There's an interesting new ad on one of the streetside billboards near the university. The main heading reads "Ask your doctor about better erection", and the bottom part refers to the website www.erektiovarmuus.fi (i.e. erection security). It's hard not to be amused by the sincere do-good attitude the ad conveys and the fact that the location makes it practically the last thing people see before they arrive at the university main building. I wonder if a corporate board somewhere has decided to target the university community with this campaign, with the intuitive knowledge that academics, if anyone, feel impotent in contemporary society. Or then the logic might be less metaphoric. Everyone knows students ride their bikes a lot, which could cause a lot of pressure on their private parts. Hmm, not very convincing. Perhaps the real reason -assuming these ads are not omnipresent in town - is that big business expects the university to produce citizens with maksukyky ('paying ability', a revolting Finnish euphemism for 'a lot of money'). Citizens, in other words, who can afford to medicalize every single little inconvenience they have and purchase treatment for these "diseases". I'm pretty sure that in twenty years drug companies will be selling medication for things like loneliness, pale/dark skin, boredom, bad cooking skills, and low intelligence. And there will always be buyers.

(Just checked one source, which said loneliness is already being treated with drugs. There is also an operation they use to fix shyness - that horrible plague, the least acceptable of all diseases - by somehow manipulating certain nerves. Seems I'm behind the times. There's something I would like to try, though. I wonder if anyone has developed a pill that would make me look good on the dance floor. All it would have to do is reset my muscle memory, erasing a few hundred hours of track style coordination training.)

So I visited this website (OUT OF PURE CURIOSITY, people) and examined the contents. Crème de la crème: "300,000 Men Think They Are Alone" [within Finland]; "Test Your Erection"; "Easy to Spot [really?], Easy to Cure". The enclosed statistic shows, for example, that two thirds of seventy-year-old men suffer from erection disorder. Boy, the grandpas must really suffer. I guess the remaining third are running around producing children. Maybe there's a reason for some things being easier for twenty-year-olds than for old men. A link placed separately from the main tabs reveals who is behind the site: Pfizer, the biggest drug corporation in the world, which "facilitates health and well-being around the globe".

The title of the pages alone - "erection security" - implies a specific philosophy I'm not happy with. Apparently, one should be guaranteed a good time all the time, for ever. If we take this out of the immediate context, it is neither realistic nor desirable. In general, I feel the ups and downs of life (the sexual context nicely literalizes this figure of speech) are highly necessary. My former coach had a very succinct way of putting it after a bad training session or race: "Ei se aina kulje". It doesn't always go smoothly. I still take that as an absolute truth. Medicalization aims at eliminating that thruth from people's daily lives, but I doubt that the results are as positive as the pharmaceutical monsters want us to think. Probably more often, as some therapist said about Viagra, we just turn the masses of unhappy men into masses of unhappy men with an erection. And that's a more difficult situation to handle. 12:41