Healthy Skepticism Library item: 2700

Warning: This library includes all items relevant to health product marketing that we are aware of regardless of quality. Often we do not agree with all or part of the contents.

Publication type: news

Gerstel J.
More sex please: Is desire a drug conspiracy?
Toronto Star 2005 Oct 28
http://www.thestar.com/NASApp/cs/ContentServer?pagename=thestar/Render&c=Page&cid=968867505381

Keywords:
FSD medicalization sexual testosterone

Notes:

Ralph Faggotter’s Comments:

‘The medicalization of female sexuality’ ( especially via direct-to-consumer advertising )is the theme of this article.

The article was inspired by an impending meeting in Toronta, Canada of the Women’s Health Forum-
Workshops on November 1 2005 at the U of T Health Sciences Building, 155 College St., from
2 to 5 p.m., require pre-registration by emailing whp-apsf @ web.ca.

Full text: The Toronto Star DATE: 2005.10.28 EDITION: ONT SECTION: Life PAGE: C7 BYLINE: Judy Gerstel

More sex please
Is desire a drug conspiracy?

I hope Paula Caplan tells the Viagra anecdote on Tuesday at the Forum on
Women and Pharmaceuticals.

The former Torontonian, a psychologist teaching at Harvard, is one of
several experts who will question the way the pharmaceutical industry
pathologizes women and markets to them.

The medicalization of women’s sexuality – female sexual dysfunction is
so high profile it’s known simply as FSD – is front and centre at the
Forum.

It’s a bogus disorder, says Caplan – echoing the opinion of most women
who know they’re more likely to be turned on by an attractive, loving
partner (and a good night’s sleep and time to de-stress) than by a pill
or a patch.

“I have a friend who said her husband had gone on Viagra,” says Caplan,
“and I asked, ‘Is it helping?’

“She said, ‘It’s not really helping me very much. Because his idea of
foreplay is shaking the bottle of Viagra at me.’”

A big gripe for Caplan is the category called hypoactive sexual desire
disorder in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders
(DSM-IV).

It’s damaging and unjustified, she says, “because it’s telling us (the
problem) is in our brains, in our bodies – not that you have an
insensitive partner in bed with you.”

Female sexual disorders are “anything the therapist, who is likely to be
male, thinks a woman should be doing that she’s not doing,” says Caplan.

“We live in a psychiatrized and psychologized society in everything is
pathologized stuttering, math disability …” Much of this, she says, is
based on “pitifully bad research often guided by the profit motive or
otherwise misguided.”

The profit motive is behind advertising that Barbara Mintzes, faculty
member of the University of British Columbia’s Centre for Health
Services & Policy Research, will discuss at the Forum.

She’ll be asking, “Diane, Julie, Jasmin … who are these women and what
are they doing in your medicine cabinet?”

The names refer to drugs or fictional womenin drug ads.

Diane-35, originally launched as a contraceptive, has been approved in
Canada only as a second-line drug for women with severe acne who failed
to respond to other treatments. But the image in the ads, and in
commercials on MuchMusic, was of a lovely young woman who looks 15 or
16, Caplan notes. “It really looked like a fashion or cosmetic ad.”

The message, she says, is “this will make your skin look nice. There’s
no sense that this is a medicine approved only for an extremely
restricted patient group because of safety concerns.”

Jasmin, a contraceptive, “sounds like a perfume,” points out Mintzes,
questioning the use of “fantasy” brand names for powerful drugs.

Ads for Xenical, approved only for obese patients or those who are very
overweight with cardiovascular problems, play on women’s insecurities
about looking slim and attractive, using a character named Julie.

One ad shows a woman’s slim lower torso in a black, lacy garter belt
over tight, bare buttocks and thighs. Above is written, “I am Julie.
Last night, I did a striptease for my husband.”

The text continues, “I tried and tried to lose weight on my own … Ask
your doctor about Julie’s story.”

