Girl on the Brink: Surviving Desperate Times with Desperate Measures

ANN’S NOTE: Ann makes a splash in the Washington City Paper—Washington Post Profile Brings Up Touchy Subject: What Claim Do Writers Have on Their Bylines?

Every time I a write about Viagra men tell me they don’t need it, and they use subtle words that beat around the bush, as if I should be impressed.

I’m flummoxed as to why they tell me this. I’m not dating them, which makes it all the more weird.

Frankly, I quiver when I read an email about someone’s ability to sustain an erection without a sex-enhancing drug. I surmise that they would feel stigmatized if they popped the little blue pill.

But sex boosters are aphrodisiacs, which date back to the High Middle Ages when St. Thomas Aquinas, a 13th-century friar, considered hearty foods, such as meats, aphrodisiacs. And, who could forget Aphrodite, the Greek goddess of love and beauty who held sparrows sacred as a food to inspire lust.

But stigmas fade. Why don’t men get it? Employers are starting to.

Before these hard times, for example, a gap in your employment made you less desirable than a candidate who already had a job. Employers viewed employed people as more valuable or more competent.

But since the recession pushed millions of people out of their cubicles, employers are less likely to ignore any proactive job candidate with solid business experience, or at least that’s what I read.

Today’s job market offers employers many qualified candidates to fill critical positions that cannot go unfilled, and I’d like to think that recession survivors have more to offer employers than a passive job performer.

Stigmas, however, persist, and they deter people from opening up their mind, which can be a transformative experience. (Try it.)

Not doing so is like the employee who insists on doing something his way. His way is not always the best way, that’s why there are bosses.

If you can glean insight from their wisdom and experience, then you will also grow, as a person, that is.