Medicalisation of ‘problems in living’ is hardly new, is it?

‘Orlistat’ as a substitute for sensible eating.
‘Prozac’ for those who can’t cope with life’s disappointments.
‘Viagra’ for male sexual problems.
‘Benzo’s’ for anxiety symptoms – ditto propanolol.

My guess is that the biggest market for flibanserin (not filibanserin) will be amongst young women going through a phase of sexual experimentation?

Will legion of oldies be forced into joyless chemically facilitated sex because of it (while senior Tory figures cheer loudly?) – I must admit I have my doubts about the credibility of such assertions.

Flibanserin was originally developed as a life style drug, sorry, anti-depressant and although this therapeutic goal failed rather abysmally a % of female subjects did experience what were characterised as positive unintended effects.

Serendipity in the field of drug development is alive and well it seems?

I’m unsure whether Laurie Penny regards this as auspicious or not, but there are several contrary omens:

One is the flourishing scale of chicklit, some explicitly pornographic, along with the emergence of celebrated woman writers of porn such as Anne Declos/Dominique Aury/Pauline Reage, author of: The Story of O:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2004/jul/25/fiction.features3

And Catherine Millet:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2002/may/19/biography.features

Another sign of the times is the increasing number of women charged with, and convicted of sex with minors.

Yet another is the amazing succession of recent press reports about highly educated and contented hookers:
http://women.timesonline.co.uk/tol/life_and_style/women/article6927035.ece

@A&E Charge Nurse – I’m obsessive compulsive and have found that Prozac helps me to be able to control my symptoms and helps me get better. I hated the idea of drugs and withheld from them, only keeping myself ill. The CBT I was doing wasn’t impacting. I’ve found using both together helped me. You might as well say in your post that all the ailments you describe require people to simply pull their socks up – which in essence goes against the point raised by the article, rather than the out and out compliment to it you assume.

People seem to pick a perspective and stick to it like glue – can’t we agree that different methods will work with different people, if not because at the simplest analysis symptoms arise for different reasons in different people? Instead of this fanaticaly affermation/rejection of different ways as part of our own ideological stances? This is aimed at the Prozac comments, not Laurie Penny.

Ahem. Note the irony that this drug, a piperazine-derivative (1-[2-[4-(3-trifluoromethyl phenyl) piperazin-1-yl] ethyl] benzimidazol- [1H]-2-one), is coming onto the market at the same time the government is banning such chemicals to be used recreationally. Hmm.

The chemical is derivative of TFMPP (1-(3-(Trifluoromethyl)phenyl)piperazine) which has been used in the soon-to-be-illegal party pills because it has been deemed unsafe for use in the EU.

Love it.

Honestly, Laurie, your penis envy is all over this.

Let’s not be silly enough to question mandatory heteronormative monogamy

What is mandatory about it? Surely there have never been more alternatives to straight marriage than there are now?

Mandatory monogamous marriage and maternity are back on the agenda

Again, where is the evidence of compulsion for either?

How on earth do you conflate a drug that apparently helps women enjoy sex with “cliterodectomy”?

This article leaks like a colander. What on earth is wrong with a drug being made available to frigid women that might improve the quality of their sex lives if they choose to take it?

we’re going to get fucked anyway. We may as well lie back and learn to enjoy it.

If you don’t enjoy it, don’t do it.

@pagar – frigid?! Were you ever aiming at constructing a valid criticism or just lashing? Because I’m pretty sure there was no worse word choice than frigid!

The only thought I have with the article is that it is seemingly unopen to the thought that some women may benefit. But then I don’t know if HSDD is just something the drug company have effectivly made up (or over played). The article is spot on in the dangers posed through this drug not just being available to a (probably) very small number of people and being turned into a magic cure for all women – and, worse, something to make women feel even more pressured and subjugated.

For the record though, it’s not just women who feel ‘to blame’ or in any way responsible for sex dropping of in relationships. There are plenty of men out there who for many reasons go through phases of lowered sex-drive. And there are instances where the female parter does and the male partner instead of blaming the female questions himself and his role in that.

I very much doubt the Laurie is alien to this – but the point of the article I think is that some men, and very likley society in many ways, would find themselves questioning their role in the woman’s lowered sex drive and instead of finding his own solution (or a joint solution) resort to coertion, manipulation anf bullying to block these thoughts and turn it back on the woman. Something made all the easier with a magic pill out there justifying his response.

Coming next to the market; Darcyium, a medication that makes men laugh at Sex and the City, cry at films, notice haircuts and have an uncontrollable urge to run hot bubble baths and give foot massages.

