning monotone, as if talking about municipal zoning ordinances. The backdrop in the studio was a stylized painting of spermatozoa swimming into a murky womb. The show was mostly hygiene-oriented (no kinky stuff about S&M fantasies and vibrator technology), but the advice was pretty straightforward. “Parents out there should realize that all teenagers masturbate. It’s not a problem. Just get used to it. So no more questions about this, okay?” Often these two advisors were so casually dismissive of sexual problems that they almost seemed to imply that grownups ought to have more important business on their minds. “Try smoking less, get more exercise. You’re 40, it’s time you quit thinking so much about sex, anyway.” Coming from the US, where sex is hyper-hyped, relentlessly commercialized, and pointlessly obsessed about, I found this kind of approach rather refreshing.

Since then there have been many shows on Chinese TV dealing with sexual matters. A groundbreaking projected show called “The Mask,” which was billed as China's first late-night talk show on sex, was to have aired in January of 2005. The format of the half-hour show was to involve an interview with a guest – wearing a mask throughout the show – who would talk freely about some problem in his or her sex life, which would then be discussed and analyzed by a guest expert. If you think that sounds a little daring for Chinese TV, you would be right. The State Administration of Radio, Film and Television (SARFT) cancelled the debut of the show, saying that it would “guide people in the wrong direction and create a bad influence on society.”

All this is to say that when the director called me to do this “men’s health” show, I already knew that Chinese TV was open to discussions about sex — but that the censors could pull the plug at any minute. For this reason, the producers of the show had to choose the guests very carefully. The director told me they needed a foreign perspective on the topic, and since I had appeared on TV many times, they trusted me to not say anything too inappropriate or outrageous. Thus I was being flattered and warned at the same time. At any rate, the show sounded like it might be interesting, so I agreed to do it.

The name of the show was Dianshi menzhen, “TV Clinic”. The other two guests on the program were a famous crosstalk comedian, and a urologist. The host started out the discussion with a lame bit of humor. “We all know what a CD is, as well as a VCD, and a DVD. But does anyone in the audience know what the letters ED stand for?” He then asked me explain the term, making me the first to broach the topic. I guess it was reasonable to call on me, since ED is an English acronym, but his request made me feel as if we foreigners had somehow invented the problem.

The show eased into the topic gently, starting with general comments about how men’s health has been a neglected topic in society. The crosstalk comedian took a holistic point of view based on traditional Chinese medicine, and spelled out the link between overall fitness and sexual health. This seemed to me a promising direction for the show to take.

Suddenly the host asked me point blank: Had I had ever experienced ED?

Whoa. Why ask ME? Was this the reason they had invited me on the show? Did they think a foreigner would be more willing to answer that question? What was I supposed to say? “Oh, yeah, there was the time when this punk-rock chick I had just met ended up at my place after a few too many tequilas…” I deflected the question with the same brilliant humor that had begun the show. “Well, I have quite a few CDs and DVDs,” I said, grasping at a non sequitur. (And I want to make it clear in this article that I have, uh, never, NEVER experienced this sort of problem.)

Having transparently dodged the question, I tried to quickly interject the notion that the lack of an erection does not mean you can’t have sex. “I think women see this problem somewhat differently,” I said. “Women are not as focused on penetration itself, and often are not so obsessed with the role of the penis. We know that many women cannot even achieve orgasm through vaginal penetration, and are perfectly happy with oral sex or manual stimulation. I mean, there must be a hundred different ways to make love, and not all of them require an erect penis.”

You could tell that I had watched my share of Oprah, and I was sure my sensitive, eloquent remarks would be taken as sagely advice, and would especially be welcomed by the women in the TV audience. A brief fantasy even flitted through my mind that millions of Chinese women watching the show would suddenly start wondering what it would be like to have sex with me. But my daydream was shattered when neither the urologist nor the host would have any of my enlightened comments

“Well, I don’t know about any 100 ways of making love,” the doctor said rather dismissively, “but I think we all agree that a functional penis is essential to good sex.”

