It’s Not You, It’s Your (Old) Vagina: Osphena’s Articulation of Sexual Dysfunction

Abstract

Released to an American market in 2013 the pharmaceutical drug Osphena was heralded as an innovative, hormone-free therapeutic option to cure two dysfunctions associated with menopausal women’s bodies: vaginal atrophy and dyspareunia. Yet a critical examination of the drug, its advertising, and associated discourses presents an opportunity to explore not only the medicalization of aging but also direct-to-consumer advertising’s role in perpetuating ideologies concerned with normalcy, normal bodies, normal sex, and normal gender performance. This project undertakes a critical feminist analysis of Osphena’s advertising campaign and the public’s response, incorporating Foucaultian theory and a bioethical perspective, and ultimately re-contextualizing them within medical discourses that highlight the pharmaceutical benefits associated with widespread adoption of the “deficiency” perspective that the drug perpetuates. I claim that the Osphena campaign is a clear contemporary illustration that the age-old rhetoric of women’s bodies as requiring medical intervention to resist aging is far from passe, and suggest that images and rhetoric of empowerment would be more readily accepted without relying upon dated and cliched depictions of female sexuality.