The Soft Sell

The healthcare brand Hims wants to leverage young men’s anxiety over erections and hair loss into a multibillion-dollar empire. It’s been harder than expected.

- Jesse Barron

AT SOME point in the past few years, I looked around at my male friends and realized that they were on drugs.

Not Lexapro or benzodiazepines or Wellbutrin—which everybody was also on—but the kinds of drugs that are taken for age-related complaints. The most common seemed to be Viagra. For a few years in the 2010s, my friend Paul, then barely out of his teens, was buying it over the counter at airport pharmacies in Mexico. He consumed it like an anti-venom for the other drugs he took, to have sex when he was drunk, or high on MDMA. Alex, a TV writer in his early 30s, kept generic Viagra in his wallet for big dates. Without it, he was too nervous to perform with women he’d just met. Lucas took it during group-sex encounters, to fortify himself. Diego, a musician in his late 20s, had started generic Viagra in 2020, when the chemical steroids he used for his workouts unintendedly tanked his testosterone levels, which screwed up his sexual function. He would swallow a pill in the car on the way to his girlfriend’s house, or he’d slip into the bathroom right before they went to bed. As far as he could tell, she never knew.

I was hearing about testosterone therapy, too. Testosterone, to treat a supposed hormone deficiency called “low T,” had risen from a negligible market in 2000 to a multibillion-dollar one in 2020, driven partly by demand from cis males, many of them young. One acquaintance of mine, a trans man who works in health care, wittily described these new practices as “gender for men.” He meant that the act of modifying one’s body chemistry based on sex had previously been associated with women (birth control) and the trans community (estrogen and T).