Meet Osphena, That New Viagra-Esque Drug for Women

Those who are avid watchers of female-oriented programs like Scandal or Real Housewives may have found themselves inadvertently learning about Osphena in recent months, a new drug with a sexy goal: getting older women wet (again).

Osphena is a prescription drug developed by Shionogi, Inc. and QuatRx. It’s available for menopausal women who experience pain during intercourse due to vulvar and vaginal atrophy, called dyspareunia. According to the drug’s website, one in three women suffer from this ailment. (Shionogi has also set up another site about the condition called VVA Voices.) Osphena was approved by the FDA a year ago, and while it’s not actually estrogen, the drug works like estrogen, thickening and strengthening the lining of the vagina.

There’s plenty of over whether the Osphena is really necessary, as explored thoroughly in this Newsweek article from last year by Jennifer Block called “Will This Pill Fix Your Sex Life?” In her piece, Block explains how the drug is part of a movement by the pharmaceutical community to try and make money from women through the “menopause market.”

But whether or not Osphena is necessary or helpful for the women its manufacturers say it will love it, the commercials definitely look like female Viagra ads. (Bonus: they’re just as upsettingly sexual to concerned parents out there.) However, there are practically no products like Viagra on the market for women, so an Osphena ad stands out in a crowd of prescription drug commercials with long lists of calmly stated side effects.

As co-worker Isha points out, there are no men in the commercial, unlike the many women in the Viagra or Cialis commercials. Women help to market Viagra or Cialis by demonstrating that men can prove that they’re still sexual and viable by taking an erectile disfunction drug. Osphena isn’t making that kind of pitch: this is a drug just for women (who have sex. Possibly with men). Female sexual worth evidently doesn’t have to be validated by the appearance of a man in this commercial. The sexy looks they give the camera and the slow pans over their Eileen Fisher-clad bodies as they rub themselves, slowly moving about a brightly lit studio space, are enough. Nothing explicit needed here.

Most appropriately for a women’s product, the most striking thing about the Osphena commercial might be the model in it with beautiful grey-white hair. When you Google “Osphena commercial,” she’s one of the first results that comes up, in a Yahoo Answers thread that has since been deleted. It looks like the searcher found at least one piece of information they were looking for. Whether it was Osphena that they needed is still unclear.