The makers of a plastic "urethral suppository" called MUSE promise that their product offers a "new and unique approach to treating erectile dysfunction," and they aren’t kidding about the "unique" part.
MUSE is an acronym for "Medicated Urethral System for Injection." It is manufactured by Vivus, Inc., who hunger for a slice of the Pharmaceutically Enhanced Erection Pie which is now almost entirely gobbled up by Pfizer’s Viagra. The company, whose name sounds uncomfortably like "Virus," also markets something called "Actis," which appears to be a latex cock ring.
The most striking difference between MUSE and Viagra lies in its administration:
1) Viagra is a pretty blue pill that is comfortably swallowed with water;
2) MUSE is a pointy plastic "urethral suppository" which you jam down your dickhole in order to inject a tiny pellet.
At first, MUSE seems more like the stuff of political torture than bedroom hijinks. I know of few males who are enthusiastic about the idea of jamming ANYTHING down their fragile pink urethral tunnel. As anyone who has endured the painful naked humiliation of a urethral "swab" to test for gonorrhea will tell you…and I need to make it clear that I’ve NEVER endured that sort of test, although about a year ago I got this phone call from a local clinic saying that one of my ex-Love Turtles had tested positive for chlamydia and listed me as one of her partners…but anyway, as anyone who’s ever endured a urethral swab, or, say, a catheterization, or as any normal male who cringes at the mere IDEA of foreign objects being plunged down their pee-pee hole, whether it be for medical reasons or merely for kicks, can and WILL attest, it’s an instinctually unpleasant scenario for any sane man and his penis to ponder being violated in this manner. Your dick is supposed to poke INTO the world. It’s your divining rod, your exploratory compass. Your dick INVADES. It isn’t supposed to be INVADED. It is supposed to do the penetrating, and never, under any circumstances, is it to be penetrated. Especially in that soft slimy shiny gummy onion-skin-thin urethral tissue. That shit’s a lot more fragile and sensitive than a mouth or an ass or a cunt. One wrong move, you’ve ripped it to ribbons and are bleeding all over the place.
That’s why MUSE is such a curious product. It’s a mystifying blend of an attractive promise (a robust veiny erection just brimmin’ with gusto) delivered in a horrifying package that would immediately send any non-masochistic male a-runnin’. I mean, you shove things down people’s dicks to get them to spill nuclear secrets about your political enemies, not to get ’em in the mood for makin’ whoopee.
Apart from its shocking method of administration, MUSE employs a different active ingredient than Viagra’s sildenafil citrate. MUSE’s magic boner-potion is alprostadil, a natural substance abundant in seminal fluid which aids in the time-honored erection-producing process. Alprostadil has a relaxing effect on spongy erectile tissue, allowing the increased blood flow that produces a stiffie.
But alprostadil, unlike the active ingredient in Viagra, can’t be swallowed in a pill. Unlike the pill-based "systemic" drugs, which are deemed kosher to course throughout your entire system, alprostadil is only considered safe and effective when applied to the target area…in this case, the male wang-a-dang-diggity-dang.
Doctors have been prescribing alprostadil to their patients for years—long before Viagra—but until MUSE hobbled into the market with its shiny li’l plastic do-it-yourself bone-bone kit, the only way to administer it was through a syringe needle jammed through the skin in your dick’s limp shaft. Not only was this process painful and somewhat humiliating, it also presumably took place in a doctor’s office, after which you had to rush home and get jiggy wit’ it while the shot was still fresh.
But then came MUSE.
Through, um, all the proper channels, a single foil-wrapped MUSE injector recently landed in my lap. It was accompanied by a booklet called Restore the Feeling, published by the manufacturer, which claims that MUSE is at least as effective as Viagra, and possibly more so, when it comes to givin’ ya a woodie.
Restore the Feeling features a drawing of a positively RADIANT middle-aged couple on the cover, their hearts aglow at the thought of boners resurrected like Lazarus from the grave. The booklet boasts nicey-nice glazed-donut passages about "restoring sexual intimacy," which is a politely dishonest way of saying, "inducing your first hard-on in fifteen years so your wife doesn’t have to fuck the plumber to get her rocks off." The booklet also says that MUSE is no protection against "chlamydia, gonorrhea, herpes simples virus (HSV), viral hepatitis, human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), human papilloma virus (genital warts), and syphilis," and I cite that passage for no other reason than to gross you out.
