Women's Viagra? It's missing the point

Shere Hite, the celebrated feminist author and expert on sexual behaviour, has joined the debate over "female sexual dysfunction" by suggesting drug companies hunting a cure are looking in the wrong place.

The author of the Hite Report, among the most detailed surveys of sexual behaviour so far, says the pharmaceutical industry and the public share a collective blindness about the true nature of female sexuality and the way most women achieve orgasm. Drug companies looking for a female equivalent of Viagra, the anti- impotence drug that has proved successful in men, are pursuing research based on an outdated notion of how couples should have sex, she says.

The companies have been accused of creating the disorder known as female sexual dysfunction to profit from new drugs to treat it. Critics say it has too many categories to be a single condition: lack of desire, lack of arousal, pain on intercourse and lack of orgasm. They say only one, lack of arousal, corresponds to impotence in men, which can be treated with a drug.

But Ms Hite says this analysis misses the point. In New Scientist, she writes: "The pharmaceutical industry is guilty not just of cynical, money-grabbing exaggeration, it has misunderstood the basics of female sexuality." The key is that women have orgasms more easily when masturbating than when having intercourse. Instead of focusing on intercourse, as the drug companies do, they and we should pay more attention to masturbation as a way of improving women's experience of sex, she says.

"The overwhelming majority of women ...can have orgasms easily during masturbation. So why not also during coitus? The answer is that, during masturbation, women choose to stimulate the clitoral area. Only in 2 per cent of cases, does it involve vaginal penetration."

This difference between men and women is fundamental but not recognised. For men, the stimulation they give themselves when masturbating is similar to that during intercourse, for women it is radically different. "So it is not at all surprising that the rate of orgasm [for women] during coitus is low," Ms Hite says.