Snigger. The leap from the Victorian women who enjoy sex are weird so this is the patriarchy at work to the here’s a pill to help women enjoy sex so this is the patriarchy at work is particularly glaring.

Anyway, the effects of the pill seem to be fairly subtle: it increases the enjoyment of sex (ie, raises the probability of an orgasm) when sex does occur. It is this that then leads to the raised desire for more sex.

Can’t really see that there’s a great problem with that: aiding people in enjoying one of nature’s bounties sounds like a reasonable sort of thing for an advanced industrial culture to be doing.

As to the heteronormative: there’s no indication anywhere that the drug works only for heterosexual penetrative sex you know…..

Snigger. The leap from the Victorian women who enjoy sex are weird so this is the patriarchy at work to the here’s a pill to help women enjoy sex so this is the patriarchy at work is particularly glaring.

Sure – if social pressure to conform to x is a form of oppression, then social pressure to conform to the opposite must be liberation, right? It couldn’t possibly be the social pressure to conform that’s the problem, could it?

@6

Frigid
(esp of a woman)
a. lacking sexual responsiveness
b. averse to sexual intercourse or unable to achieve orgasm during intercourse

Sincere apologies, Chris. Didn’t realise the word Gestapo had added another one to the list.

I really must keep up.

[3] ‘can’t we agree that different methods will work with different people’.

Yes, of course, Chris – I am certainly not anti-medication but am concerned about the staggering increase in the number of prescriptions for SSRIs (to cite just one class of drugs).
They can be very useful when prescribed effectively (as you have already testified) but their over-use, along with a huge upsurge in anti-psychotics is beginning to raise eye brows in a number of circles.

We also have major issues with bug resistance due to overuse of antibiotics.
Everybody is on a statin it seems.
And even children are far more likely to be given psycho-active medication nowadays.

@8 Personally, I’ve always got my treatment at Stepford County Hospital.

“Don’t fancy sex with hubby tonight? Let’s not be silly enough to question mandatory heteronormative monogamy or a culture that frames heterosexual intercourse as the ultimate panacaea”

I thought nowadays popular culture promotes (jokingly) the idea that sex stops with marriage?

Ok- so I’m an old bag, and hubby and I are at an age where we’re just pleased that we can still shag, rather than hung up on the number of times we pull it off – but do we need to keep portraying women as such victims?

Who cares if the Tories want you up each day blowing the old boy so that he can go off to work a happy man? Who cares if Boots or whoever wants you to buy pints of anti-smelly-fanny spray? Who cares what the mainstream thinks about anything? We’re women – we can make our own decisions. And a lot of us DO make our own decisions. We laugh at botox, we laugh at fanny enhancement surgery, and we laugh at dickhead who try and tell us skinny is best. We somehow manage to score husbands and boyfriends in spite of it all.

I like this site a lot and think Laurie posts some majestic stuff, but Jesus – let’s have a break from the stories about women on the receiving end. Most of us live lives that have nothing to do with the sort of vacuous, headline hunting, non story crap the mainstream press keeps pumping out in the hope that such stories will rescue it from extinction.

I don’t care if the Tories want me to be a home hooker. They’re idiots.

@10 – not the word gestapo – plus you can’t hide behind a dictionary. Dictionary definitions are all well and good, but dictionarys don’t keep pace with word usage. Frigid is clearly a word which is used in a derogatory manner and has come to be understood as derogatory, regardless of what it originally or previously meant. Word use changes. The word frigid was probably coined by a society where that negativeness was even more ‘normal’ than it was today anyway, so just because the book doesn’t tell you it’s a negative word doen’t mean it’s not.

@11 – yes, I see what you mean. I was prickled a bit by the definition of anti-depressants as ‘lifestyle’ drugs. I certainly don’t use them to maintain a lifestyle image, but I can see what you mean about over prescription. Things do seem to be progressing a touch now – my CBT is only possible as my NHS area provides it now, giving my doctor (and me) more options. Five years ago when I had my last attack of major OCD it wasn’t and I couldn’t afford it.

In the context of the article, it would be hoped that this new drug to combat HSDD would be used by doctors with extreme caution – if indeed there’s a basis for it in the first place.

Laurie – the vast majority on women on the street will never take this drug, will never care about this drug and will be perfectly happy having sex about once a week. Where did you get this area that women are forced to please their husbands sexually? Surely men are more keen to please women in the bedroom than ever before? Most couples don’t have that much sex once they’ve had kids and on the few occasions that they do, I would wager that it is a 50/50 reciprocal business.