“If you look at the image in these ads,” says Mintzes, “this is not
somebody who is or has been obese.”

Besides, she notes, “the effect of Xenical, as with any anti-obesity
drug, is pretty modest 3.3 kilograms in one year of use.” And the side
effects are not anything you’d want to happen while wearing only a
garter belt and performing a striptease.

“If you think of the fairly mild effectiveness and the fairly frequent
bowel-related side effects with this drug” – Mintzes politely avoids the
term ‘anal leakage’ – “there’s a large gulf between the fantasy way it’s
presented in the ad and the reality.”

Mintzes is disturbed by how these ads circumvent Canada’s laws against
direct-to-consumer marketing of drugs.

“What we’ve seen in Canada in the last five years is a very liberal or
lax approach to enforcement of our law,” she says, “and some of the most
prominent examples have been ads targeting young women.”

Another speaker at the Forum will question not just the marketing of
drugs but the industry’s overbearing presence in our lives.

Warren Bell, a family doctor in rural British Columbia and past
president of the Canadian Association of Physicians for the Environment,
asks, “Why just drugs, for heaven’s sake?”

His answer “We’ve allowed the whole field of therapeutics to be co-opted
by what we fondly call Big Pharma.”

Bell’s explanation is the Eurocentric cultural bias we inherited that
deeply distrusted the untamed wilderness and notion of wild nature and
sought to control it.

That, he says, is the cultural matrix for intellectual property rights,
which is the key to Big Pharma’s position actively suppressing every
single therapeutic option that is not patentable.

Women, he says, are especially vulnerable to Big Pharma because of
remnants of social conditioning. “If someone says something will enhance
some quality they’re told or believe is necessary to be desirable,
there’s an acceptance,” he says.

But men are also victims of Big Pharma’s marketing, he points out.

“As a family physician, I have men coming into my office telling me they
have grave doubts about their virility, vitality and their importance in
the relationship because they cannot perform sexually. And they ask me
for something to enhance their ability.

“My question to them is, “Have you asked your wife if she feels this is
a problem?’

“And they say, ‘No, I haven’t.’ And then they realize they’re off the
hook.”

Finally, Leonore Tiefer, sex therapist, psychologist and professor at
New York University School of Medicine will talk about the
medicalization of women’s sexuality, asking, and “Is sex more like
dancing or digestion?”

Tiefer maintains that “sex is much more a cultural matter than a
physical function” – Sex Is Not a Natural Act and Other Essays is the
title of her book.

And the commercialization of sex by Big Pharma is “biologically
reductionist,” she says.

That applies to men, too, notes Tiefer. Men feel pressure to perform,
she says, “and now there’s no way for them to say no. The only option is
to take drugs and feel stereotyped by this macho image of sex as a pile
driving exercise.”

The launch of Viagra, she says, “was the poster child for how to sell a
lifestyle drug and pretend that it’s a disease drug.”

Tiefer appeared before an FDA hearing last year in Washington to argue
against the approval of Intrinsa, a testosterone drug for women
developed by Procter & Gamble.

“Intrinsa is not a glass of Chardonnay and yet we have already seen that
it may well be promoted with a giggle and a wink as “the female Viagra,”
she warned. “Not so – this is a steroid hormone women ..Yet P&G’s
promotional materials encourage the attitude that millions of women are
walking around under-androgenized in danger if imminent sexual withering
away. It’s a revival of menopause as a deficiency disease – only this
time it’s testosterone, not estrogen that rides to the rescue.”

For sure the Women’s Health Forum on Tuesday, which is free and open to
the public, is going to be provocative.

Workshops at the U of T Health Sciences Building, 155 College St., from
2 to 5 p.m., require pre-registration by emailing whp-apsf @ web.ca.

It’s not required for the panel discussion from 6 to 8 p.m. For
information, go to www.whp-apsf.ca.

jgerstel @ thestar.ca