Can A Pill Recharge Your Sex Life?

Three years ago, the holy grail for women with a low sex drive seemed to have arrived. A little pink pill called Addyi—pronounced add-ee and erroneously nicknamed the female Viagra—was the first prescription medication ever approved by the FDA to help reinvigorate a woman’s flagging desire. (There were already multiple boner helper drugs on the market for men. Just sayin’.) But days after Addyi got the green light, its developer, Sprout Pharmaceuticals, was sold, and the momentum fizzled. Factors like the med’s high price and a lack of awareness among doctors made it hard to come by. Also, fewer than 10 percent of pharmacies kept it in stock.

- Kristen Dold

Fast-forward to this summer. Cindy Eckert, co-founder of Sprout and CEO of The Pink Ceiling, a women’s start-up incubator, is back in charge of Addyi after some legal wrangling. She’s relaunching it at a cheaper cost (a maximum out-of-pocket fee of $99 per month) and making it available to all women via telemedicine. “Our number one objective,” she says, “is ensuring that women have access to this treatment.”

It’s about time the pharma industry gave some love to women’s bedroom needs. “There’s this idea that we don’t have a desire for sex the way men do, or if we don’t want sex, that’s our natural state of being,” says Tami Rowen, MD, an ob-gyn at the University of California at San Francisco who specializes in sexual health. “That’s obviously wrong.”

THE CLIMAX YOU’VE BEEN WAITING FOR?