Most newspapers didn't even report that in December an FDA panel turned down Procter & Gamble's application for Intrinsa, a testosterone patch intended to raise libido in women whose ovaries have been removed. The problem wasn't that Intrinsa didn't work (the panel voted 14-3 that the manufacturers' trials showed a meaningful improvement in desire and pleasure); the issue was health risks as well as the potential for "off-label use" by women who had simply lost their mojo.
A "lifestyle drug" for women! Can't have that. <...>
SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER (brings you The Nation magazine):
http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/opinion/227076_focus05.html
Women fed up with the double standard in the bedroom Sunday, June 5, 2005 By KATHA POLLITT Penises were all over the news as I sat down to write this column. On May 22, faces blushed scarlet in New York state when it came to light that over the past five years Medicaid has handed out free Viagra to 198 sex criminals. Apparently the state thought federal rules required no less.
The next day, researchers released a study showing excellent results for Johnson & Johnson's dapoxetine, a drug that prevents premature ejaculation and intensifies the male orgasm. True, rapists' access to taxpayer-funded erections vanished within hours, and they will probably have to buy their own dapoxetine, too. But you have to admit, men are moving right along, sexually.
They have drugs to help them get up and stay in and get out in a shower of sparks, and an array of private and public health plans to pay for these fleshly maneuvers: Last year, Medicaid laid out about $38 million for impotence drugs; Medicare will start providing them for seniors next year at an estimated cost of nearly $2 billion over the following decade. Even the Defense Department covers them. Need I add that men don't have to worry that their pharmacist will ask to see a marriage license or plug their name into the sex offender registry before handing over those little blue pills?
No, the double standard still waves over the nation's bedrooms. The only new birth control method coming up soon is actually a nostalgia item, the Today sponge, beloved by Seinfeld's Elaine, which will be returning to drugstores later this year.
Two decades into the AIDS epidemic, the only woman-controlled means of protection against HIV -- now the leading cause of death among black women age 25-34 -- is the aesthetically repulsive, cumbersome and hard-to-find female condom. Hormone replacement therapy, promoted since the '50s as the fountain of feminine youth and sexual vitality, looks to be mostly hype, with the possibility of heart attack, stroke, and breast or ovarian cancer.
And what about sex aids for women? Where's that female Viagra they're always promising us? <...>
It's all enough to make a girl go on sex strike -- at least until Intrinsa gets the OK. After all, as President Bush seemed to be suggesting in a photo-op with babies who had been "adopted" as abandoned embryos, why get hot and bothered when you can be implanted with one of the thousands of leftover embryos languishing in fertility-clinic freezers, and save that clump of cells from certain death in the lab? Yes, thanks to the wonders of reproductive science, if you pay attention in abstinence-only sex ed you, too, can have a virgin birth.
from the June 13 issue of The Nation (www.TheNation.com) . . .