FDA Considers Endorsing "Viagra" for Women

Wash. Post: FDA considers endorsement of drug that some call a Viagra for women, by Rob Stein:

A panel of federal advisers will soon wrestle with a question that has bedeviled poets, philosophers and generations of frustrated men: What do women want?

That enigma will be part of a Food and Drug Administration committee's deliberations next month when it considers endorsing the first pill designed to do for women what Viagra did for men: boost their sex lives. A German pharmaceutical giant wants to sell a drug with the decidedly unsexy name "flibanserin," which has shown prowess for sparking a woman's sexual desire by fiddling with her brain chemicals . . . . 

See also: Newsweek Magazine: The Selling of the Female Orgasm, by Barbara Kantrowitz & Pat Wingert:

A provocative new documentary targets Big Pharma's quest for a female Viagra

You can't help but feel the anguish of Charletta, a charming 60-something Southerner who appears prominently in Liz Canner's new documentary, Orgasm Inc. Charletta is so distraught about her inability to achieve orgasm simultaneously with her husband during intercourse that she agrees to be a test subject for a bizarre invention called an "orgasmatron."  But inserting this questionable device in her spine stimulates only her left leg, which shakes uncontrollably when she flips a switch. After the orgasmatron is removed, Charletta shares with Canner her distress at being such a freak. "Not only am I not normal, I'm diseased," she says. But under questioning by Canner, Charletta discloses that she can, in fact, achieve orgasm in other ways. When Canner tells her that makes her "normal," since 70 percent of women don't reach orgasm during coitus, Charletta is stunned. By the end of the film, she seems like a new woman. With a big smile on her face, she tells Canner, "I accept myself the way I am." If more women could make such a statement, Canner wouldn't have spent much of the last decade making Orgasm Inc. But the film, which has its New York premiere May 27 at the Film Society of Lincoln Center, is a desperately needed antidote to all the hype generated by pharmaceutical companies pursuing their holy grail: a female Viagra. . . .