Letters to the Editor
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I want it!
Ok, maybe not. I'm happy with both my dress size and my sex life. And I can see the potential for medicalising a normal condition, although society is long past the point at which that line might have been successfully drawn.
In the end, though, it comes down to choice. My husband isn't going to hold me down, poke a pill into the back of my throat and hold my mouth shut till I swallow. If a woman wants a libido-enhancing pill — which at a minimum seems to be a better option than faking it — and a safe one exists, who are we to object?
Or wait, are we worried that our mates are going to run next door to have it off with the unnaturally sexed neighbour?
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I want it, too!
Will I even give a damn about sex in 10 years though?
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ha!
"Can one pill promise a smaller dress size and a hotter sex life?"
Why yes!
It's called "methamphetamine."
If you don't mind the paranoia, athetosis, tremors, aggression, hyperthermia, convulsions, hallucinations, teeth-grinding, acne scars, and eventual death, it's FABULOUS!
yeesh.
I think I'm starting to relate to Nancy Reagan.
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The Pink Pill!
If they can add in the result of boober getting bigger they will have the perfect pill for the women of the future - maybe they can call it Stepfordra - the little pink pill.
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Hmmm...
Does it only work on women? I'm thinking I could stand to lose a few pounds, and the side effects of tongue flicking and rump shaking seem less ominous than the oily stools and anal leakage promised by Alli.
I already suffer from excessive eyebrow raising, so that's not an issue.
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I'd buy it.
I could certainly stand to lose the weight, and if having an amped libido is the side effect, that's a hell of a lot better than most other side effects.
I don't think this is worth protesting over--it sounds from the article as if they were working on one much-researched topic (the libido aspect)and found that it also had the second effect. It's not like eeebil scientists were trying to come up with one that did both.
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if there is a link between wanting more sex therefore less food does this mean that people who want more food want less sex
and THIS raises two interesting questions, how many women would want a drug that makes men thinner and hornier AND how many would want a drug that makes men fatter and less horny.
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perfect!
You know, we women don't have enough social pressure to be anorexic playbunnies. All those soft-porn MTV videos really don't hammer the message hard enough. Not to mention all the 5 foot 8 eighty pound actresses we see in movies and on TV.
Yes, we women need a pill that forces us to fit all the stereotypes we've been killing ourselves to personify. *And* we need to spend ten years and loads of research money to develop it!
Thank the gods modern science is there to clarify gender roles once and for all!
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so what if they did?
what if the evil scientists *were* trying to make a pill to both lose weight and increase women's sex drive?
Why is increasing sexual desire a bad thing? I firmly reject any discussion that automatically equates increasing female sex drive as something that is bad for women. As far as I know, this pill won't force women to have more sex in bad relationships with men, or force women to have more sex with men in general, or force women to have more sex in bad relationships with women, or force women to have more sex with women in general, or force women to have sex at all.
Why do we think when and if women get their hands on a pill to increase their libidos, they'll stay in bad relationships? This sounds like the religious right saying that women can't understand how bad abortion is, so they'll just criminalize it so the women won't have to worry their purty little heads about it.
Are there more significant and pressing health issues affecting women than decreased libido? I'm sure there are more immediate life-and-death issues, yes. But this is a quality of life issue that I'm sure is quite significant for some women. Stop with the patronizing.
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Doesn't this already exist?: part 2
Doesn't thyroid medication also solve both of these problems? At least, you know, if you have them both together...
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Almost perfect
As I wrote to Feministing earlier today on this very article, they just need to add a final component that induces servility. Then it's ready for market, trade name Patriarxil.
Next up is a pill which will let men trade a year of life for an inch of penis length. It's expected to reduce the average male lifespan from 72 to 19.
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Why just us?
My boyfriend has terrible libido problems and has been packing on the pounds for the last year now, can't we do something about that? And technically speaking, aren't these problems more prevalent in men? so, why us?
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The perils of a hotter sex life.
"Next up is a pill which will let men trade a year of life for an inch of penis length. It's expected to reduce the average male lifespan from 72 to 19."
I'll respond to this absurd analogy literally: if somebody wants to trade 53 years of his life for a slightly bigger penis, why not let him? It would reduce our country's skyrocketing medical expenses, and would weed out some of the dumbest members (yuk) of our herd.
Seriously, why must we be nannied by appointees of Platonic guardians like George W. Bush? Why can't competent adults be trusted to make these kinds of choices about their lives?
If there were a pill that would make me skinnier and enrich my sex life, I'd take it. Why not? To avoid forfeiting my moral superiority? (As it happens, I do enjoy being morally superior -- but not as much as I enjoy having great sex.)
When hectoring, knee-jerk anti-"medicalization" meshes with hectoring, knee-jerk feminism, the result is especially irritating and hypocritical.
To Tracy Clark-Flory, let me ask: are you opposed to letting "transgendered" persons sugically alter their sex organs? (Do you snicker about sex changes in Broadsheet?) That seems a rather extreme example of "medicalizing" a problem that has traditionally been "part of the human condition." I personally find sex change operations -- and tanning beds, and Botox -- baffling . . . but who the hell am I to judge how other people want to live their lives, so long as their weird choices don't harm me in some significant way?