A vegan and a Mormon join forces to create one of the world’s most popular erectile dysfunction supplements. It sounds like someone brought magic mushrooms to the pitching session, but the story is 100 per cent true and forms the basis of ITV's The Great Erection Deception - the most bizarre documentary it has aired in years.
It all begins in the early Noughties with a mysterious American businessman named Erb Avore, who creates a “herbal” alternative to Viagra named Stiff Nights. Erb is a visionary businessman who has travelled the forests of south east Asia in search of the perfect natural sex stimulant. After finding a promising herbal candidate in China, he contacts Mormon dad-of-four and supplement industry expert Kelly Harvey, who helps him condense the product into bottles. Within months, the product is flying off the shelves in every US state and the pair become millionaires: profiting from fragile male egos and a sexual culture increasingly detached from reality and preoccupied with being bigger and better.
But it all comes crashing down. The sudden rise of Stiff Nights attracts the interest of the Food and Drug Administration, the US pharmaceutical regulator, who raid the company’s offices and conduct tests on the product. It transpires that the pills contain a chemical that is almost identical to the active ingredient in Viagra, which at this point had already been on the market for years.
It seems like an innocuous marketing trick but Viagra, while perfectly safe for most users, can carry the risk of heart attack and stroke. Most users of Stiff Nights thought they were ingesting a harmless plant, not a chemical stimulant.
The FDA is a vigilant regulator of pharmaceutical drugs but, under US law, dietary supplements are treated differently. Manufacturers assume total responsibility for the safety of their products, and the regulator can only take action if users begin to suffer adverse effects. This loophole created a Wild West in which charlatans could push products promising a six-pack in a week or the world’s biggest boner.
Kelly is eventually jailed for three years for his role in distributing Stiff Nights. Erb, he claims, "went into hiding" after the FDA raid and eventually fled the country. At this point the documentary starts to throw up key questions: why was Kelly prosecuted and Erb was not?
The facts alone make for compelling viewing, but ITV only have access to Kelly, which hugely limits the scope of the documentary. He is a faintly ridiculous character: a convicted criminal with the demeanor and fashion sense of a Sixth Form geography teacher. As affable as Kelly is on screen, the ghost of Erb hovers over the documentary. I can only presume that a man with such a name is unlikely to return the calls of a British documentary producer, but it leaves the show feeling incomplete. At one point, they attempt to track him unsuccessfully to a call centre in India. He must be alive and out there somewhere, as he gave a fascinating interview to the New Republic in 2021. It leaves us wondering why he wasn't able to tell his story here.
The Great Erection Deception is thin on analysis and most of the contributors, comprised of sex academics and pharma experts, offer little beyond quips and light commentary. This is a story so remarkable and bizarre that it is wasted on a 90-minute TV documentary. It has all the ideal raw materials for a comic drama: plot twists, sex jokes and a cast of barely plausible weirdos.
It is an especially important story given the ubiquity of online pornography and the extremity of much of the content being consumed by young men, which has led to unrealistic expectations of sex and body parts. There is no serious discussion of this in the programme, making it feel at times like a collection of cheap laughs about boners rather than a documentary examining the change in sexual habits at the turn of the century.
As entertaining as The Great Erection Deception is, you can’t help but feel this could have been so much, um, bigger and better.
