Russian men turned on by anti-impotence drug

AFP MOSCOW

"Why is the lion the king of the animals? Because of his tufty tool. And what makes a man really a man? You know perfectly well," reads the latest innuendo-laced commercial launched by a Russian pharmaceutical firm.
The firm has been using the disarmingly simple message to push its new anti-impotence drug, and in a year it managed to carve out a sizable share of the national market - slightly smaller than that of the wonder drug Viagra.
Impaza (the brand name is a play on the words meaning "impotent" and "imposing") has two advantages over its better-known rival Viagra: it costs only $8 a packet, compared with $20 for Viagra, and it is available without a prescription.
As a result, Materia Medica, the company that produces Impaza, has sold some 500,000 packets in just a year, marketing manager Yakov Zilberman said.
Company owner Oleg Epshtein -- who has handsomely refurbished his offices on the proceeds -- has no doubts about the scientific soundness of his formula. Impaza is one of a new generation of medicines using homeopathic doses of antibodies to control the behavior of certain molecules in the body.
It takes effect earlier in the erection process than Viagra, stimulating the production of a gas -- nitrogen oxide -- in the cells of the penis.
This leads to a greater swelling of the blood vessels.
Whatever the technicalities, Impaza has been selling like hotcakes, a phenomenon perhaps not unrelated to the "performance anguish" believed to be widespread among Russian males since the mid-1990s when Russian women -- 25 years later than their Western sisters -- launched their sexual revolution.
Reliable statistics are thin on the ground, but according to Igor Kon, a former philosopher and sociologist and now one of the country's leading sexologists, "Russians have a lot of difficulty in their sex lives."
"As elsewhere in the world, erectile dysfunction is due in Russia to health problems, to age and difficulties of communication with women," he said.
"But Russian men are also victims of certain traditions: they rarely ever go to see a doctor, and certainly not to talk about sexual problems."
Alcoholism, very widespread in Russia, is also a factor.
Kon believes that even an effective product combating impotence is unlikely to improve the sex-life of Russians unless meaningful sex education is introduced in schools as it is in the West.
A number of attempts to introduce sex education in Russian schools were made in the mid-1990s, largely with U.N. funding, but "an alliance between the Russian Orthodox church and the communists, backed by nationalist and conservative forces" stopped the initiative, Kon explained.
Since then, he said, Russian authorities have paid no heed to his warnings.
"Here in Russia, the authorities are for reproduction but against sex, while the population is for sex without reproduction. That's the nation's problem," he said.
Falling life-expectancy and a marked reluctance of Russian women -- mainly for economic reasons -- to have children has meant that the Russian population has slumped dramatically over the past decade, and worst-case projections indicate that it could dip to below 120 million within a few decades, compared with 143 million now.