If the sexualisation of children and proliferation of Cosmopolitan and the like have done anything, then surely the one thing they HAVE done is to encourage women to tell their blokes to fuck off if all he wants in a blow job and won’t give anything in return.

Coming next to the market; Darcyium, a medication that makes men laugh at Sex and the City, cry at films, notice haircuts and have an uncontrollable urge to run hot bubble baths and give foot massages.

Now that would cause the average bonk rate in this country to skyrocket.

Not that you could ever convince a Pharma executive that good relationships are an important precondition for good sex[1]. Cause they know – as they shold, being Scietists(tm) and all that – that actually women are pharmacologically manipulated sex dolls, not something crazy like people or anything.

++++++

[1] Not the only one, of course. Self confidence, awareness of one’s own body, dispensing with shame and a lot of other factors are important for a woman to have an enjoyable sex life. But if men want to help, then there are worse things they can learn to do than give foot massages. Or great head.

Most of us live lives that have nothing to do with the sort of vacuous, headline hunting, non story crap the mainstream press keeps pumping out

Eh? Most of us live in a cave, you mean?

It’s great that you have the emotional resilience and sense of self to simply brush off the relentless assault on your identity that is modern popular culture; I envy and admire you for that, and I say that with all sincerity.

But I find it deeply problematic that you should want to erase the experience of the many, many women who don’t share your strength and who suffer daily deaths by a thousand cuts from being reflected to themselves as flawed, dirty, guilty, inferior, weak, demanding, foolish, frivolous, stupid, ugly and irrational from every cultural surface and in every available medium.

@ 17

Not that you could ever convince a Pharma executive that good relationships are an important precondition for good sex

Nor any man.

I’m not saying that it’s a “good thing”, but that’s the biological truth that creates the fault line in sexual politics.

The Lady,

Lady – getting bored with the mainstream’s relentless portrayal of women as weak, endlessly manipulated, pushaboutable cocksuckers is not synonymous with writing off women who do feel manipulated and pushed about.

It is simply to make the point that all this emphasis on the supposition that women are empty vessels into which men, perves and major corporates pour their own visions without resistance is inaccurate for many of us.

I’m glad that you’re glad that I’m strong, feel good about myself despite being no oil painting, and haven’t resorted to botox even though there are plenty of cracks I could fill now that I’m 40.

Your post tries to write ME off for being those things – as though being those things is somehow a betrayal to the sisterhood. Bollocks it is. One can want positive female feelings covered as well as negative ones. To buy into the mainstream’s obsessions with looks, plastic surgery and tight fannies is basically to agree that you’re letting a dickwad like Murdoch set your standards for you. Why not applaud those of us who can’t be doing with that?

My wife is a slave to her hormones. There’s about a week in the month when I have to beat her off with a stick, a week where I have to tread VERY carefully around her (sometimes the same week, thinking about it), a week when she just wants to curl up with painkillers and cocoa, and a week where she’s at the same emotional level as me. This isn’t me imposing my patriarchy, this is a result of internally produced behavioural adjusting drugs (hormones) having an effect. The strange existential thing is that sometimes I wonder which, if any, is the right her, especially when she apologises for or contradicts something she said or did earlier.

[18] ………….. many women who don’t share your strength and who suffer daily deaths by a thousand cuts from being reflected to themselves as flawed, dirty, guilty, inferior, weak, demanding, foolish, frivolous, stupid, ugly and irrational from every cultural surface and in every available medium.

Yes, but such an extreme interpretation only makes sense if you see life through a dramatic, and perhaps even self-dramatising lens?

Take big pharma – isn’t this industry primed to seek out, or create new markets all the time?
Lets face it they have certainly picked up on our propensity to stuff as many tablets into our gob as possible.

Is the introduction of flibanserin driven by a chauvinistic political agenda, or is it merely a further example of a product seeking to find a new niche in an already saturated market (and thus bring in a few more bob for the directors).

As far as I can tell it doesn’t matter if you are male, female, or even a child, the pharmaceutical industry will sniff out any opportunity to sell you new drugs.

Your post tries to write ME off for being those things – as though being those things is somehow a betrayal to the sisterhood. Bollocks it is. One can want positive female feelings covered as well as negative ones. To buy into the mainstream’s obsessions with looks, plastic surgery and tight fannies is basically to agree that you’re letting a dickwad like Murdoch set your standards for you. Why not applaud those of us who can’t be doing with that?

