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Increased cases of men dying in the course of duty, outside their homes after using performance enhancing drugs has left many astonished. Claims abound that sex, let alone inspired by the potent pills, rarely happens on the marital bed, how did we get here?

Nailantei Norari @artnorari

Viagra, the first oral drug for erectile dysfunction hit the market shelves for buyers to use in 1998.

It was discovered totally by accident in the early 1990s when Pfizer, (an American multinational pharmaceutical corporation) was looking for a drug that could treat hypertension (high blood pressure) and angina pectoris (chest pain due to heart disease).

Researchers during the trial found that sildenafil, the drug active in viagra was more apt at expanding blood vessels around the penis more than those around the heart and thus the blue pill was born. 

This pill is widely used in the world, but nowhere is it used in more secrecy than in Kenya.

Many old men have been dying with conjecture and speculation around their deaths pegging it to the blue pill.

What has astonished many Kenyans is its wide use by married men outside their marital homes, while claims abound that sex, let alone inspired by the potent pill rarely happens in the marital bed. How could this be?

Respectful sex and patriarchy

“Kenyan men have this culture of ‘respecting’ their wives such that they do not do certain things with them and leave the ‘dirtier’ deeds and the Naivasha road trips to their side chics.

This is a culture perpetuated by men and nurtured by women. But going outside the marital bed to seek something you could get is not exactly a sign of respect.

Your wife is not just good for a few rounds to get a baby before proceeding outside the marital bubble for more adventurous sex,” Maurice Matheka a leading psychologist and sexual therapist in the country explains.

He adds: “This in itself shows how the man will get his pleasure from wherever while denying his woman the same, something we can lay down at the door of patriarchy and toxic outmoded cultural conditioning.

It is toxic patriarchy in that it deems pleasure to be unrespectable if experienced by a married woman and respectful when it is a man.

It is, therefore, still a measure of policing women’s bodies and what they can do with their bodies.

This is what will make an older man be okay with having no sex at home, but go ahead and pop a few pills to enhance performance with a clande, whereas it should be the other way around.” 

He talks of the need for both sexes to stop viewing sex as a means to an end, a baby, a proposal, a better life and instead see the act as the natural pairing it is and that which should be enjoyed by all uncluttered by shame.

He argues that respect should always be at the centre of any sexual activity whether with a girlfriend or wife. 

Matheka gives an example of BDSM, (an acronym for a variety of sexual practices that involve bondage and discipline, domination and submission, sadism and masochism) where sexual partners inflict pain on each other and how when that is devoid of respect becomes battery and just plain masochism.

He believes any sexual act should be respectful regardless of whom you are engaging it with.

But have wives always been respected and hence denied sex in traditional African communities?

“Traditional societies confined sex to the marital bed with its main aim being to procreate. This is why when no child was forthcoming, the husband was free to get another wife, at times at the behest of the first.

There were also strict rules about sex and touching between opposite genders, with certain dances, which were deemed to be sexual in nature only being danced by older age sets who were almost married or just married.

This was common in many Bantu communities such as the Agikuyu in Kenya and the Zulus in South Africa,” Dr Francis Kerre, a sociologist and don at Kenyatta University explains.

He goes on to demonstrate just how much sex was functional and disassociated from pleasure, by citing female genital mutilation, which was meant to take away the pleasure nub that would lead young girls into sex and beckon married women from their marital beds.

It is due to this view of sex as functional and for getting a baby only that men were not worried about sexual prowess or sexual longevity.

So long as you could get a baby, it did not matter how, where, or even how long the act was. The question of enhancing performance could not, therefore have come up.

Proving a point

Matheka posits that the modern man’s obsession with performance and how men’s egos are massaged by just how long rather than how well they do is the main reason there is a rise in performance enhancement drugs and plastic surgery to increase penile size and reduce the vaginal cavity.

He posits that part of the reason so many men are dying on their clande’s beds may have more to do with male ego and proving a point rather than the blue pill.

“Viagra is not supposed to be taken by people with heart disease. One is also not supposed to take more than one in 24 hours.

But you will find someone intent on proving a point flaunting this medical wisdom and doing the exact opposite.

The problem to be addressed is the male ego and its fragility, and how these men should be more concerned about their performance at home rather than out here in the streets.

In a mutually respectful union, such pressure to perform would not be there,” Matheka says.