media essay 5-6 pages due 12 hours

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h o m e › o p i n i o n U S w o r l d s p o r t s s o c c er t ec h a r t s l i fes t y l e fa s h i o n b us i n es s

Feminists, stop lecturing women about ‘female Viagra’ Sonia Sodha

T he backlash against flibanse r in ignor e s fe male individuality

S e x O p inio n

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jobs US edition sig n in sear c h

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Pa ssions running high – without even a ctua lly ta king the little pink ta blet. Photogra ph: Allen G Breed/AP

Sa turda y 22 August 2015 19.03 EDT

I t is the 1960s, and for the first time, the contraceptive pill has become widely available. While many women have welcomed it, some feminist g roups have condemned it as a terrible form of exploitation: women being

forced to stuff themselves with hormones that mess with their natural

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biolog ical rhythms just to be able to pleasure men without inconveniencing them with a preg nancy and the consequent marital oblig ations.

A ludicrous-sounding alternative reality, rig ht? Everyone knows that feminists heralded the pill as the dawn of female sexual liberation. But is there a strain of this extreme form of feminist arg ument, so concerned about the exploitation of g ender that it rides roug hshod over any notions of individual ag ency, in the debate now rag ing about flibanserin?

Flibanserin, approved by the U S Food and Drug Administration (FDA) last week, is the first drug to be authorised for the treatment of female sexual dysfunction. Feminists who oppose it arg ue it is an example of the pharmaceutical industry doing what it does best: making money by inventing a new medical condition where one doesn’t exist, creating a perceived need for expensive drug s to manag e it.

In doing so, they arg ue it has exploited a natural mismatch between female and male expectations of sex to develop a drug that messes with the female psyche and creates a creepy “on” switch for female lust. They point to the fundamental difference between flibanserin, which creates desire by boosting levels of brain chemicals linked to sexual excitement, and Viag ra, which targ ets the physiolog ical causes of male sexual dysfunction. (This hasn’t stopped the media dubbing flibanserin the “female Viag ra”, perhaps because it has a terribly unsexy name).

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Concerns about this drug aren’t unfounded: the pharma industry struck g old with Viag ra and has been looking for a drug to cure female dysfunction since. But there is an active debate within the medical community as to whether female sexual dysfunction is actually a medical condition at all or whether it can simply be accounted for by psycholog ical and social issues.

These concerns aren’t unique to this area, however. Pharmaceutical companies have long made big bucks by inappropriately marketing drug s in the context of the American for-profit healthcare system. Companies spend billions beaming ag g ressive advertising into people’s homes showing how wonder drug A is the solution to your life’s problems. Consumers push for it; doctors prescribe it; insurance premiums g o up.

When it g ets to what’s g oing on in our brains, thing s g et even murkier. Take anti- depressants. In the U S, they are almost certainly overprescribed by a healthcare profession that is not very g ood at understanding the psychosocial bases of many mental health conditions. But just as it would be ludicrous to arg ue all types of depression should be treated with drug s, isn’t it equally extreme to arg ue that they have no role to play in manag ing some forms of clinical depression

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that are caused by chemical imbalances in the brain?

Flibanserin sounds like a drug that will only be rig ht for a small proportion of women for whom there is a biolog ical, rather than purely psycholog ical and social, cause of their sexual dysfunction. But shouldn’t these women have the rig ht to make an informed choice? Rather than ban the drug altog ether, isn’t the answer to address over-medicalisation in western healthcare by tackling attitudes in the pharma industry and teaching the medical profession to better disting uish between the biolog ical and the psychosocial causes of conditions such as depression and sexual dysfunction?

But the anti-flibanserin feminist brig ade has questioned whether there is such a thing as a meaning ful choice. Forg et the fact that some women with sexual dysfunction want this drug and say they believe it will make them feel human ag ain. The essence of this feminist arg ument is that these women are slaves to social expectations about sex: they don’t ultimately want sex for themselves, but are fretting about not being able to satisfy their partners. No matter that women’s org anisations have campaig ned to g et flibanserin on to the market: this is explained away by arg uing they have been manipulated by the drug s companies.

In portraying women like this, the feminists sceptical of flibanserin rob women of their ag ency. They attribute to these women a sort of sexual false consciousness – you just think you want sex, you don’t know any better. And

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what women would want to risk feeling sick and dizzy for just the one extra sexual experience a month that flibanserin has been associated with?

But who are they to say? For some women, the difference between zero and one mig ht be worth all the side effects in the world. The implication women can’t know what they really feel about sex is horribly patronising – isn’t desiring sex even while you don’t, or not wanting to eat the last doug hnut in the box even as you’re reaching for it, what makes us wonderfully, but painfully, human? Whether it’s a drug to fix the chemical imbalances that are associated with low libido, companies paying for female employees to freeze their eg g s or g iving g irls the rig ht to wear the hijab to school, the truth is that what is liberating for one woman can be exploitative for another.

This is where the feminist movement – or movements – can run into trouble. In its fig ht for the sisterhood, feminism has tended to oversimplify what it is to be female. When all of our interests coincide, this has not only been unproblematic, but has helped feminism achieve some momentous wins, from female suffrag e to the campaig n for equal pay.

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Mo re c o mment T o pic s Sex Wo men Feminism P ha rma c eut ic a ls ind ust ry

But a movement whose essence is to define women by their g ender has not always been very g ood at coping with ethical complexity and moral nuance. At its worst, it can descend into a platform for women to air their own deeply personal views and experiences, while claiming the false leg itimacy that comes from speaking on behalf of all women. Feminists need to remember when they speak for themselves and when they speak for half of the population. I, for one, will remain suspicious of any woman claiming to comment on ethically complex issues from a “feminist” standpoint on my behalf.

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