Ratstronauts Beware

Space May Be Bad for Boners

I’m cranky today. While there are plenty of things going on in the world and in my world that could explain my bad mood, I have to admit some of it is based on a fictional world that I’ve immersed myself in the last few months. (Spoiler alerts for an old show coming up.)

I’ve been binge-watching Madam Secretary, a drama that ran from 2014-2019 and stars the ever-so-appealing Téa Leoni as the quintessentially decent Secretary of State. At the start of the series, she’s a former CIA agent who knows everything about every part of the world but doesn’t have a political bone in her body. Her motives are pure, and her goal is always to do what’s best. She’s often the lone voice in the “Sit Room” for diplomacy over military action, but she’s tough and can shake down a foreign leader with a threat when necessary. Then she goes home to her three kids and manages to be a good mom (though her attitudes about teen sex are questionable) and a great wife (so great that Téa and Tim Daly, who played her on-screen husband, have been a real-life couple since the first season).

Of course, she does all of this while looking great in an endless wardrobe of perfect silk shirts without ever spilling coffee or worrying about sweat stains (the reason I don’t wear silk) and 4-inch heels without ever wobbling (the reason I don’t wear heels).

While Elizabeth McCord is reminiscent of CJ Cregg (my other favorite silk-shirt clad, tough-talking, political role model), the show is no West Wing. The dialogue is not nearly as tight, the depictions of the state department are hardly accurate, and once every few episodes someone looks toward the camera and says, “We better do it quick, or we’ll be looking at World War III.”

In the beginning, the show was so very CBS that we were never told whether the president who hired her—a decent, not entirely political dad-in-chief—was a Democrat or a Republican. We only know that he lost “his party’s” primary and was forced to run for his second term as an independent.

As the series went on, however, things in the writer’s room seem to have shifted, and we start to get some clear anti-Trump/anti-GOP messages with our diplomatic crisis of the week. (He would have been elected somewhere around Season 3.) There were the foreign despots who shared Trump’s right-wing politics and pussy-grabbing tendencies. Secretary McCord gave them a good talking down and, in the case of the former soccer player who won becomes the President of the Philippines and tries to pinch her ass, a powerful left hook. There was the MAGA-sounding governor of Arizona who instituted a policy of separating parents and children at the border. Secretary McCord visited the detention center where they were held and let herself be jailed for trespassing to bring attention to the horrible conditions. There was also the potential Republican presidential candidate with a scary mustache and Southern accent who spewed blatant white supremacy rhetoric, plus the rotund one who wore an oversized suit and talked about the good-old days when women weren’t so “sensitive.”  

We even got a scene in her office in which she consulted her real-life predecessors—Madeleine Albright, Hillary Clinton, and Colin Powell—ahead of a speech she was making against nationalism and intolerance. CBS allowed our former top diplomats to school their audience—advertisers and all—on the importance of democracy. Albright made the inevitable Hitler comparison, but having escaped Germany as a child, she is allowed to play the Nazi trump card whenever she wants. (That pun was inadvertent, but I’ll stand by it.)

The final season of the show is just 10 episodes long (and missing many key characters). She has been elected president, but rather than show us the fun stuff—election night, inaugural balls, moving into the White House—we’re dropped in a few months later when she is being investigated by the Senate and House on trumped up charges of colluding with Iran to get elected. (Okay, that one was on purpose.)

The hearing scenes make it clear that the men of Capitol Hill were not ready for the country to be run by someone with a uterus, and they’re flailing to get her out. It’s bringing back memories of Mitch McConnell saying his only legislative agenda was to make sure our first Black president didn’t get anything accomplished. (Ask Merrick Garland and all the women who have since lost their right to an abortion whether he got away with that one.)

I have two episodes left. I know it will end well both because it’s network television and because I peeked ahead at the episode descriptions. But watching powerful men behave badly and go unchecked as they twist the meaning of democracy is really getting to me. Next year at this time we will have new president-elect, and there’s a non-zero chance it’s Donald Trump who will run his anti-democracy playbook through to the end if given a second chance.

