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| Now you're all wet, baby! - Shut up, you sexist jerk with your for-profit science. |
For 15 years, Carla Price and her husband's sex life was great. But then things began to change.
"Before,
I would want to have sex," says Price, who is 50 and lives in central
Missouri. "But over the years my sexual desire has just dwindled to
nothing."
Price has no idea why. She's healthy. She's not
really stressed out about anything. And she's still totally crazy about
her husband.
 |
| Poison all problems. |
"It's not that our relationship got boring," Price
says. "Because it's actually the opposite -- we became closer as we got
older together."
"We live in a culture that has historically discounted the importance of sexual pleasure and sexual desire for women."
- Terry O'Neill, president, National Organization for Women
 |
| Junior Anti-Sex League (1984) |
But her lack of interest in sex almost wrecked their marriage.
"It did get to the point where my husband thought that perhaps we just needed to divorce," she says.
Women
like Price, who see their decreasing sex drive as a problem, are at the
center of an intense, emotional debate that's been raging for years
over whether the Food and Drug Administration should approve the first
drug that claims to boost a woman's libido [sexual desire].
 |
| A sea of chemicals |
"Men have a number of treatment options for
sexual dysfunction, says
Cindy Whitehead, Sprout's CEO. "We haven't yet gotten to one for
women's most common dysfunction."
"Up
until now," she says, "the treatment paradigm for women with sexual
dysfunction has essentially been: Let's take a drug that works in men
and let's see if it works in women."
"The misrepresentation that 'everybody should be having it...
has a problem if they don't have it,' is to change what sexuality is
into more of a medical thing."
- Leonore Tiefer, psychologist, New York University
 |
| If you struggle you'll fail (LiH). |
None of them did. But Sprout's drug, flibanserin, takes a totally
different approach than, say, Viagra. Instead of increasing blood flow
to the genitals, flibanserin affects a different part of the body: the
brain.
Flibanserin shifts the balance of three key brain
chemicals, Whitehead says. The drug, she says, increases "excitatory
factors for sex" -- dopamine and norepinephrine -- and decreases
serotonin, which can dampen the sex drive.
But there's a lot of
skepticism about flibanserin. The FDA has rejected it twice, saying
there wasn't much evidence it works. The agency also questioned the
drug's safety, especially with long-term, daily use.
"The
combination of...not very robust effectiveness, and the fact that the
safety profile had not been really characterized very well at all made
us reach that conclusion, that it really wasn't ready for approval,"
says
Sandra Kweder, deputy director of the FDA's Office of New Drugs.
The
company acknowledges flibanserin can have side effects, including
sleepiness, nausea, and dizziness. And there are no results yet, Sprout
says, on whether the drug might interfere with the [presumably] helpful action of
Zoloft, Prozac, or other SSRI antidepressants, which are thought to work
primarily by boosting levels of serotonin in the brain.
"Women...want drugs that work.
And this
doesn't seem to be one of them."
- Cindy Pearson, executive director, National Women's Health Network
But Whitehead argues that flibanserin is safe and says the company's studies show it can help many women.
 |
| Testosterone power! |
"We
increase their desire by 53 percent," she says of study participants.
"We decrease their distress by 29 percent, and then they doubled their
number of satisfying sexual events."
Whitehead argues the FDA
is holding flibanserin to a higher standard than it uses to evaluate
drugs for men. And some women's rights advocates worry that might be
true.
 |
| Choose sex over hypocrisy (Stivers) |
"We live in a culture that has historically discounted the importance of sexual pleasure and sexual desire for women," says
Terry O'Neill,
president of the National Organization for Women. "And I fear that it's
that cultural attitude that men's sexual health is extremely important,
but women's sexual health is not so important. That's the cultural
attitude that I want to be sure the FDA has not, maybe unconsciously,
imported into its deliberative process."
