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By Herb Newborg

"Pink Viagra" to be Reviewed by FDA Next Month
New drug to treat "female sexual dysfunction" estimated to begin a new, $2 billion market.

With the passing of the 10th anniversary of the FDA approval of Viagra, drug makers have turned their attention to FSD, or female sexual dysfunction, an equally profitable affliction, at least according to some. Pills and gels are being tested. Big money is at stake.

Next month, an FDA advisory committee will meet to review German drugmaker Boehringer Ingelheim’s pill to tackle FSD. Boehringer Ingelheim is optimistic that its drug, Flibanserin, is on the verge of becoming the first prescription medication to tap what some have estimated could be a $2 billion market in the United States alone.

And so just in time for the regulatory action comes a new documentary called Orgasm Inc. (subtitled The Strange Science of Female Pleasure), which premieres in New York on Thursday and explores the issue by examining a host of views and products, including the Orgasmatron and an effort by Vivus Pharmaceutical to develop and sell a topical treatment. “A lot of this is about marketing,” filmmaker Liz Canner tells Newsweek. “They are trying to sell disorders.”



And a growing group of psychologists, academics and public health advocates agree that FSD isn’t an authentic medical condition, or at least not the sort of problem that should be treated with drugs. Bandied about but never proven is the statistic that 43 percent of women suffer from this affliction.

The anti-FSD crowd is mostly women. 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.”

“Drug companies want to say to women, ‘You don’t need to know anything; you can have the satisfying sex life that you seek - people dancing on TV, the whole bit - without knowing anything. Just ask your doctor,’ ” she says. “I resent that, because there are specific harms that come from being ignorant and dependent in the world we live in. There may be lots of people who aren’t interested in sex, but is there a medical reason for that, and do we diagnose that?”

Tiefer’s critique centers, in part, on the way that ‘pink Viagra’ is sure to be marketed - with ads day and night, suggesting women who aren’t feeling frisky have a medical problem, the paper writes. She and her allies - known as the New View Campaign - are also galled that so much money and media attention are heaped on the so-called lust drug, even before it exists, when for many women the solution to their libido problems isn’t that exotic.