In August, 2015, the US Food and Drug Administration approved Addyi (flibanserin) for the treatment of Hypoactive Sexual Desire Disorder in premenopausal women. Ten months before that, the FDA had held a Patient-Focused Drug Development Public Meeting to address the ‘unmet need’ for a pharmaceutical to treat that condition. I attended that meeting as a rhetorical observer. This essay is an account of persuasive strategies used on, and then by, the FDA, as it considered approving a drug that was not convincingly either safe or effective. The essay turns on three texts: the ‘Even the Score’ pro-drug campaign that informed the patient-focused meeting, the text of the meeting itself, and the FDA’s own published report of the event. I describe how a pharmaceutical company (Sprout, then owners of flibanserin) recruited, and then ventriloquized, both health professionals and members of the public to pressure the FDA to approve a sex drug for women – claiming that not to do so was evidence of sexism. I argue, with rhetorical evidence, that the case for approving flibanserin had already been won before Sprout submitted its application.
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