As someone who might not technically be a masochist but who certainly makes unhealthy, self-defeating decisions in life, I decided to give MUSE a try. I’m a self-starter. I’m all for improving my attitude and improving my erections. I become a volunteer Astronaut Chimp for this daring new sexual pharmaceutical.
My unwitting female guinea pig is, of course, My Jewish Companion. One early summer night, as we lay about in my plush Portland penthouse awaiting another round of our interfaith sexual frolicking, I excuse myself to the bathroom and rip open the tinfoil which holds the foreboding plasticine Dick Injector.
The alprostadil is contained within a tiny pellet encased in the clear plastic Cock Cartridge. Restore the Feeling instructs me to piss first in order to achieve a "moist urethra" that will help the flea-sized Penis Pellet dissolve. After pissing, I pinch and pull at my pud in order to ensure pliability. Then I jam the cold two-inch clear-plastic proboscis inside my dickhole. At first it doesn’t go in more than a half inch, and it pops out almost as if my cock had spitten it out. I finally manage to thrust it in deep, ever fearful of the booklet’s admonition that one wrong jiggle could cause painful bleeding.
Once the thin spiky tube is fully plunged down into my urethra (not to be confused with My Sharona), I press down on a button that, hopefully, releases the pellet. Then comes the most uncomfortable part—I have to wiggle the device inside my urethra for five seconds to make sure the pellet is dislodged. Then, to make sure the drug is evenly distributed, I slip out the tube and massage my cock as if I’m rolling dough.
Initially, the drug afflicts my penis with an uncomfortably hot sensation as if someone’s burning a Zippo lighter inside my dick, but that soon fades. In ten minutes, I’m in bed and my cock is hard enough to knock someone unconscious with it.
The Jew says things such as:
"Jesus Christ, you’re hard like steel!"
…and then…
"Oh my God—you’re in so deep!"
…and finally…
"OK, OK, you’re gonna have to stop, or I’m gonna pass out."
She tells me she lost count after eight orgasms. I shoot a grateful load after about a half-hour of fuel-injected eight-cylinder pumping.
I won’t tell her I’ve used the Penis Pellet until the next morning. At one point during the night she reaches over, gasps, and says, "Sweet Baby Jesus, you’re hard again!" But I’m not really hard "again"—I’m STILL hard. My dick is a mallet. I could play a round of croquet with it. I was a slab of pink granite for nearly two hours AFTER I came. At one juncture, mesmerized by my tool’s pesky firmness, she squeezes it in her hand with such force that I thought my cock would pop off my body in a bloody explosion. I yelp with pain. She apologizes.
Despite the fact that MUSE made me harder than Viagra did—almost frighteningly hard…satanically hard, even—I’m sorry to report that it boasts none of Viagra’s druglike effects, none of its Garden of Eden-like euphoria. Arousal and hardness aren’t always the same thing. The penis pellet affected my cock but not my mind. MUSE gets a perfect score for its mechanical, cantilever-like erection-conjuring skills, but it did zilch for my libido.
Restore the Feeling claimed that MUSE would give me a "natural-feeling erection," which is false. Rather, my bone-bone felt uncomfortably swollen, as if a hundred thousand Kurds had fled Iraqi persecution and were seeking asylum within my cock. The booklet also cautioned that one shouldn’t use MUSE if you have "an abnormally formed penis." In my case, not to worry. My penis is so beautifully formed, they should hang it in a museum, I swear.
MUSE is a cultural oddity destined to fail in the Pharmaceutical Boner Sweepstakes. It’s a marketing disaster. The dodo bird and the Edsel and the Chevy Chase Show of the chemically induced erection market all wrapped into one disgusting little plastic injector.
Thankfully, MUSE is already obsolete. Other companies are releasing alprostadil-based products which don’t require syringes or urethral insertion. Topiglan (by Macrochem) is a cream yet to be approved in the US that uses alprostadil and is smeared on your glans penis. A similar cream called Befar (by NexMed) has been approved in Hong Kong and is helping to make countless Asian peni look slightly less pathetic than they normally would.
Those who intend to use alprostadil and then receive a blow job should warn their partner that the shit supposedly tastes REALLY bad. Those with pregnant partners should probably know that alprostadil is rumored to have fetus-killing properties, and one’s mind imagines precedent-setting court cases to determine whether killing an unborn baby by cumming on it constitutes murder.