Er… OK.

It’s great that you have the emotional resilience and sense of self to simply brush off the relentless assault on your identity that is modern popular culture; I envy and admire you for that, and I say that with all sincerity.

I’m sorry for failing to acknowledge and applaud you. Must do better in future.

Jeez.

Is the introduction of flibanserin driven by a chauvinistic political agenda, or is it merely a further example of a product seeking to find a new niche in an already saturated market (and thus bring in a few more bob for the directors).

Please explain why this is an either or question.

Laurie is basically saying that this is a further example of a product seeking to find a new niche in an already saturated market, while exploiting a chauvinistic political agenda to differentiate itself and artificially create said niche. And I agree with her.

I don’t get this dichotomy of “things that are not harmful to women only” not being allowed to be “things that are harmful to women”. The overmedicalisation of life in general is a bad thing, but in this particular instance the damage is limited to women because the drug is targeted at women. Seems like a perfectly cogent topic to write an article from a feminist perspective about.

Hang on, I just noticed this:

that’s the biological truth that creates the fault line in sexual politics.

Men are bilogically incapable of sustaining healthy and caring relationships?

And feminists are supposed to be man-haters? Really?

“Laurie is basically saying that this is a further example of a product seeking to find a new niche in an already saturated market”

She is saying rather more than that. As far as I can see, she is saying that, for political reasons, women who find it difficult to achieve orgasm should not be allowed to take chemical compounds that might help (bad news this for the white wine industry). Instead, they should go to a committe meeting or something else designated as wholesome by Laurie and her pals.

[24] ‘Laurie is basically saying’ ……….. oh, I’m sure posters will draw their own conclusions about Laurie’s ideas.

Incidentally, drugs can only be harmful if patients agree to take them (leaving aside the issue of treatment imposed on patients detained under the MHA, or those who lack capacity because they are demented/pre-verbal, etc).

The founding principle of the MCA [2005] is that ALL patients are presumed competent until proven otherwise.
http://www.dca.gov.uk/legal-policy/mental-capacity/mca-summary.pdf

Are women so ‘flawed, dirty, guilty, inferior, weak, demanding, foolish, frivolous, stupid, ugly and irrational’ that they are unable to resist the machiavellian activities of a few German scientists?

How did the old anti-drug campaign go – ‘just say no’?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Just_Say_No

As far as I can see, she is saying that, for political reasons, women who find it difficult to achieve orgasm should not be allowed to take chemical compounds that might help (bad news this for the white wine industry).

I don’t think you quite understand how the drug works, or what it is designed to combat.

This drug will not help women reach orgasm more easily, or make their existing sex lives better. It is designed to enhance their libido – how much they want to have sex. Put simply, it increases horniness, not pleasure.

Now granted, horniness can lead to pleasure; if you feel horny you are more likely to turn to your husband or your Rampant Rabbit for attention and hence your chances of achieving orgasm are increased.

But feminists – both Laurie and I among them – are skeptical about the fact that female pleasure is the focus of attention from the drug designers as much as female availability and willingness to engage in sex are.

Additionally, there is a fairly large body of evidence that indicates that women experience a drop in libido/desire when they are stressed, overworked, resentful about carrying a disproportionate burden in the household/childcaring, feel insecure, experience lowered levels of trust and intimacy with their partners etc.

Women’s lack of self confidence (amply bolstered by a gleeful advertising industry), the fact that they still routinely do more work in the home, are paid less, bombarded with “I balme the mother” rhetoric from the tabloid press, and so on and so forth, could really do with being addressed at the root. It’s not unreasonable for feminists to be suspicious when the pharma industry instead throws (expensive) drugs at the symptoms.

That treating the symptoms also happens to allow men to get laid more without making their partners genuinely happier and more content may not be on the order of an out-and-out evil conspiracy, but it’s certainly in line with patriarchy’s attitude to women as a second-rate servant class (where the services, in this particular case, are sexual).

Ack.

“skeptical about the fact that female pleasure is notthe focus of attention from the drug designers as much as female availability and willingness to engage in sex are. ”

Apologies.

I can’t help wondering, though; was there this resistance when viagra and cialis hit the open market – calling for the spouses of elderly men to get erotic and creative with their lovemaking rather than ‘take a tablet, hoik up the nightie and roll it back when you’ve finished?’

the a&e charge nurse, you dodged the question, so I’ll repeat it: why do you presume that commercial greed and patriarchal attitudes cancel each other out?

