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Performance-enhancing drugs are good - they enhance performance, and enhanced performance is good. Viagra is a performance-enhancing drug. So Viagra is good.

And yet . . .

Beta-blockers enhance performance in professional snooker but are bad - players who use them cheat. If everyone else in snooker cheats, the person who doesn't cheat is worthy of respect and admiration, though she may also be a sucker. If she cheats because - well, everyone else does, - she may not attract our condemnation, but she disappoints us all the same. We want games like snooker to be on the level.

The game is on the level if no player has an unfair advantage over another. If both players take the same performance-enhancing drugs there is no unfairness, for there is no advantage. Yet we still find performance-enhancement suspect. Why? In most games, players are in competition not just with the players they play against - against whom they compete directly - but also the players of earlier and later generations, and especially the greats of the game. Comparisons across time are impossible if the conditions under which a game is played change radically enough. Performance-enhancing drugs bring about radical changes in performance - that is the point of them, after all - and so tilt the level of the game iremediably. In this way they are like technological advances in the equipment of the game - the aluminium bats that are illegal in baseball, the carbon-fibre rackets that ought to have been made illegal in lawn-tennis, but instead were allowed to transform the game into something radically different.

Am I cheating, when I use Viagra? I cannot see how. Who is being cheated? I am not playing against anyone at all, but rather playing with someone, and the person I am playing with benefits from my enhanced performance just as much as I do. I am not playing against other men when I fuck a woman - how could I be? Even if I were, I would take no unfair advantage, for other men are free to take Viagra as I do. Comparisons across times are irrelevant with sex, for sex is private and particular: there are no record books, no greats. There is nothing at stake except that private and particular pleasure. Sex is play, to be sure, but sex is not a game.

If I'm not cheating when I take Viagra, why is it still a source of unease? I use Viagra more often than I say I do (though I say I do fairly often), and I feel some sort of embarassment about doing so. I think the explanation of this must trace back to deep convictions about the naturalness of sex, about the way in which culture and artifice is supposed to be discarded along with the underwear. The idea that sex is natural is itself a cultural construct, but I admit that it does not feel that way when I am fucking. Losing myself in my body and hers, in the rhythms and motions of fucking, I take delight in a way that feels so direct and immediate that I cannot see why men and women should not have pleased themselves this way forever. If they did not, well still, they might have. That, anyway, is how it feels.

Viagra interferes with this ahistorical sense of naturalness. If I do what I do because I am stoked up with pharmaceuticals, I do not do what some aborigine might have done. But the pharmaceuticals are really the least of it here. What separates me from the aborigine is overwhelmingly a matter of culture rather than pharmacology (though the aborigines, we can bet, had their own interesting mind/body altering drugs and rituals too). I fuck in the twenty-first century. No fucking I do now might ever have been done much before now. That is less true in some parts of the world than others, and among certain segments of society compared with others, but it is true of us all in some degree. I am not fucking on the level with humans everywhere else, everywhen else. But it is part of the mythology of sex that I am, nevertheless. Viagra is a cool blue reminder that this is just a myth.