Will we ever have a pink Viagra? NASA has sent a woman around the moon, yet we still don’t have a reliable pharmaceutical to send us over the proverbial moon, at least nothing like the launchpad men have.
I’ve been covering women’s sexual health for 20-plus years, almost as long as pharma has been trying to create such a drug—one that triggers desire, arousal, and orgasm (or at least two out of the three). Now, a new documentary, The Pink Pill: Sex, Drugs & Who Has Control, streaming on Paramount+ (a division of our parent company), asserts there is a female answer to Viagra. It’s called Addyi, and the film treats the story of its bumpy road to approval by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in 2015 as a major front in the ongoing fight for female sexual pleasure and bodily autonomy.
You’ve heard of Viagra and its many spin-offs. So why have you never heard of Addyi? The film has an answer: sexism. “Just think to yourself: What if the pill had been blue?” Cindy Eckert, the co-founder and CEO of Sprout Pharmaceuticals, whose sole product is Addyi, tells viewers. Her point is both literal and metaphorical—Viagra has long been known as “the little blue pill.” And the film uncritically adopts this framing.
The story it tells is one of feminist triumph over sexist regulators who put unreasonable demands on the company because they took the sexual needs of women less seriously than those of men. Never mind the drug’s lackluster performance and concerning side effects. Bias was at the root, and Eckert was determined to expose it. “Not on my fucking watch,” she tells the camera.
Yet there is another narrative to the Addyi story that isn’t about sexism but about which drugs get approved and why. While Sprout did recognize a legitimate need, it also leveraged a public lobbying campaign to influence an agency that is supposed to be driven by science.
