David Segal in the Washington Post:
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.
But as this race reaches what could be its final lap, not all of the spectators are cheering. Some, in fact, are booing as loudly as they can.
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.”
More here. [Thanks to Ruchira Paul.]