I’ve been thinking about sex lately, and so have you. Well, only in an appropriately skeptical way, of course. It has always fascinated me, as a social scientist, that for an activity allegedly so “natural”—a simple biological activity like eating, singing, or walking—that sex is so complicated. If it’s a “normal” part of life, let alone “simple,” why do people throng therapists’ offices and buy nine zillion books to answer their question, “Am I normal?” Yes, you are, buddy, and also no, you aren’t. Compared to whom, when, and where?
A few years ago I wrote an essay for this column on the manufacture of “female sexual dysfunction” and, forgive me, the cockamamie statistics being used to justify it. I know that readers have been panting ever since for a followup on the pursuit by Big Pharma to find a libido-boosting drug for women. Finding such a drug is the Holy Grail of Modern Medications, and if you can get FDA approval, that adds three or four mini-miracles, all in one little pill. Thanks to tireless activism by skeptical, scientifically-minded sexologists and researchers, organized by Leonore Tiefer and the New View Campaign, “Challenging the Medicalization of Sex,” the first such drug, Procter & Gamble’s Intrinsa (a testosterone patch), failed in 2004 to get FDA approval because it didn’t work and wasn’t safe.