And we’re not alone in our move to right-wing nationalism (or maybe ultra-left-wing libertarianism?). Argentina just elected a fringe candidate who promised big changes by campaigning with a chainsaw. I’m not familiar with that country’s politics and can’t comment on the legitimacy of most of his ideas like adopting the U.S. dollar as their currency. I can say that he thinks sex ed indoctrinates children and wants to overturn the recently passed law legalizing abortion. (He also suggested that selling human organs should be legal, but he may have backed off of that.)

For the first few seasons of the show Bess won most of the time and when she didn’t she was often proven right in retrospect. She’ll win again in the next episode undoubtedly by making an impassioned Sorkinesque speech about democracy in front of the House Committee. It will be fun to watch, but I’m not sure my mood will improve because she’s fictional, and in the real world the good guy doesn’t seem to be winning.

Germans Are Using Condoms More Than the Pill

According to a new study by Germany’s Federal Center for Health Education, there has been a big shift in contraceptive preferences among adults in that country. The survey of 1,001 sexually active respondents ages 18 to 49 found that 53% used condoms as their contraceptive method of choice compared to 38% who relied on birth control pills. This is particularly interesting because in 2007 the exact opposite was true with 36% using condoms and 55% preferring the pill.  

When asked for their most important criteria for choosing contraception, 39% said reliability, 30% said simplicity of use, and 25% said good tolerance (this may be lost in translation, but I took it to mean few side effects).

I’m thrilled that condoms ranked high on each of these categories for Germans. Here they have an unearned reputation of being unreliable, difficult to use, and taking the fun out of sex. (Condoms, not Germans.) In an article for The American Journal of Sexuality Education, Logan Levkoff and I talked about how sex education often inadvertently perpetuates these negative messages about condoms. While I don’t know the specifics of how Germans teach or talk about condoms, we’ve known for years that most European nations are far less prudish than we are. They have better sex education and allow condoms to be advertised on television. (The linked commercial is from a French-Belgian condom company, but it was too funny not to share.)

The study results aren’t all Europeans-are-doing-it-better good news, though. It is possible that the switch from pills to condoms is a result of the same anti-pill sentiment that TikTokers are spewing here. In the German survey, 61% of respondents agreed with a statement saying that artificial hormones have "negative effects on the body and the mind." In 2018, only 48% of respondents believed that.

The arguments used to suggest the pill is dangerous are suspect at best, often relying on small studies and mistaking correlation for causation. In the U.S., my fear is that the people pushing this messaging go on to advocate for natural family planning methods which are very user-intensive and far more prone to error than the pill or condoms.

People should be free to choose whatever contraception method will work best for them. If that means a switch from the pill to condoms, great. They’ll also get some STI prevention benefits. When it means a switch from the pill to something less effective, or worse to nothing at all, this sex educator gets nervous.

Viagra May Be Good for More Than Your Dick

A growing body of research suggests that the little blue pill known for helping Bob Dole get it up may be good for the brain and the heart as well.

A study published in May of this year found that sildenafil use was associated with a reduction in Alzheimer’s disease. Researchers at Mt. Sinai’s Icahn School of Medicine used the IBM MarketScan® Database which includes data from over 30 million employees and family members per year. They matched people who had taken sildenafil to those who had never taken it (based on something called the greedy nearest-neighbor algorithm which was designed to solve the traveling salesman problem—who says mathematicians are no fun?). After analyzing the medical records of both groups, the researchers concluded that using Viagra or its generics was significantly associated with a 60% risk reduction of developing Alzheimer’s disease.

These results were similar to a 2021 study published in Nature that looked at data for 7.23 million individuals and found that sildenafil usage was significantly associated with a 69% reduced risk of Alzheimer’s Disease. Although a National Institute of Health study that analyzed Medicare data and was published in between those two (in 2022) found no correlation.

