So the pill that’s supposed to treat female sexual dysfunction has been approved by the FDA. I thought it would be a great thing but now that I read about it, I’m confused.
The pill purports to address not the blood flow to the genitals but “receptors in the brain” in order to combat lack of sexual desire. Normally, the biggest problem in terms of sexual dysfunction that women experience is not that they have no desire for sex or can’t get aroused. The problem is that they can’t bring the arousal to the point of culmination.
But the pink pill isn’t addressed to these women, it seems. It is, instead, supposed to treat women who have no sexual desire at all. This is a very serious pathology, and how many people on the planet can have this problem? Three? Fifteen? What’s the point of making a pill just for them when there’s a much more widespread dysfunction?
This is very puzzling.
Clarissa's Blog 
So basically they’ve created a pill to make women more desperate for sex, so that the men who are on viagra (or not, as the case may be) have “willing” partners more often?
–as someone who doesn’t have sexual desires [yes, I’m weird, yes I know it, yes I’ve been on 3 different hormonal treatments – not for this but for other female problems – all of which nearly killed me – literally, not figuratively], I think the whole thing is a little weird…
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Female sexual desire is much easier to fulfill without men. 🙂 Just as male sexual desire is easier to fulfill without women.
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Female sexual dysfunction = my libido doesn’t conform to the box in which I’m supposed to live.
Addyi is a treatment for hypoactive sexual desire disorder, defined by Sprout as “a persistent absence of sexual thoughts, fantasies, responsiveness and willingness to engage in sexual activity that causes personal or relationship distress.”
I just don’t see doctors going through the persistent questioning and testing required to rule out health problems, orientation mismatch, partner mismatch, etc to make this drug worthwhile for many people.
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I agree. More often than not, it’s lack of interest in this specific partner and not any medical issue. It’s disturbing that people will be medicated in order to cram them even deeper into unsatisfying relationships.
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My impression is that a bunch of people have some very mistaken idea of how viagra works, and claim that the lack of a female equivalent is discrimination. They therefore demand a pill for women that does what they, mistakenly, believe viagra does for men.
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JE —
You’re right! The media are doing a terrible job of calling this new medication “the female Viagra,” when it doesn’t function the same way at all, and some feminist websites have angrily seized the “discrimination” angle.
Viagra doesn’t affect the male libido; it simply increases blood flow to allow an erection when the man is already emotionally excited.
By contrast, Addyl doesn’t directly affect the blood flow to female genitals at all. Instead, it affects the same receptors in the brain that are associated with depression, and it takes weeks to have the desired effect when/if it works. So it’s essentially a mislabeled anti-depressant medication.
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By contrast, Addyl doesn’t directly affect the blood flow to female genitals at all. Instead, it affects the same receptors in the brain that are associated with depression, and it takes weeks to have the desired effect when/if it works. So it’s essentially a mislabeled anti-depressant medication
SSRIs are well known dampeners of emotion including libido, and SSRIs are the overwhelmingly prescribed class of anti depressant medication. Any kind of hormonal birth control has the well known common side effects of weight gain and libido dampening. How many are on one or both classes of meds? For a lot of women Addyl sounds like it would be an exercise in frustration.
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Another antidepressant? ?? Oh Lordy. Today these nasty antidepressants are prescribed for everything, it seems.
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The important thing is the result. If this pill did produce orgasms for those who don’t have them, it would be the most important invention ever. But the way it’s described doesn’t seem to lead there.
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The point of such a pill is simple: so someone can say “we’ve got one too!”
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Life without an orgasm is no life at all. So it’s a pretty huge point.
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If you want a good comprehensive history on why this drug was not approved the first few times it came up against FDA scrutiny, the politics behind the search for the “pink viagra”, and why this drug actually doesn’t work, then a new book by my UVic Mentor called Big Pharma, Women, and Labour of Love just came out.
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PS- The people who have been calling for a “pink viagra” have actually not been feminists at all. Most feminists have been critical of the idea of a “pink viagra”. The real promoters who are using feminist rhetoric to say “we need one too, for equality” have often been highly paid astroturfers who are bankrolled by drug companies, such as the Berman Sisters.
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Its a drug that specifically targets the libido in women experiencing menopause and premenopause. Hate to break it to you but as a woman, sexual desire really starts to disappear after that. Doesn’t matter how good your sex life was before menopause. It is not about physiological dysfunction or blood flow.
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And this is how I know you are a boy. 🙂 You are projecting, Jim. Or Jack. Or Harry. 🙂
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Irrespective of who pays them, enormous numbers of women never manage to reach an orgasm. Many don’t even manage to reach it on their own. And there are quite a few whose problem is so serious that they can’t retain the memory of reaching it in their sleep. I hope this very serious issue doesn’t get lost in the discussion of who paid whom and who is a real feminist.
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Sexual dissatisfaction (and, as the studies this drug used to determine effectiveness vaguely dubbed them, “sexually satisfying events”) are a huge problem. But they’re not going to be solved by a drug company that’s more interested in producing the next “blockbuster drug” than whether or not it delivers on its promises. For the last decade “pink viagras” have come and gone without FDA approval, and this one is no different in terms of resulting in very few “sexually satisfying events”, but creating an impressive and sometimes dangerous series of unwanted side effects.
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Right now, what very many people (women and men) use to address this issue is alcohol. I’m one of these people. If it weren’t for alcohol, I’d probably still suffer from this dysfunction.
However, it’s obvious that alcohol is very far from ideal in these situations. So I was hoping there would be a medication that would play the role of alcohol but be safer.
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Alcohol serves as a disinhibitor of impulses, but it depresses the central nervous system, so too much will backfire. Hence the term, “whisky dick” and “it giveth the desire but taketh away the performance.”
I never initially hooked up with anyone while drunk or even slightly tipsy. Then again, I haven’t hooked up with many people so…_(ツ)_/¯ When I was in college the problem of “we hook up when we’re drunk but he treats me differently when we’re sober”, mystified me.
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You’re not supposed to drink with this medication at all. The science on this is so stinking bogus:
But here’s the thing. Nobody actually even knows what would happen if a woman taking Addyi were to cheat and have, say, a glass of wine with dinner — because the research on the effects of drinking while on the medication was done almost entirely on men. The alcohol-safety study included 23 men, and a grand total of two women.
A sample size of two sounds completely ridiculous for a billion dollar drug launch of a drug with modest effects at best.
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There are so many women who are desperate for even the tiniest effect. And their children are even more desperate. So I can understand the enthusiasm even for a highly defective drug.
Obviously, I’d prefer for people to choose the non-medicinal solutions but in this culture that isn’t happening.
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Enthusiasm, I can understand. But when the drug goes through the FDA I expect it to work with a reasonable amount of certainty and for the side effects to be well researched, not just some random CYA trials.
Otherwise, why not get some mystery oysters or powdered rhino horn or eat ice cream or some homeopathic sexy time pills ? Why the hell should I pay a drug company markup so I can subsidize the drugs in other countries with universal health care?
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This is such a drug obsessed culture that people take prescription drugs to make their lashes grow. There is an anti-depressant you take to handle the effects of another antidepressant that you take at the same time. Painkillers are attached to coffee cups in neighborhood cafés. What can I say? Americans believe in the happy pill. There’s no changing that.
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Maybe a fluorinated piperazine drug is just what the doctor ordered …
… if you’re suffering from depression and have the need for an anti-helmintic drug because you’ve been carrying around a low-grade parasite infection. 🙂
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Yes, having a low grade parasitic infection would bring one down, in every sense.
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