This article presents a feminist discursive analysis of orgasm, focusing on the transcripts from discussions with women and men in Aotearoa/New Zealand regarding the meanings that attach to (hetero) sexual health. Certain aspects of deconstructive theory lie behind the approach used to read the transcript material. In the first place, as Derrida (1981) has pointed out, ` “everyday language” is not innocent or neutral' (p. 19); rather, it is laden with assumptions and investments that may not be immediately apparent. This textual analysis is thus principally concerned with examining one of the habitual structures underlying Western thought and language - the distinction between presence and absence - and with examining how this binary pairing produces, and is produced by, the `common-sense' attitudes to sex within the `everyday language' of the participants. Examining the functioning of notions of presence and absence reveals some of the paradoxes inherent in contemporary ideas about orgasm; for example, the notion that orgasm offers a transcendental experience (a meeting with one's `true' self) at the same time as it involves a loss or absence of `self'. Finally, it is suggested that the deconstructive properties of `desire' have the potential to challenge the conventional place of orgasm as the ultimate (or only) measure of healthy heterosex.

In this article I employ Deleuzian theory in an exploration of men’s and women’s experiences of sexuality and sexual relations when encountering erectile difficulties and/or using sexuopharmaceuticals such as Viagra (sildenafil). I analyse the ways in which accounts of the function of Viagra-assisted erections can be seen to restore or re-establish previous sexual conventions or patterns (in Deleuzian terms, to ‘re-territorialize’ desire in ‘molar’ directions), and the ways in which Viagra use may change or challenge such patterns. Also examined are the alternative stories of those for whom Viagra hasn’t ‘worked’; these accounts demonstrate how the persistence of erectile difficulties produces positive opportunities for experimentation, creativity and transformation in the realm of the erotic.

Discourse on male sexuality in mid-to-later life has exploded in recent years (Gullette 1998). Attention to this topic has been spurred by the advent of (highly profitable) sexuopharmaceutical 'solutions' to erectile changes affecting older men. 'Success' stories abound in the media and in medical literature related to the restoration of faulty erections and ailing sex lives through drugs such as Viagra (sildenafil citrate), Uprima (apomorphine) and Cialis (tadalafil). In this paper we explore some of the ways in which notions about ageing and male sexuality are changing in popular cultural and medical texts in response to the advent of Viagra and the increasing authority of biomedicine in this area. We also demonstrate how the recent biomedical endorsement of 'sex for life' (the imperative to maintain an active youthful masculine [hetero]sexuality -defined in terms of male orgasm through penetrative sex) may be challenged by the very accounts of older men who are, or have been, affected by erectile difficulties and have used drugs like Viagra themselves. We present the perspectives of mid-to-late life heterosexual men in New Zealand whose stories question the contemporary biomedical privileging of erections and intercourse 'at any cost and at any age'. We argue that the current push to identify and treat so-called erectile dysfunction (and restore erections and penetrative sex to relationships) neglects some men's own experiences of alternative modes of relating sexually that they identify as 'normal', 'healthy', 'enjoyable' and 'satisfying' for them and their partners; and undermines their understanding of such changes as positive outcomes of ageing, experience and maturity.

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