Well, it turns out that perhaps they, too, have a disease — “female sexual dysfunction” (fsd)—though as yet there is no cure. The search for a female Viagra may be hampered by the anticipation of less profit, and by the perceived complexity of female sexuality. Male sexuality has been brilliantly stripped of all context, reduced to a singular empirical focus. How big? How long will it last? It’s like shopping for fruit.
But the attempt to medicalize female sexuality doesn’t have the same reductive advantages. In laboratory tests, some women who watched pornographic videos demonstrated increased blood flow but reported that they weren’t aroused. There was a disconnection between physiological and psychological responses. In her wonderfully observant book Talk Dirty to Me, Sallie Tisdale wrote that her mind often reproved what her body responded to. Such is the nature of sex, a naturally conflicting area where libido, history, intellect, and politics all vie for position. A cartoon reproduced in Loe’s book has the tag line “Viagra Supplements,” which include Talkra (“Revives flagging interest in what she has to say”) and Anniversra (“Rekindles a passionate drive to remember birthdays, anniversaries, etc.” ). The message is that sex can’t be reduced to its physical essence for everyone. Viagra is a simple solution to a complex issue.
Viagra hasn’t been promoted as a recreational drug, but recreational use has been an inevitable and highly profitable market for Pfizer. You don’t want to be seen hawking the sexual equivalent of Ecstasy, but it certainly helps the bottom line. And how do you discern between recreational and medical use? If you are a seventeen-year-old who is nervous at the prospect of post-prom sex, do you have a legitimate medical condition? It is an increasingly fine line.
At any rate, you can now be the judge of whether you are suffering from a disease. It is no longer necessary to have an awkward chat with your doctor. You can get “diagnosed” on-line and have thedrug delivered. If the medical perspective is flawed and self-serving anyway, why not skip the middleman? The drug companies themselves may eventually be usurped by more familiar hawkers. Wrigley has patented a chewing gum that enables erections (and gives you fresh breath). In Japan, a health tonic imported from China that contained sildenafil, the active ingredient in Viagra, stayed on the market for a year before authorities ordered it withdrawn. The McRigid burger and Stud Suds can’t be far behind.
The Rise of Viagra isn’t likely to be a best-seller. It reads, in places, like a slightly disguised doctoral thesis, and the subtext is failure, always a tough sell. But Loe raises interesting issues. The battle for men’s sexuality has been fought and won by the drug companies. Admittedly, we didn’t put up much of a fight. But, for women, the enemy has yet to be engaged. A clinical psychologist is quoted as saying that she sees sexuality as a boxing ring. “It’s not just us versus the pharmaceutical industry. It is a vision of women’s sexuality that we’re struggling over.”
Historically, the magic-bullet theory has been a seductive one for the medical profession. In manufacturing drugs to treat the major mental illnesses, the pharmaceutical industry has done brilliantly, the patients less so. But at least there is (relative) consensus on the illnesses, on schizophrenia, depression. With sex, there was first a need to manufacture consensus on what is normal, what is disease. That perspective might remind some of an earlier expert opinion. Only now it is the drug companies that are drawing a line with three dots, implying that the wrong choice will end badly.