A January 2023 study, published in the Journal of Sexual Medicine, suggested that Viagra and drugs like it might be good for the heart as well. Researchers examined medical records of 70,000 men with erectile dysfunction and found that among men diagnosed with this issue, those taking ED medication (like Viagra/sildenafil or Cialis/tadalafil) had a 13% lower risk of major adverse cardiovascular events, a 39% lower risk of cardiovascular related death, and a 25% lower risk of dying of any cause. The researchers acknowledged, however, that this association does not prove causation. It’s possible that men with ED who choose to take the drugs share other common characteristics—like being healthier, more energetic, and more likely to see a doctor—that are not true of the men with ED who don’t bother with boner pills. 

Still, there are scientific reasons to believe Viagra would have an impact beyond the dick. It is part of a group of drugs known as phosphodiesterase type 5 (PDE5) inhibitors which relax blood vessels and allow more blood to flow. The dick hardening effect was discovered by accident when these drugs were being tested as a potential treatment for high blood pressure and angina (chest pains). And while these drugs are known for their work in the corpus cavernosa, PDE5 inhibitors increase blood flow to vessels throughout the body. In fact, they are still used as a treatment for pulmonary hypertension.

While the benefits of sildenafil may last far longer than 4 hours, remember that an erection lasting more than 4 hours is an emergency for which you must seek immediate medical attention. (Do we really think people aren’t heading to the ER somewhere around the 3-hour-and-47-minute mark at the absolute latest?)

Astronauts Beware: Space Rats Get Fewer Boners

A new study suggests that men who spend a lot of time in deep space may end up with erection issues when they get back. I assure you this study was published in a legitimate journal, but that doesn’t mean it adds anything useful to our understanding of space travel or penises.

Researchers at the University of Florida modeled the conditions of space for 43 non-suspecting male rats. No, they did not create a tiny zero gravity chamber or a rat-sized vomit comet. Instead, they simulated microgravity with a technique called hindlimb unloading. They lifted the back legs of the rats, tilted them at a 30-degree angle, and left them like for a month. (I hate rodents of all kinds. Don’t even try to tell me that guinea pigs are cute. And don’t get me started on the rats who tried to ride out lockdown in our basement. Still, even to me this seems a little cruel especially since the researchers admit it’s an “imperfect simulation of what people experience in space.”)

They then exposed the rats to mock cosmic radiation made up of protons and ions. Some rats got a lot of exposure, others just a little, some none at all. There was also a control group of rats who got to roam freely around their cages flat to the ground as usual but were exposed to the same varying levels of radiation.  

A year later, the researchers checked in with their ratstronauts and found signs that would make ED more likely. Regardless of position, those rats who had been exposed to radiation had narrower blood vessels in the erectile tissue and greater levels of oxidative stress than those who had not. (Oxidative stress is a condition that occurs when there are not enough antioxidants in the blood. It can lead to ED and other health issues like diabetes.) The rats who experienced microgravity but were not exposed to radiation also had some increased risk factors for ED (but fewer than those who experienced radiation but not microgravity).

The researchers concluded that microgravity and cosmic radiation exposure could impair astronaut’s erectile function even after they’ve returned from their deep space mission. It is possible that antioxidants could help, but that has not yet been studied. The lead researcher told the media that the takeaway from this study was that “… when these astronauts do return to Earth, they should be aware of and monitored for their sexual health.”

Sure, sounds great, but did we need to waste limited resources (money, time, rats) figuring this out? Billionaires may continue to prove they don’t need Viagra by orbiting the earth a few more times in their dildo-shaped rocket ships, but the number of people going into deep space anytime soon is very, very small. Wouldn’t it have been sufficient to speculate about their post-mission penis problems and meet them on the tarmac with a bottle of Viagra and some blueberries? (See above: both are good for their hearts.)