‘Female Viagra’: Not tonight, dear

If you’ve been waiting for a female Viagra, said Katherine Hobson in WSJ.com, “don’t hold your breath.” A Food and Drug Administration advisory panel last week unanimously rejected a pink pill intended to treat “hypoactive sexual desire disorder”—a low sex drive in otherwise healthy, premenopausal women. The drug, flibanserin, led women who took it to have an average of two additional satisfying sexual experiences every month, but the FDA said that success rate wasn’t “particularly compelling,” especially since the subjects reported no noticeable boost in their overall sex drive. The drug maker, German pharmaceutical giant Boehringer Ingelheim, isn’t giving up, said Deborah Kotz in USNews.com. Boehringer claims that low sex drive is a medical condition afflicting “approximately one in 10 women.” If it can produce further research that would convince the FDA that the drug works, and women to take it, the company could rake in billions in sales.

I have so-called low sex drive, said Joan Sewell in TheDailyBeast.com, and I don’t need a cure. This pink pill was created not to make women happier, but to satisfy “the convenient male fantasy of the sexually voracious woman.” Many, or most of us, are not as obsessed with sex as men are—and that doesn’t mean we have a disorder meriting medical intervention. Research shows that most women naturally “have fewer sexual thoughts,” and we are just fine if a few days or weeks pass without a roll in the hay. Strangely, it’s now considered anti-feminist to admit this, since modern, Sex and the City feminists “equate a lower sex drive with inferiority.” There’s nothing inferior about it. When it comes to sex, men and women are just different.

That sort of thinking “is reactionary and, at worst, chauvinistic and cruel,” said Katrina vanden Heuvel in The Washington Post. Yes, “the female libido is complex,” and each woman’s need for sex is different. But when the FDA considered Pfizer’s application to sell Viagra a dozen years ago, no one questioned whether erectile dysfunction was a real medical condition meriting treatment. Yet now that a female Viagra may be possible, skeptics are suggesting “that a lack of female sexual satisfaction isn’t really a problem.” Says who? A pill that produces two more satisfying sexual experiences a month might not sound worthwhile to the FDA or the cynics. But for some women, it might be just what they’ve been waiting for.

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