Drug companies have been hard at work trying to understand what others haven't been able to: the complexities of human sexuality.
While the objective of Viagra is essentially physical – to make the penis hard and have it stay that way — manufacturing sexual desire in women is a more challenging endeavour, and one that defies easy analysis.
At present, women who lack sexual desire are encouraged to undergo counselling or hormone treatment. Of the numerous pharmaceutical cure-alls for women, none have yet passed approval in the US or Australia.
Boehringer Ingelheim, a German company, was hoping Flibanserin, which they initially developed as an antidepressant, would be just the ticket; the drug targets the brain, particularly the workings of serotonin, dopamine and norepinephrine. A Food and Drug Administration hearing in the US just days ago proved otherwise: issuing the drug for general release was declined.
Indeed, the foisting of pink Viagra on women as a pharmacological solution faces an enormous hurdle: what is sexually "normal" belies easy analysis. In fact, alongside the creation of "big pharma" drugs chasing the billion-dollar prize of a panacea for women's sexual lethargy, there has been a dissemination of misleading information about the levels of female sexual dysfunction. The main statistic used by drug companies and misinformed researchers is that female sexual dysfunction is at an alarming 43 per cent.
This statistic comes directly from the work of Edward Laumann in his 1999 paper Sexual Function in the United States: Prevalence and predictors, published in the prestigious Journal of American Medical Association.
Yet, a careful reading of the paper reveals that the women in Laumann's study were labelled sexually dysfunctional if they simply answered yes to just one of seven questions: whether they had arousal difficulties, inability achieving orgasm, anxiety about sexual intercourse, not finding sex pleasuring, physical pain during sex, a lacking desire for sex, or – wait for it – climaxing too rapidly. The authors failed to ask whether women found their so-called sexual problem distressing despite this being wellknown diagnostic protocol.
Also, defining female sexual dysfunction has been a murky process, with most of the participants who helped revise the standardised international definitions having financial links to drug companies. This led Ray Moynihan, health writer and author of The making of a disease: female sexual dysfunction, published in the British Medical Journal, to call the new classification system "a corporate-sponsored definition."
Apparently, the most common type of female sexual dysfunction is called hypoactive sexual desire disorder. To be classified as such, a woman must experience persistent or recurrent absence of sexual fantasies and desire for sexual activity as recognised by a clinician who has taken into account factors that affect sexual functioning, and who rules out any other major disorders or health conditions.Further, it must cause her, not only her partner, personal distress.
One of the many problems with this definition is the complexity and room for error in determining if a woman's sexual problems stem from organic, or medical reasons versus a host of other probable interrelational or psychological factors. Although a small cohort of women do experience inhibition of their sexual response system, by far the majority suffer more psychosocial hindrances to a vibrant sex life, namely relationship problems. A pill for that, I'm afraid, isn't on the market.
Rachel Liebert, member of The New View Campaign headed by Leonore Tiefer, explains: "In order to create a market for their products, drug companies need to define or redefine a 'disease' so that it appears to require pharmaceutical intervention. In the case of Flibanserin, this 'disease-mongering' is through BI's framing of HSDD.
"In lieu of FDA approval of Flibanserin, BI has already launched a million-dollar marketing campaign, using erroneous claims and pseudo-science to convince women that HSDD is extremely prevalent and from a biochemical imbalance – that their sexual desire starts in their brain and that anything low is diseased. The plan being that if Flibanserin is approved, a demand for the drug would already have been created."
Although Flibanserin was not approved, surely it won't be long before the next designer sex-drug is passed. Considering Viagra is the most popular drug, ever, and considering the momentum behind producing its female equivalent, one can only imagine the results of this second coming: a Viagra-Flibanserin popping nation.
The problem with pharmacological solutions, however, is the difficulty of determining what is normal versus what is fashionable.
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