Professor Meika Loe appears on WRVO’s Take Care program

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Meika Loe, author of The Rise of Viagra: How the Little Blue Pill Changed Sex in America, Associate Professor of Sociology and Women's Studies, in the Departments of Sociology and Anthropology, photographed in and outside of Alumni Hall.

Meika Loe is the author of The Rise of Viagra: How the Little Blue Pill Changed Sex in America.

Meika Loe, associate professor of sociology and women’s studies and director of LGBTQ and Women’s Studies, was a guest on WRVO’s “Take Care” program.

In a 15-minute segment that aired Sunday, Loe discusses the history and the effects of Viagra. She is the author of The Rise of Viagra: How the Little Blue Pill Changed Sex in America, and has been a frequent contributor to media discussions about the subject.

Loe’s book, published nine years ago, was one of the first to document the impact of Viagra on society.

“Viagra was created by accident,” according to an accompanying WRVO story. “Researchers and chemists at Pfizer, one of the world’s largest pharmaceutical companies, were testing a drug they hoped would treat angina. The results showed that instead of treating chest pains, the drug had the ability to induce erections by increasing blood flow to the genitals. The rest is history, and the drug, named Viagra, was approved by the FDA in 1998 with the purpose to treat erectile dysfunction.”

You can listen here to the segment.

Loe conducts a lot of research about aging in America, and you can see her latest posts on her Aging Our Way blog.