More
 |
| Will trade tees for pills |
"Viagra for women" is backed by FDA panel (NY Times) A tablet of flibanserin, a drug to increase sexual desire in women....to inform patients of potential side effects -- like low blood pressure... - Libido drug for women aims to "even the score" with Viagra (Today) Libido-boosting aims to "even the score" with Viagra drug for women... "I'm like,' Oh my word, this drug is working,'" Parrish said in a segment that...Proponents say the drug addresses low sexual desire via a nightly pill that... And new safety...
- Female libido pill fires up debate about women and sex Women like Price, who see their decreasing sex drive as a problem, are...But Sprout's drug, flibanserin, takes a totally different approach than, say, Viagra....Sandra Kweder, deputy director of the FDA's Office of New Drugs.
- Concerns remain as FDA reconsiders sex drug for women (CBS News) ...Controversy surrounds a drug described as the female equivalent of Viagra....But a new review released by the Food and Drug Administration...a female equivalent to Viagra, the blockbuster drug that treats men's...But critics argue that drug development efforts like...
- Female "Viagra" could be approved today (New Scientist) ...The first drug to treat low sexual desire in women may get approved in...have drugs like Viagra, but nothing exists for women with low sexual...
 |
| It beats other options (Stivers) |
Where's the sex drive drug for women? (CNN) (Jan 11, 2014)...There is no approved treatment for low female sexual desire. ...There is no treatment available in the United States for boosting the female sex drive, but women like...their new drug application, asking for more research, Goldstein said. ... for male sexual dysfunction... - FDA panel backs "pink Viagra" for sexual dysfunction in women (LA Times) ..."Pink Viagra" gets a conditional okay from an FDA advisory panel. American...Some say drugs like flibanserin could enhance women's sex lives in the same way....The story was updated throughout with new details.
- FDA panel backs a "female Viagra" (WSJ) ...Twice rejected by regulators, sex pill clears hurdle--with caveat... the FDA would approve new drugs amid accusations of gender bias....More like a quality of life issue than a serious medical issue compared to breast cancer.
- Is this "Little Pink Pill" the Viagra for Women? (NBC News) ...An outside panel will evaluate a new drug called Flibanserin seeking FDA approval that could potentially change the sex lives for millions of women....
- A pill that boosts a woman's sex drive is almost here. But do we... (Wired) ...Three months after Viagra was approved in 1998, The New York Times ran a...Every sex drug, including Viagra, has an inordinately high placebo rate....
- The Short List (top stories at scpr.org, KPCC FM)
Patriarchy: When sex goes wrong
 |
| Patriarchs Dick Cheney and fellow Christian Republican Dennis Hastert, D.C. (AP) |
.
 |
| Oops, wrong party. - Not so fast, Jeff. |
What could go wrong as we medicate every perceived problem and inconvenience in America? The medical system has money it needs to make, and we have problems we need solved, so what if our livers suffer in the process of chasing easy cures? Why look into the deeper causes -- institutional sexism, bias, childhood sexual trauma, emotional and physical harm, oppression, and shaming... Then there are the hypocrites and molesters -- Catholic Christian priests, conservative Republican lawmakers, military comrades, and so on.
 |
| The gay Church fathers made me do it! |
Closet homosexual child molester former Republican House Speaker Hastert: But years before [her brother's] death, his sister said, he told her that his first homosexual contact was with [former Republican House Speaker, former high school teacher and coach, nominal Christian, and hypocrite] Hastert and that it lasted throughout his high school years.
 |
Let's keep this quiet, says hypocrite Hastert
|
[Her brother] Stephen Reinboldt attended Yorkville High School,
where Hastert was a history teacher and coach from 1965 to 1981. In an interview aired Friday on ABC's "Good Morning America," Burdge said Hastert had been a [homosexual] father figure to her [molested] brother but also caused him irreparable harm [through rape and ongoing sexual abuse].
More
 |
| Yum, yum, that's terrible! I mean, really, guys, quit it! (Rick Perry) |
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