THE LOW DOWN ON GETTING UP
Now 30, he first experienced “the internal panic” at university. The girl he was cavorting with had started telling him not to worry before he realised what was going wrong. “I guess I was struggling,” he says. “Out of nowhere, she tells me that this guy her friend is seeing ‘has it all the time’. She diagnosed me, there and then. It was the absolute worst thing to hear. I fancied her a lot. I couldn’t stop panicking. Then I really couldn’t get it up.”
It’s during the “best” moments that things hit rock bottom for John.
The frisson fizzled out. They didn’t have sex, and he never saw her in a romantic capacity again. That was in 2009, when he was barely out of his teens. A decade later, John, who requested that we don’t use his real name, still carries the shame. “It’s not something you really go to the doctor for. Why would you? They’ll only give you Viagra, which I can get myself. And who wants to talk about it?”
Who, indeed? But experts believe that John is just one figure in a crowded room of men suffering in silence. Erectile dysfunction (ED), once considered an older man’s malady, is reportedly skyrocketing among millennials. Researchers claim that one in four new ED patients are now under 40, and a recent study by Co-Op Pharmacy found that, out of 2000 men surveyed, half of those in their thirties had difficulty achieving or maintaining an erection – more than men in their forties or fifties.
In medical terms, this makes little sense. Millennials are healthier, fitter, more nutritionally switched on and far
