To your health

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It seems like everyone is jumping on the bandwagon to enhance men's sexual performance. It started with Viagra, and has grown from there. You may remember that early on Pfizer (the maker of Viagra) made claims that the drug addressed women's sexual "problems" as well. Scratch that effort to advance market share by marketing a drug for the whole population - not just the male half of it. Pfizer Gives Up Testing Viagra on Women (NYT, 2/28/04) because their tests show that Viagra is ineffective for women.

After eight years of work and tests involving 3,000 women, Pfizer Inc. announced yesterday that it was abandoning its effort to prove that the impotence drug Viagra improves sexual function in women. The problem, Pfizer researchers found, is that men and women have a fundamentally different relationship between arousal and desire.

One has to wonder if this cultural or biological, but the Pfizer studies seem to indicate that for males physical arousal leads to the desire for sexual activity. However, physical arousal for females "seems to have little effect on a woman's willingness, or desire, to have sex." Of course, the interpretation of such a difference is framed from a patriarchal perspective:

"There's a disconnect in many women between genital changes and mental changes," said Mitra Boolel, leader of Pfizer's sex research team. "This disconnect does not exist in men. Men consistently get erections in the presence of naked women and want to have sex. With women, things depend on a myriad of factors."

Is this a failure in the socialization of females, or a failure of biological wiring? One might have stated the findings as "Women do not seem to share the automatic conditioning of men to socially constructed sexual stimuli." Or, if we were going to be more objective in approach, one might state: "The relationship between arousal and desire appears to function differently for men and women."

So Pfizer is off on a different tactic for stimulating female desire - the hunt for a drug that effects brain chemistry. Why does this bring to mind the studies of electronically stimulating the pleasure centers of the brains of mice? In those studies, mice could press a bar to stimulate their pleasure centers. What happened? Mice essentially standing on the trigger to electronically jolt their brains.

One way or another the drug companies will attempt to "capture" the full population in this quest for what seems to be promoted as males fantasy - every woman lusting indiscriminately for sex, and every male constantly ready to engage.

Posted by rowan at February 28, 2004 08:44 AM | TrackBack | Printable Version | [eMail this article!] |