The host was on the same page. “Right,” he said, “The couple’s sex life is the basis of the marriage, and I think it’s obvious that male performance in this area is necessary.” Period. Okay.

We went on to talk about the care and feeding of the prostate, alcohol and ED, and so on. But as the discussion progressed, the doctor began to focus more and more on Viagra. As the doctor continued to sing the praises of the drug, I began to suspect that this show was basically a Viagra infomercial. I knew that many Chinese current affairs shows produce episodes that are essentially paid advertisements disguised as news programs. Every day there are “news items” in regional news broadcasts about the opening of some new factory, with thinly-veiled plugs for features and benefits of the new product. If a show purporting to be an objective consumer report suspiciously lauds one company over the rest, you can bet that money has changed hands somewhere along the line. TV producers and directors can often pad their salaries considerably by taking such bribes, and I strongly suspected this show was such a case.

If I needed any more confirmation, when the taping of the TV show was finished, we were all given a free sample pack of three blue Viagra tablets, along with a promotional ballpoint pen with the name of the product and a replica of the blue pill inside the clear plastic pen shaft. (The phallic symbolism didn’t escape me.)

Viagra is now a fact of life in China. Sold for many years in the black market, the blue pill is now being officially sold in about 2,000 drugstores in major Chinese cities, despite ongoing patent disputes with the manufacturer Pfizer. The boring official name for the drug is a relatively meaningless phonetic transliteration, wan ai ke, something vaguely like “10,000-beautiful-allow”, but the more common colloquial name is wei ge “great elder-brother”. (I was aware of this name early on, since my Chinese name, Dawei, uses the same “wei” character, and my friends seemed to think it was hilarious to call me wei ge, “elder-brother Wei”.) Viagra is also known in Taiwan as wei er gang, meaning “fierce and strong.”

There is no doubt Viagra has already been a great boon to the large number of older Chinese men suffering from impotence. Since 2000, mainland doctors have written almost two million prescriptions for the drug. The Financial Times of London estimated that the market for Viagra in China is about 1 billion RMB (US$120 million) annually and growing fast. But some estimates indicate that black market sales probably surpass these figures. As in the West, many Chinese men with who don’t actually suffer from impotence buy the drug on the street and take it recreationally to enhance their performance.

And of course, there are the inevitable social shifts and disruptions caused by any new invention. The restored potency Viagra brings can reinvigorate some marriages, and disintegrate others. A few years ago, there was the case of a Mainland Chinese woman living illegally in Taiwan, who blamed Viagra for her deportation from the island. The woman said her husband, 73, had found another woman after secretly taking Viagra, and, deciding he didn’t want his 41-year-old mainland wife anymore, informed the police she was working in Taipei without a visa. The woman wept as she told police “I’m a victim of Viagra.”

Just as the advent of Viagra supposedly caused a profit windfall for the legal brothels in the state of Nevada, the introduction of the drug in China has probably boosted the already booming prostitution trade, as out-of-circulation old geezers find their phoenixes rising from the ashes.

There are complaints that the drug is too expensive for the average Chinese male. I once heard an out-of-work car repairman say “Well, Viagra costs around 100 yuan per pill. That means I can afford to have sex about once a month.” Some say that for the foreseeable future, the drug will be too expensive for the vast majority of lower-class Chinese, and so these men will continue to turn to the traditional Chinese methods.

China has always had a host of folk remedies for impotence, and the condition is dealt with extensively in traditional Chinese medicine (TCM). The Beijing hutongs (remember them?) used to be plastered with advertisements for herbal remedies for premature ejaculation and impotence, in which the benefits of the drug were pretty much spelled out explicitly.

One of the longstanding superstitions in Chinese medicinal folklore, and in TCM, is that certain substances can bu, or “restore” and “nourish” the various organs. All well and good, but there is also the truly nutty notion that substances with this restorative effect are those that resemble the organ in question. Walnuts are supposed to be good for the brain because they look like little brains, and so on. Thus the Chinese for a thousand years have used rhinoceros horn as an aphrodisiac, resulting in an ongoing slaughter of the innocent beast, whose only crime consists of being unfortunate enough to have a horn resembling a phallus growing out of its nose.

