One of the best perks of being a columnist for iVillage is that when I am sitting around eating chocolate chips and typing random words into Google, I am not "wasting time," I am, in fact, "doing valuable research." Suddenly I am transformed into a diligent social scientist with my hair up in a smart bun and large horn-rimmed glasses as I adjust my immaculate white lab coat and dive into some recently published data.
So naturally, when I came across an article that appeared on MSN.com about female sex drugs, I would have been remiss in serving my devoted readers if I had not checked it out.
Sex, Drugs and the Elusive Female Orgasm
According to the article, sex drugs like Viagra and Cialis represent a 2.5 billion dollar a year industry. Um, that's a lot of money. Turns out that male sexual dysfunction is big business.
What's truly puzzling is that female sexual dysfunction is a much bigger problem (I know it's hard for you men to hear that ours is bigger than yours, but it's true!), which means women's sexual dysfunction is potentially more lucrative, and yet no one has developed a credible drug to treat the condition. A study done at the University of Chicago reports that 31 percent of men claim to have had one or more persistent problems with sex. (Note: The sex problems don't include "not being able to find anyone to have it with," which is also a large, but separate, problem for many men.) But what was shocking even to researchers was that 43 percent of women reported having persistent sexual problems.
That's bad, of course, but if you do the math, you'll discover that if there's 2.5 billion dollars to be made from the sex problems of men, that means there's potentially 3.3 billion dollars to be made from the sex problems of women, and yet, to repeat (it does deserve repeating), there's not a single drug out there for us gals.
This makes me want to take myself, horn-rimmed glasses, lab coat and all, out into the kitchen to whip up a little something for the ladies, seeing as there's a cool $3.3 billion in it for me. And really, how hard could it be?
Well, of course, "How hard can it be?" is exactly the question the makers of Viagra have answered to such resounding effect. Apparently, dealing with the persistent sexual problems of men isn't so hard. The most persistent male sexual problem is lack of erection, and Viagra and Cialis seem to have that problem well in hand, so to speak. According to sex researcher Beverly Whipple, "Women are more complex than men."
The primary sex problems in women are lack of desire and inability to achieve orgasm. Simply increasing the blood flow to the genital area, which has such a swell effect for men, doesn't really do the trick for women.
According to the MSN.com article, Pfizer and other drug companies have abandoned the search for a female Viagra as being "too complicated."
This response from the drug companies may sound eerily familiar to women who have had trouble achieving orgasms, as they've probably already heard this same excuse at home.
