Viagra is to be sold over the counter in pharmacies, in an effort to tackle what has become a huge black market. The figures are indeed arresting. There were nearly 3m prescriptions for Viagra in 2017. Nevertheless an additional £17m in unlicensed or counterfeit Viagra was also seized. Which can only be the tip of … something. Ha ha.

Poor Viagra. Since its introduction, in 1998, the erectile dysfunction drug been a running joke. Yet massive demand suggests a more nuanced story about male sexuality than the macho legend of its febrile and hair-trigger priapism suggests. If anything gives the lie to the idea that women risk driving men to uncontrollable sexual distraction by showing their legs in public, it’s this.

The popularity of Viagra suggests that men are riven with performance anxiety

Whether men will want to go into the chemist and have a chat with a pharmacist about a problem they are conditioned to consider shameful is another matter. Medical information will have to be exchanged. Anyone could just walk in and overhear. The popularity of Viagra suggests that men are riven with performance anxiety. The popularity of risking rip-off or medical danger to buy Viagra on the internet suggests that they’re anxious about discussing their performance anxiety too.

Or maybe not. The other legend around Viagra is that it’s all being bought up by people in the habit of conducting three-day shagathons in real-life re-enactments of porn movies. Which again only begs the question: why? Why is your explosive sexual need at the centre of two huge and lucrative industries, both existing to offer sexual help and encouragement?

Already there’s a backlash against the #MeToo movement. The actor Angela Lansbury helpfully suggested that women sometimes had to take some responsibility for their own sexual assault. The Washington Post reported that a woman tried to plant a false allegation against the Republican US Senate candidate, Roy Moore, in order to taint a more credible one. The British journalist Rupert Myers wrote about how being outed as a creep led him to call the Samaritans, pointing out that two men involved in allegations have died. A large number of columns in which men angst over whether they can now smile at colleagues or put kisses on emails have come and gone.

As ever, the strategy is to swing the focus back to women, their unpredictable behaviour and possible lies, and masculine fear of that unpredictable behaviour and those possible lies. Yet, again and again, what’s really being ventilated is male sexual insecurity and resentful anger against women, whether it’s making them watch you masturbate because you’re a famous comedian, or raping them because you know they’re intimidated by your power. Or exploiting children because women are just too scary.

Yet it’s not women who portray men as barely able to get through a newspaper, unless there are breasts to look at, or so sex-crazed that they can’t see a snugly unholstered bottom without thinking it’s an open invitation to all penises, especially theirs. It’s men, the men so thrumming with sexual potency that they can’t get enough Viagra and porn to get them in the mood. Men put those sexual pressures on themselves and each other, glorify the lothario stereotype and feel awful when they can’t come near it themselves.

Feminists have long argued that gender is a performance. The macho performance, whereby a man has to stride through life reducing women to quivering jellies of sexual fulfilment at every frequent opportunity, looks increasingly like one that engenders male anxiety at best and violent resentment against women at worst.

I’m not in the least against Viagra at the pharmacy. I’d like to see more drugs designed for pleasure to be legalised and controlled. If people need some chemical help to obtain the sex life that they want to have, then good on them. What I am against is the cognitive dissonance whereby women are expected to put up with the antics of men whose sex lives are governed by fantasy – about other men, about themselves, about their desirability, their prowess, and the degree to which women should be expected to accept that men will sometimes make some crude and surprising pounce just to check if she’s “up for it”. When a man isn’t “up for it”, he usually cares a lot more than the woman telling him that it’s not as important as he thinks it is.

• Deborah Orr is a Guardian columnist