Are women so ‘flawed, dirty, guilty, inferior, weak, demanding, foolish, frivolous, stupid, ugly and irrational’ that they are unable to resist the machiavellian activities of a few German scientists?

Oh, never mind. You’re arguing in such despicably bad faith as to make the whole enterprise soul-witheringly pointless. Not for a moment did I suggest that women are “flawed, dirty, guilty, inferior, weak, demanding, foolish, frivolous, stupid, ugly and irrational”, but that they are constantly bombarded with cultural messages that try to sell them product on the basis that they are those things. This was a more than usually distasteful word-twisting trick to have played, even for the internet. Ugh.

Not for a moment did I suggest that women are “flawed, dirty, guilty, inferior, weak, demanding, foolish, frivolous, stupid, ugly and irrational”, but that they are constantly bombarded with cultural messages that try to sell them product on the basis that they are those things.

You both seem to have misspelled ‘people’

Men are biologically incapable of sustaining healthy and caring relationships?

No, of course not, but that’s not what was said.

You argued that good relationships are an important precondition for good sex

The argument that relationships are important for women is, in fact, justification for Chris Grayling’s view of how he would like the world to be.

#30 – Googling “feminist critique of viagra” brought up a few interesting-looking studies, among them:

http://www.thefreelibrary.com/Is+Viagra+enough%3F+broadening+the+conceptual+lens+in+sex+therapy+with+…-a0153360120

http://www.springerlink.com/content/b2227687187331g6/

But I don’t really know what you mean by “this resistance”. Laurie and Liberal Conspiracy aren’t exactly the Murdoch press. The mainstream reporting has been overwhelmingly positive.

You both seem to have misspelled ‘people’

Spellcheck your own self, please. Men get their fair share of shit from the media and the advertising industry, but I was originally referring to very specific cultural messages about female inadequacy, especially in the realm of sexuality; “feminine hygene” products, Brazillian waxes and labioplasty were high in my mind, because they’d been brought up by Kate Belgrave as somethig we should effortlessly shrug off. These things are targeted at women, not men. To then turn around and say that it was I who claimed women were dirty, stupid etc. is quite simply despicable.

The argument that relationships are important for women is, in fact, justification for Chris Grayling’s view of how he would like the world to be.

I did address that point in the footnote, you know:

“[1] Not the only one, of course. Self confidence, awareness of one’s own body, dispensing with shame and a lot of other factors are important for a woman to have an enjoyable sex life. But if men want to help, then there are worse things they can learn to do than give foot massages. Or great head.”

I will add though, for absolute clarity, that for women who are in relationships the quality of those relationships is very important for a good and satisfying sex life.

I’d say there is a fairly large body of evidence that people experience a drop in libido/desire when they are stressed, overworked, resentful about carrying a disproportionate burden in the household/childcaring, feel insecure, experience lowered levels of trust and intimacy with their partners etc.

“This drug will not help women reach orgasm more easily, or make their existing sex lives better. It is designed to enhance their libido – how much they want to have sex. Put simply, it increases horniness, not pleasure.

Now granted, horniness can lead to pleasure; if you feel horny you are more likely to turn to your husband or your Rampant Rabbit for attention and hence your chances of achieving orgasm are increased.

But feminists – both Laurie and I among them – are skeptical about the fact that female pleasure is the focus of attention from the drug designers as much as female availability and willingness to engage in sex are. ”

So much nonsense in a few short paragraphs.

The drug designers couldn’t give a shit about female pleasure, female libido or female availability. They’re interested in money.

You know, this profit thing that drives the capitalist dynamic? They’d have been just as happy to find a drug that you take every day that puts two inches on a woman’s bust, two inches on a prick (thus making me 6 ft 2 inches tall, just to get that joke in first), keeps you looking 35 until you’re 85 or guaranteeing that you’ll never get cancer of any form at all. For the drug company it’s “can we get people to take one of these every day?”, little else.

To be sceptical about the drug being designed around orgasms or availability you don’t need to be a feminist. Just naive about the economic system you inhabit.

Further, there were no drug designers looking at anything at all to do with female orgasm, libido or availability in this case. The drug was designed as an anti-depressant. It didn’t work very well as such but the women in the test group taking it did report that they were having more satisfying sex more often while taking it. Thus a second round of tests to check out this effect of the drug:

“Women who took a daily 100mg dose of the drug, called flibanserin, reported having satisfying sex more often than those who took a placebo. Before the trial, subjects reported an average of 2.8 satsifying sexual events per month. Those who took daily flibanserin saw this rise to 4.5 times a month, compared with a rise to 3.7 times a month for those taking placebo.”

http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2009/nov/16/female-viagra-sexual-desire-libido

The serendipity of the finding pleases me for Viagra was of course found when men reported interesting side effects from an angina drug being tested (and it wasn’t very good at dealing with angina).

