Pharma's New Sales Pitch to Women: If You Aren't Horny, It's 'Sexual Dysfunction' -- Try These Pills

"We're hoping to be able to expedite the process ... of disease development ... " -- Drug company manager Darby Stephens

The woman looking confidently into the camera lens must be in her late twenties or early thirties, her long black hair falling over strong shoulders, a slip of striped blue material tied into a bow around her neck. Her red lips and good looks are striking, but it's her words that are most captivating. Her name is Darby Stephens, and she's a research manager at a California-based drug company called Vivus. The company is testing a drug for women said to suffer from a new condition called female sexual dysfunction or FSD. As Darby Stephens explains in an extremely candid on-camera interview for a documentary, FSD is so new that the drug company itself has had to help work out what the condition actually is: 'In order for us to develop drugs, we need to better and more clearly define what the disease is,' she said.

The frankness of the comments may be unusual, but the marketing activity being described is becoming commonplace. Pharmaceutical companies now assist in shaping the very diseases their drugs are targeting. Through its close ties to the medical profession and its influence over public debate, the industry is now helping to determine whether we see our sexual problems as every day difficulties or medical dysfunctions, and whether female sex drugs become a permanent feature in the bedrooms of our future.

The Californian company where Darby Stephens was manager of clinical research had started testing a pharmaceutical cream for women to rub on their genitals, to see whether it could enhance blood flow and boost their level of sexual arousal.

First you have to have a disease

Before the drug testing could go into full swing, however, there was a problem that needed to be addressed. As Stephens tells it, in order to get a drug formally approved and have insurance companies pay for its use, it has to be shown to work against a specific medical condition: 'The whole thing is kind of complicated because you have to have a disease before you can treat it.'

The difficulty with FSD was that no one was really certain exactly what the condition was, and some people even questioned whether it existed at all. So part of Vivus's role, Darby Stephens explained, was to sit down with the experts, the 'thought leaders' in the field, and work with them directly on developing this new dysfunction in order to be clearer about what it was. During her frank interview, she revealed that in the 'process of defining the disease, we've been able to get thought leaders involved in female sexual dysfunction, and really work closely with them to develop this disease entity, so that it makes sense'. Her comments were made at a time when drugs for male sexual dysfunction had already been approved, and billions of dollars' worth were set to sell every year.

So from the industry's perspective, there was no time to waste in developing the sister condition for women. "We're hoping to be able to expedite the process of drug development and of disease development," she told film-maker Liz Canner during the interview for Canner's documentary Orgasm Inc.

'Condition branding'

Bizarre as it may sound, the idea that a drug company would play a role in 'disease development' is backed up by observations from another industry insider, this one with expertise in the practice known as 'condition branding'. The advertising expert Vince Parry famously revealed how drug companies are sometimes involved in 'fostering the creation' of medical disorders, giving a little known condition renewed attention, helping redefine or rename an old disease, or sometimes assisting in the creation of a whole new one. The branding expert has said that as part of his high-level work for drug companies he will sit down with medical experts to try to 'create new ideas about illness and conditions'. As the Canadian writer Naomi Klein told us in her classic No Logo, corporations are no longer just selling products, they are selling brands, and brands are about lifestyles and concepts, not commodities.