For 600 years, seahorses have also been used in TCM as a cure for impotence, served in rice wine or soup as a source of virility. Around 25 million seahorses a year are now being traded around the world and there are concerns that the demand is putting the animals on the brink of extinction. Seahorses were recently added to a global watch-list of endangered species, and 161 countries around the world were asked to monitor sales and prohibit the trade of any specimen under 10cm in length.

Though the various parts of rare animals have been used around the world in folk medicine traditions to boost male potency, the Chinese seem to be the worst offenders in this regard.

There has recently been some hope that the availability of Viagra would reduce the slaughter of such hapless animals, all victims of the Chinese male’s centuries-old quest for the perfect hard-on. And indeed, since Viagra went on sale in 1998, there has been a marked drop in global demand for certain animal products used in traditional Chinese medicine, such as seal penises. Sales of the penises of Canadian hooded and harp seals fell by half between 1996 and 1998, and were near zero in 2000.

However, the arrival of Viagra appears to have spurred rather than diminished the demand for certain animals. There is evidence that the above-mentioned plight of the endangered seahorse may be related to the increasing attention to erection medicines, causing many men seek out traditional folk treatments as a cheaper alternative to Viagra. In addition, black-market versions of Viagra for sale in China often add animal ingredients such as seahorse as a “booster”, an East-West double-whammy.

And then there are the herbal performance enhancers, such as the TCM plant that goes by the delightful name “Horny Goat Weed”, epimedium saggitatum, in Chinese yinyanghuo, literally “licentious-goat-fire.” Legend has it the plant was named by a goat herder who noticed that his flock of goats became excessively amorous after eating the weed. The classic Shen Nong book of herbal remedies (about 1200 B.C.), tells us that Horny Goat Weed was used to treat impotence and penis discomfort, to facilitate urination and to boost the qi, or “life force.”

Of course, as cheap and available as Chinese medicines are, they do have one tiny drawback: they don’t actually do much. Viagra’s experimentally demonstrable effects probably ensure that the drug will have great staying power.

Viagra has become such a part of Chinese culture, in fact, that even pandas are taking it. According to the China Daily, some zoos have given Viagra to Chinese pandas to improve their copulative performance and save them from extinction. The report states that scientists are experimenting with the drug as a last resort, after traditional Chinese medicines failed to boost the pandas’ sex drive. In the past, zookeepers have also tried showing the pandas X-rated movies to get them in the mood for love. (Comedian Bill Maher joked that this method was not likely to help matters, since male pandas emulating Western porno films would merely pull out at the last second and ejaculate on the female panda’s breasts.) Apparently the male panda can only mate for 10 to 20 seconds at a time, and so the chances impregnating the female are low. Viagra can extend the male’s performance time to 20 minutes.

However Zhang Hemin, director of a panda center in Sichuan province, is skeptical that Viagra can be an ultimate solution. “We tried to give them Chinese medicine in the mid-1990s,” he said. “The sex drive of the pandas did improve, but they also became hot-tempered and attacked the females. That obviously wasn’t so good and we had to end the experiment.” Hard to imagine a cuddly male panda turning into a brutal Stanley Kawalski from A Streetcar Named Desire, but who knows? “The real problem,” Zhang said, “is that many pandas do not know how to mate.”

Apparently some tigers have the same problem. Zookeepers are also administering Viagra to rare South China tigers in a Beijing zoo, in an attempt to increase their number from 49 in captivity and an estimated 20 in the wild. This is all quite ironic, since it is said that the product name “Viagra” comes from the Sanskrit word “vy_ghra”, meaning “tiger”.

Obviously the Chinese don’t need Viagra to keep their human population high, so Chinese people are going to use it to the same end as Westerners: to maintain a scintillating sex life well into the golden years. And more power to them. I imagine Viagra will be incorporated into Chinese pharmacology in the same way McDonald’s fast food made its way into the culinary landscape. China has a way of accepting foreign things while maintaining “Chinese characteristics”, and no doubt the little blue tablet will always share the medicine cabinet with turtle extract and Horny Goat Weed.