But the way that I’ve read these pieces (and at this point of course I could be wrong) is that the drug absolutely works by increasing the liklihood of orgasm in any specific sexual encounter. The effect on the libido is a secondary effect as, well, I think that this is at least logical, sex which leads to a satisfactory orgasm is likely to be in greater demand than sex which does not do so.

The serendipity of the finding pleases me for Viagra was of course found when men reported interesting side effects from an angina drug being tested (and it wasn’t very good at dealing with angina).

*snort* Who’s being naive now?

They spent a couple hundred million designing a dud drug, and now they have to find a market to push it to to recoup their losses. Serendipity had nothing to do with it – it’s fuck-up damage control.

But I ask again – how do the commercial aspect and the overmedicalisation of female bodies/patriarchal angle cancel each other out? It’s not all either/or with neat little ingle causes in life, you know. They could be greedy bastards and misogynist fucks. It does happen.

umm, do you know what serendipity means? If I’d spent a couple hundred million designing a dud drug, I’d call discovering that it happens to increase sex drive (or whatever) extremely serendipitous.

Luis “good luck in making unexpected and fortunate discoveries ”

Glad I didn’t entirely fail dictionary 101 there.

“They could be greedy bastards and misogynist fucks.”

Hurrah for greedy bastards say I…..but it does entirely escape me how increasing the number of orgasms in the world is misogyny. Even if it is purely, as I claim, a side product of pure greed.

Tim – sorry I was asking TheLady

What Kate says. Laurie continually portrays women as pathetic victims of ‘patriarchal capitalism’, or somesuch nonsense.

And as Tim points out this ‘explanation’ explains everything, even opposite outcomes: it’s worse than useless.

This is puritanical stuff. What exactly is wrong with taking a drug which enhances either pleasure or desire for pleasure? I take drugs which enhance my clubbing experience (and most of those aren’t given the safety tests they’d get from Big Pharma). Boo hoo, poor me.

And who the hell says these only work on heterosexual women anyway? If anything, my lesbian friends are keener on experimentation than my straight friends.

“Hurrah for greedy bastards say I”

So rare for a right wing twit to tell the truth these days.

Still, it is nice when they admit their beliefs. Which of course is why you come on here spouting the very economic policies that benefit the greedy bastards you love so much.

Quote of the day:

“A research scientist who unmasked herself as the blogging call girl Belle de Jour has admitted that she misses the satisfaction of ‘doing a job well’ since giving up prostitution.”
http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/books/article6933348.ece

[31] ‘You’re arguing in such despicably bad faith as to make the whole enterprise soul-witheringly pointless’.
And,
‘This was a more than usually distasteful word-twisting trick to have played, even for the internet. Ugh’.

Is it possible that you are over reacting ……… just slightly?
You seem to present your opinions in such hyperbolic terms that it becomes very hard to distinguish what IS actually important, and what should merit no more than a few bland sentences at beginning of the BNF.

I know very little about this drug but as other posters mention, have you even considered the possibility that some women (gay or straight, as Shatterface rightly point out) might, just might find it beneficial?

Is it possible that you are over reacting ……… just slightly? You seem to present your opinions in such hyperbolic terms that it becomes very hard to distinguish what IS actually important

Do you know, nobody’s ever said that to me before?

Oh sorry, one last thing:

have you even considered the possibility that some women (gay or straight, as Shatterface rightly point out) might, just might find it beneficial?

No, I just shot from the hip. Laurie, too. Feminists are thoughtless and impulsive like that. It comes from over-reacting the whole damn time.

Honest to fuck, why does every little pharmaceutical development need to get its own social critique? It is like the left-wing equivalent of the right’s “reefer madness” gene. Any drug is great/evil for the left/right depending on whether some guy or girl in a suit is gonna make money out of it at some point in its consumption. It is all so lazy and predictable. Why can’t we just leave people alone to take whatever drugs they feel like?

A drug of this sort will lead not to better sex for women but more demands from men. Young girls will be eventually clamoring to get this new wonder drug that all the ‘popular’ girls are taking. This is a disaster.

I looked up “heteronormative” in three online dictionaries. I didn’t find it. I still don’t know what it means.