Drugs to Boost Female Libido Are A Slippery Slope

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In the past, women who lacked sexual desire were stigmatized as frigid today, psychiatrys diagnostic manual labels them with hypoactive sexual desire disorder (HSDD). Big Pharma is betting that many such women will want to take a drug to rev up their sex lives, but is that a good idea?

Ethicists and feminists are concerned that the emergence a drug that can amp up female sexual longings may have lasting effects on the very nature of female desire. Male sexual enhancement drugs, you see, are about shoring up the plumbing improving blood flow to the penis while research so far suggests that most women need more than mere physical arousal to get in the mood. To stoke female desire with pharmacology, then, you need to get into the brain.And that, understandably, makes some people nervous. While I share some of those worries, I believe well nonetheless soon be faced with a variety of such drugs and need to address the way we view and regulate them rather than trying to turn back the tide.

In this weeks New York Times Magazine, author Dan Bergner chronicles the lives of some participants in clinical trials of two new drugs aimed at relighting womens fires. He writes:

The promise of Lybrido and of a similar medication called Lybridos or of whatever chemical finally wins the race for F[ood] and D[rug] A[dministration] approval, is that it will be possible to take a next step, to give women the power to switch on lust, to free desire from the obstacles that get in its way. Female Viagra is the way drugs like Lybrido and Lybridos tend to be discussed. But this is a misconception. Viagra meddles with the arteries; it causes physical shifts that allow the penis to rise. A female-desire drug would be something else. It would adjust the primal and executive regions of the brain. It would reach into the psyche.

In fact, Lybrido is actually a combination of Viagra (sildenafil) and testosterone. Just as they do in men, Viagra sends blood to the organs of arousal, and testosterone can increase lust. The second drug, Lybridos, combines testosterone with buspirone, an anti-anxiety drug that lowers serotonin levels briefly. That may help because elevated serotonin can interfere with sex drive, which is why SSRI antidepressants like Prozac can kill desire.

With millions of American women taking antidepressants and with dampened sexual desire a common experience in aging and in long term relationships pharmaceutical companies see room for blockbusters. I certainly wouldnt mind having the option, if I needed such a pill.

But some feminists anticipate that the marketing of these drugs will pathologize normal losses of desire and make women feel as though we need a pill to please our partners, when, in fact, low desire may result from stress or relationship problems that should be addressed in other ways. Men have already felt such pressures, thanks to Viagra and similar drugs that imply anything but a constant ability to turn on arousal is worthy of medical treatment. The same pathologization of normalcy appears in a completely different environment intensely competitive academic programs where some students feel they must take stimulants just to keep up.

Leonore Tiefer, associate professor of psychiatry at New York University, is so concerned about the potential misuse of female sexual desire drugs that she founded an organization, the New View Campaign, back in 2000, to address calls for a female Viagra that arose after the drug was first approved for men in 1998.

In an essay for the scientific journal PLOS Medicine, she called the selling of drugs for female sexual dysfunction a textbook case of disease mongering, or creating and selling a disorder simply to market a medication for it. Just as pharma re-branded impotence as erectile dysfunction to sell Viagra, Tiefer fears it will label a large chunk of normal female sexual experience as a disease to be medicated away for profit.

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Drugs to Boost Female Libido Are A Slippery Slope