OUR NEED TO find victims, plots and double standards has led to implications that the development of the male potency pill Viagra is a male conspiracy against women.
You knew it had to happen. Once again, one of those groups that regards itself as historically oppressed -- minorities, feminists, gays -- sees double standards and oppression where none in fact exists.
Syndicated columnist Ellen Goodman is beside herself, wondering why a male potency pill was developed before a male birth control pill. And how dare health insurance companies offer coverage for Viagra and not female contraceptives? Judging from the tone of her Viagra column, it seems the new drug probably ruined the poor woman's castration fantasies.
Newsday columnist Mario Cocco soon followed suit, charging a double standard exists in health insurance coverage for Viagra and none for birth control pills.
If Goodman and Cocco wanted to talk about a really obscene double standard, they'd address the gross disparity in research funds for breast cancer vs. prostate cancer. Oh, I should hush. Here I go implying there may be a double standard against men. Only women qualify for the double standard treatment. Pundits will point out double standards -- such as Viagra vs. the birth control pill -- until our tricentennial celebration. They'll point them out even if a good reason exists for them.
And the good reason is this: Preventing birth is not a medical condition. It's a choice. There is no way that deciding not to have a child and that you want to take a contraceptive pill for it is a medical condition.
Impotence is often a medical condition, brought on by some very real physical maladies. Diabetes is the affliction most often cited as leading to male impotence. The disease will kill you as dead as breast cancer will. For Americans with the noninsulin-dependent, adult-onset type, diabetes is especially harmful because it's a stealth disease. It tends to creep up on you sometime after you turn 40. If you don't see your doctor on a regular basis, adult-onset diabetes can blind or cripple you without your even knowing you have it.
Victims of adult-onset diabetes don't choose their illness. Men with the disease don't choose the impotence resulting from it. That seems a distinctly different situation from a woman -- or a man, for that matter, should Goodman's dream of a male birth control pill come to fruition -- choosing to use contraceptive medicine and asking a health insurance company to foot the bill for it.
