After Viagra got here to market in 1998, ladies started clamoring for a drug of their very own. But it surely has taken many years for the medical neighborhood to take ladies’s sexual well being severely—and even longer to develop and approve a drug that improves ladies’s libido.
A brand new documentary known as The Pink Tablet: Intercourse, Medicine, and Who Has Management, premiering on the DOC NYC movie pageant, explores the combat to launch Addyi, a drug often called “the feminine Viagra.” Directed by Aisling Chin-Yee, the movie follows Cindy Eckert, the founding father of Sprout Prescription drugs, who labored for 5 years to carry Addyi to market, which she managed to do in 2015. However simply as fascinating, the movie explores society’s notion of girls’s sexuality and whether or not ladies have a proper to sexual pleasure.
The movie additionally has an uncommon backer. Knix, the underwear startup known for its period panties, offered the capital to carry this movie to completion, and Knix founder Joanna Griffiths serves as an govt producer. It’s an attention-grabbing technique that enables Knix to be a part of a broader dialog about ladies’s rights whereas additionally doubtlessly introducing the model to new shoppers.
The Authorities’s Effort to Block Addyi
Low libido is a widespread downside amongst ladies. On this movie, ladies discuss how their want for intercourse can out of the blue dry up, harming their romantic relationships and decreasing their high quality of life. However whereas males’s lack of sexual want is handled as a medical downside, ladies’s sexual issues have been dismissed. Girls describe their docs telling them to drink some wine or learn a steamy romance novel to get themselves within the temper.
Then, in 2009, a German pharmaceutical firm stumbled throughout a breakthrough. A medicine initially developed to deal with melancholy was discovered to enhance ladies’s sexual want. However when the corporate tried to carry it to market, the U.S. Meals and Drug Administration rejected the drug—citing issues about its effectiveness and negative effects—and it was deserted.
Enter Eckert, a pharmaceutical govt who had struggled with low libido herself. She believed it was price taking over the FDA. She purchased the drug from the German firm for $5 million and went again to the federal company to ask what trial information was required to approve it. However as she met the FDA’s calls for, it stored coming again to her with new points.
Chin-Yee’s documentary makes the case that the FDA had the next customary for Addyi than it did for different medicine as a result of it was meant for ladies. As an example, one facet impact of Addyi is sleepiness, which is true of many drugs available on the market. However the FDA needed to dam Addyi out of concern {that a} girl may take the drug at night time, then go to sleep whereas driving her youngsters to highschool the subsequent day.
In response, Eckert poured greater than $1 million right into a driving examine that confirmed ladies truly drove higher after taking Addyi, seemingly as a result of they slept higher. “[Their concerns were] very a lot about defending ladies as a result of they may not make good decisions,” says Dr. Anita Clayton, an OB-GYN professor on the College of Virginia whose medical observe and analysis concentrate on ladies’s psychological well being and sexual dysfunctions.
Eckert was confronted with different FDA roadblocks for 5 years, and stored working to satisfy the group’s necessities. Throughout this era, the combat to launch the drug turned a broader motion round a girl’s proper to expertise sexual pleasure, with many ladies’s organizations—together with the Black Girls’s Well being Crucial and Jewish Girls Worldwide—advocating for the FDA to approve Addyi.
There was additionally backlash. Individuals argued that the drug wasn’t needed as a result of ladies are bodily able to having intercourse even when they aren’t aroused, whereas males can’t. Others argued that it’s regular for ladies to not get pleasure from intercourse after it’s now not required for replica, comparable to after giving delivery or coming into menopause.
Ultimately, nonetheless, Eckert managed to leap by each final hoop, and the FDA accepted the drug to be used in 2015; it turned broadly obtainable in 2017. However the drug has had disappointing gross sales and has not turn out to be as profitable as Viagra. In December 2024, nonetheless, Eckert’s firm acquired $45.6 million in late-stage VC funding, and is at present producing income. So there’s hope that extra ladies will really feel snug speaking to their docs about low libido, and that docs will prescribe Addyi.
When a Model Turns into a Movie Producer
Knix founder Griffiths fell in love with The Pink Tablet when it got here throughout her desk two years in the past when Chin-Yee was within the last levels of filming it. “It raises so many vital questions on ladies’s sexuality,” she says. “It sparks so many additional conversations about every thing from our political local weather to the position that intercourse performs over the course of a girl’s life.”
In 2023, on the Banff World Media Pageant, Griffiths introduced that Knix was partnering with manufacturing studio Catalyst to launch Docs for Change, a undertaking that might establish promising feminine documentary filmmakers and finance, develop, produce, and distribute their movies. Numerous filmmakers utilized, however The Pink Tablet stood out as a result of it make clear an space of girls’s well being that has lengthy been neglected.
The subject of the movie isn’t instantly associated to Knix’s enterprise, which is promoting high-performance underwear and clothes, like period panties and teen bras. However through the years, Griffiths has tried to weave the model into broader conversations that have an effect on ladies. In 2021, as an example, the corporate launched Life After Beginning, an artwork exhibit and e-book that paperwork how ladies’s our bodies change after childbirth. Tasks like this aren’t essentially designed to market merchandise, however quite to affiliate the model with broader concepts. “We wish our prospects to know that we’re advocating for them,” she says.
Frida, a model for infants and new mothers, did something similar when it not too long ago commissioned a statue of a postpartum girl that’s at present being exhibited world wide.
Griffiths believes funding movies and artwork is extra rewarding than most of the different issues that shopper manufacturers spend their marketing budgets on, like costly dinners and influencer journeys. “You’ll be able to spend $90,000 on a flowery dinner with lovely florals for simply small teams of celebrities and influencers,” she says. “However a movie is by definition designed for a mass viewers. The objective is to get as many individuals as attainable to observe it.”
To that finish, Knix will assist disseminate The Pink Tablet by way of free film screenings within the U.S. and Canada, and is working to search out streaming providers to hold it. Knix can be going to launch “screening kits” so individuals can host events of their houses the place they’ll watch the film with associates after which have a dialog about it with dialogue questions.
It’s a novel method to advertising, however Griffiths believes it’s already paying off. “We’re already a part of so many huge conversations about ladies’s well being,” she says. “We wish to proceed doing so.”
