Dr. Alan Altman: A Female Viagra (VIDEO)?

Is there a female Viagra? The complexities of women and sex …

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Transcript:

We’ve learned that anything sexually is both. OK, take — just for a moment, look at men with erectile dysfunction. It was always in your head, then we realized it was always in your blood flow. Well, it’s in your head, but it’s different head — and it depends on that blood flow. Now we know it’s both. Because no matter where it starts with men or women — if it starts biologically or physiologically, whether it’s hormones or blood flow, it has an impact psychosocially and psychologically. So there’s always a give and take with it. That’s why the appropriate sexual medicine interview and the appropriate sexual medicine therapy is always multidisciplinary. You’ve got to have a psychologist involved. You’ve got to have the gynecologist involved– obviously if it’s a woman. You’ve got to have both and you set out, of course, to deal with both.

This is why it’s so absurd — you read in the media recently that the FDA is about to turn down the female Viagra. There is no such thing as a female Viagra and there will never be such a thing as female Viagra because female sexuality is so multidisciplinary, it’s so built into the context of a woman’s life that it’s not easy like it is with men to just increase the blood flow and you get a better erection– and we got all sorts of medicines to do that one thing. For women, if you bring– for instance, the drug they were looking at, if you bring that on the market, it’s going to help 10% of the women who have a low sex desire problem. And that’s got to be integrated with the psychological part of it as well. There can’t be such a medicine for women. It’s far too complex. Remember that men need a place, women need a reason– and that’s a huge difference with respect to what drives sexuality in men and women.

We have over the past 40 years experienced feminism and the rise in women in the workplace and more power to women. Women have become empowered. They’ve become far more confident in the workplace, at home, in their lives. This is wonderful. We call this androgyny, if you would, where men and women both have parts of each sexuality– meaning women now are more aggressive, they’re more powerful, they have more confidence. Men are softer. And you see this in the workplace and it works beautifully in the workplace. In the workplace, you share duties, you don’t want to be too harsh with one another– so there’s there’s kind of equanimity in the workplace. At home, many share in the work at home far more than they used to– whether it be child-rearing or cooking or cleaning, whatever it is. And that works beautifully in the workplace and beautifully at home– and it’s awful in the bedroom because what’s lost here is the genetic imperative and the evolutionary biological imperative of me Tarzan, you Jane.

In the ’50s, women didn’t like doing that because it it was demeaning. Now 50, 60 years later, women have been empowered, they have the confidence. What a perfect time to be able to go back into your femininity with confidence that it’s not going to be abusive and that you can do that and share that with your partner. So it’s a perfect time to do that, but it’s not being done so well. So in the bedroom, you have women who are more forceful, you have women who are more directive and you have men who are softer– and that’s fine for awhile, but over the longer term it doesn’t work and that’s why we see so much in the way of men and women turning out of marriage — I mean divorce — but even if they’re not looking for it, finding other stimulation with other partners. So it’s that unforeseen consequence of something wonderful that’s happened in our society, but there’s a price we pay for it in one area, at least.

Posted in: Blood flow,FDA,Food and Drug Administration,Sexual dysfunction,Viagra