Do you think it would be a positive or a negative thing if pharmaceutical companies came up with a medicine like Viagra for women? You might want to read this article before making up your mind:

A Dose of Desire

Where is the women’s version of Viagra?

The short answer: They’re still working on it. A bunch of companies have tried and failed to create “pink Viagra,” as it’s often called. Other companies have drugs in late stages of clinical testing, including a gel that recently began a make-or-break nationwide study with several thousand women. Give us five years, maybe less, say the most optimistic researchers and doctors. Though it’s unclear exactly how many women would ask for a prescription, no one doubts that the first company that gets to market a remedy for female sexual dysfunction, as it’s formally known, will earn a fortune.

A modest-size but fervent group of psychologists, academics and public health advocates contend that FSD isn’t an authentic medical condition, or at least not the sort of problem that should be treated with drugs. These aren’t the obtuse male physicians who for decades have been telling women distressed by their lack of libido that “it’s all in your head.” The anti-FSD crowd is mostly women, many of them self-described feminists. The most prominent is Leonore Tiefer, a psychotherapist and clinical associate professor at New York University, who has long decried what she calls “the medicalization of women’s sexuality.”

“Drug companies want to say to women, ‘You don’t need to know anything; you can have the satisfying sex life that you seek — people dancing on TV, the whole bit — without knowing anything. Just ask your doctor,’ ” she says. “I resent that, because there are specific harms that come from being ignorant and dependent in the world we live in. There may be lots of people who aren’t interested in sex, but is there a medical reason for that, and do we diagnose that?”

Arousal for women does not always lead to desire: Even Pfizer had a hard time grasping that concept. The company tested 3,000 women over the course of eight years before finally abandoning hope, in 2004, that Viagra itself could be the female Viagra.

“What we know is that very little of what’s going on with women and sex is below the waist,” says Anita Clayton, a professor at the University of Virginia’s Center for Psychiatric Clinical Research and co-author of “Satisfaction: Women, Sex and the Quest for Intimacy.” “Almost all of it is above the neck.”

I can’t help but smile at that remark; “above the waist.” I suppose for women to be more interested in having sex with their partners, a pill should be made to help them with juggling housework, raising kids, excelling at their jobs, being socially perfect, AND being content with their partners’ practical approaches to sex, if that is the case.

So now you tell me, will Pink Viagra be good or bad?

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This entry was posted on Sunday, March 16th, 2008 at 1:28 pm and is filed under Wonder Woman. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.