Clara Jane Hendrickson | Asking for more

Leftovers | 'Pink Viagra' hurts women and profits Big Pharma

By Clara Jane Hendrickson 06/17/15 11:13pm

This past week, an advisory panel of the Food and Drug Administration recommended approval for flibanserin, a drug that would treat low sexual desire in women. Chairwoman Susan Scanlan of Even the Score, a coalition of women’s organizations lobbying for the drug’s approval, celebrated the recommendation. “Today, we write a new chapter in the fight for equity in sexual health,” she declared. The push for flibanserin and its treatment of hypoactive sexual dysfunction disorder in women not only makes a mockery of the drug approval process. It marks a dangerous emboldening of the trend towards medicalizing women’s sexuality and a step away from women’s equality in the bedroom.

Even the Score trumpets the statistic that 26 drugs exist to help men with sexual dysfunctions, but no such drugs exist for women. With this perceived inequity, Even the Score has called the FDA gender-biased because of hesitations to approve the drug. However, every one of the 26 drugs that currently exist for men treat erectile dysfunction rather than low sexual desire. The naming of flibanserin as a “female Viagra” is offensively misleading as this is the first drug of its kind to treat low sexual desire in either sex.

Yet, the approval of this drug is looking to solve the wrong problem. Hypoactive Sexual Dysfunction Disorder belongs to the larger category of Female Sexual Dysfunction, a condition whose creation was carried out by large pharmaceutical companies. A 1991 paper in the Journal of the American Medical Association concluded that “sexual dysfunction is more prevalent for women (43%) than men (31%),” a finding that is widely cited in support of medicalizing and creating drugs to treat FSD. The methods of this study have since been held under scrutiny and the accuracy of the results have come into question. It is no surprise that the authors of the paper were affiliated with and received research and consulting support from large pharmaceutical companies such as Pfizer and Procter & Gamble. Sexuality researchers and clinicians with strong financial ties with pharmaceutical companies shaped discussions, the naming and the ultimate inauguration of drug development efforts to cure FSD.

FSD is a textbook example of pharmaceutical company disease-mongering. By creating FSD and promoting a medicalized view of women’s sexuality, pharmaceutical companies successfully established a market for drugs to treat low desire in women. The greatest offense, however, is the lack of scientific data and research backing FSD, a condition whose legitimacy is shaky at best. In fact, there is still very little that is known about the biological processes governing women’s sexuality.

Flibanserin is trying to solve a medical problem that simply might not exist. But here is a problem that does. Media and porn teach us that women can expect to achieve orgasm through penetrative sex. Our hypersexualized culture tells us that we will want sex the same way we did at 20 when we’re 50. Our cultural norms and sex ed classrooms encourage female purity rather than celebrating women’s bodily self-knowledge. It’s going to take a lot more than a drug, whose efficacy is dubious, to solve these problems whose roots are largely social, psychological and relational.

Flibanserin comes with a whole host of alarming and unfortunate side effects including sedation, fainting, dizziness and nausea, all of which become more severe if a woman drinks alcohol or uses oral contraceptives. But, the worst side effect of all is the drug’s association of loss of desire with a female dysfunction. Not only does this fault women for unfulfilling sexual unions, it treats sexual desire as an individual phenomenon that is gifted to someone else rather than something to be cocreated through partnership. Even the model of consent that is frequently taught continues to view sexual desire as something that is requested and then given, often a woman’s acceptance to a man’s invitation.

Let’s not let Big Pharma fundamentally change how we view our bodies and sex lives. Let’s refuse to settle for a pill that denies us the emancipatory process of engaging in a much needed conversation and reconceptualizing of sexual desire in all genders.

CLARA JANE HENDRICKSON is a rising College senior from San Francisco studying political science. Her email address is clara@sas.upenn.edu.

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