Yesterday, the Food and Drug Administration approved a pill to help women struggling with their sex drive.
“This is the biggest breakthrough for women’s sexual health since the pill,” Sally Greenberg, executive director of the National Consumers League, told the New York Times.
Frankly, I think it’s about damn time that women have a medical option.
Viagra was approved in 1998 for men dealing with erectile dysfunction (and paid for by health insurance, at a time when many plans didn’t cover the cost of birth control pills. Of course).
The decision on “female viagra” isn’t without controversy, however.
The drug has previously been rejected twice by the FDA, because of low proven rates of effectiveness and side effects. It’s not supposed to be taken with alcohol, and some doctors have complained it’s “absurd” to expect that young women taking Addyi would refrain from drinking alcohol.
I certainly hope the company manufacturing and marketing this drug isn’t experimenting on desperate women the way Fen-phen was handed out in the 1990s, with sometimes deadly consequences.
It’s been interesting to see the debate about the drug, Addyi:
@davidkroll #Addyi lots of drugs have varying efficacy and can’t be taken with alcohol, or taken with azole drugs. Not a rare issue — Aurelia Cotta (@AureliaCotta) August 19, 2015
I quietly polled a few close friends for their reactions to the drug’s approval, which ranged from “About time!” to “Great, another product that implies women need fixing” and “Why can’t they just prescribe ecstasy?”
Which brings me to the subject of this Vanity Fair article, which I explained to some younger friends last week, makes me feel like a Little House on the Prairie character by comparison.
Nancy Jo Sales delivers another very interesting read in that piece.
He says he’s slept with 30 to 40 women in the last year: “I sort of play that I could be a boyfriend kind of guy,” in order to win them over, “but then they start wanting me to care more … and I just don’t.”
“It’s changing so much about the way we act both romantically and sexually,” the article quotes one source saying about Internet dating.
And then it goes onto explain that romance is basically dead and the young women searching on Tinder are often treated to point-blank invitations to, um, bonk.
Side note: Check out Kelly Clarkson singing profiles of Tinder charmers on Jimmy Kimmel Live.
No wonder we need female viagra.
Except, as one friend quickly pointed out, the Vanity Fair article goes on to mention some young ladies swiping right only to find out their date may be the one with a dysfunction.
“It’s a curious medical phenomenon, the increased erectile dysfunction in young males, which has been attributed to everything from chemicals in processed foods to the lack of intimacy in hookup sex.”
Which, of course, brings me to pandas.
Courtesy National Zoo.
(If you don’t know why I would try to bring this conversation back to pandas, then you must not know me at all).
And one of my favorite New Yorker articles in recent memory, about the difficulties of breeding pandas in captivity.
Among many choice lines in that piece: “In China and elsewhere, panda handlers have encouraged unenthusiastic pairs by showing them ‘panda porn’—footage of other pairs having sex—and giving the males Viagra.
But even finicky Miss Mei Xiang might be pregnant at the moment, they’re not sure. Maybe she swiped right.
