This is due in part to women being more affected by mood, self-esteem and other issues of psyche than men, researchers say.
Drug companies make $2.5 billion a year selling Viagra, Cialis and Levitra to help men enjoy sex. More women suffer from sexual dysfunction than men, but the pharmaceutical industry has failed to develop a single sexual dysfunction drug for them, reports The Associated Press.
Pfizer Inc. last year abandoned an eight-year Viagra study involving 3,000 women, conceding that its famous blue pill only works for men.
"I hate to say it, but women are much more complex than men," says Beverly Whipple, the sex researcher who co-wrote "The G-Spot."
While pharmaceutical giants have abandoned the pursuit of a Viagra for females as too complicated, a growing number of university researchers are reporting progress with the help of brain scanners and other technology.
They're watching women's brains while they have orgasms, and they're coming to some interesting conclusions.
For example, by studying paralyzed women who can still experience orgasm, they discovered that for women, the vagus nerve appears to be quite important, and therefore may be a promising target for drugs. This nerve - which is outside the spinal cord - carries information to areas of the brain that control mood.
"We basically found the areas of the brains that are activated in orgasm in women," says Barry Komisaruk, who worked with Whipple on this research, which is being funded by the federal government and the Christopher Reeve Paralysis Foundation.
The scans reveal that during orgasms, the pain centers in their brains shut down, and pleasure centers - the same ones that become active when people ingest cocaine - light up.
But a big problem with these scans - done through magnetic resonance imaging - is that no machine yet built is designed to simultaneously monitor both the brain and the body. And even if they could, the images' clarity would be muddied by "background noise" such as hand movements.
