Female sexual enhancement drugs - part 1

This week, viagra-type drugs for women were explored at I Blame The Patriarchy

I am conflicted about this.

At one side, I see Twisty's point. This is advanced marketting skills in cahoots with patriarchy to convince women that a) there is a problem with their libidos, and b) they should do something about it so that men can have more sex. This is general badness.

However.

Good sex is, you know, good. [see blog title]
My point is this - if women can enjoy sex more, why shouldn't they? It's not as though the pharmaceutical industry is witholding this kind of thing from lesbians (this is not to say that lesbians are somehow exempt from patriarchal structures), so women could just want to have more sex with each other, not because some man thought they should want to. Women who want to have more sex, increase their level of desire ought to be able to.

One of the first things that ever made me a conscious feminist was a cartoon I saw in a media arts class in high school. It was a bizarro clip with three male balding scientists standing behind a press conference table labled with some major medical problem and the lead scientist says something to the effect of "while we haven't cured [insert major disease here], we have developed an excellent treatment for male patterned baldness." Now, this comic was not meant to turn my fifteen year old self into a feminist - no, in fact, it was simply meant to be funny.

But the point is this: I have a hard time accepting the logical fallacy of arguing both sides of the coin, i.e., claiming that women are at once being ignored by scientific reasearch because the field is male-dominated, and getting mad because someone finally made a sex drug for women. The point made against such a drug is that it's a sex drug, and that there are many other more pressing problems that ought to be addressed by your medical dollars at work. This is a point I accept. There are more pressing problems than uninspiring orgasms. But I'd rather have inspired orgasms than a cure for male patterned balness.

-K