Little pink pill
Meet the woman fighting for better British sex
Cindy Eckert’s office ceiling is painted “Perfect Pink”. The blazer she is wearing is shocking pink, her lipstick shade “Pink Boss” and her nail colour “Parasol Pink”. Then there’s the little pink pill she’s been fighting to have approved across the world for the past seven years: a pill that may be about to transform your sex life.
“For me, pink is a philosophy,” explains the founder of “female Viagra” from the headquarters of Pink Ceiling, her venture capital firm in Raleigh, North Carolina – a pinkalicious universe in which even the male employees wear at least one item of pink clothing, and rosé is available on tap.
“And doesn’t it seem odd that we’re told to run from anything that’s considered a gender stereotype, as opposed to unapologetically liking it?” It does. Reese Witherspoon turned pink into a power statement in
Legally Blonde, and with her perky manner and engaging smile, the New York-born 45-year-old comes across a lot like a brunette Elle Woods – a comparison I hope she doesn’t mind me making.
“Are you kidding?” she chirps. “Everything I learned about business I learned from Legally Blonde.”
Eckert’s story – a journey of bonbon-pink pantsuits and female empowerment, with many setbacks along the way – could have been penned by Hollywood scriptwriters. And it’s far from over. Though her four-year quest to get Addyi, a female libido-enhancing medication, approved in the US was eventually successful – it was recently greenlit in Canada, too – Europe and the UK are next on her agenda.
“We get so many inquiries and a lot of web traffic from the UK,” she tells me. “And that expression, ‘Lie there and think of England’, would always make me laugh when it came up in boardrooms. Well, I don’t think British women should ever have to lie there and think of England again.”
It all began in 2010, at a Sexual Medicine Society meeting in Miami, when the drug company entrepreneur listened, slack-jawed, to the findings of a German firm, which claimed to have come up with a pill able to boost female sexual desire. Initially developed as an antidepressant, flibanserin also promoted the release of sex-friendly neurochemicals such as dopamine and norepinephrine, while blocking serotonin – a neurotransmitter linked to inhibition.
So it wouldn’t so much “take you from zero-to-60, like Viagra does,” Eckert explains, “as restore the sexual hunger you once had by rectifying a chemical imbalance in the brain. Women will describe the feeling as being out to dinner on date night and looking at the waiter and saying, ‘Bring the bill – let’s go…’” Got it – though I thought at first she meant they’d be hypersexed enough to take the waiter home. Boehringer Ingelheim gave up on their pill when the Federal Drug Administration rejected their drug later that same year. But by then, Eckert was a woman on a mission, having spoken to hundreds of women suffering from low to non-existent sex drives, or female sexual dysfunction, as it’s known.
“And their stories were heartbreaking,” says Eckert. “Many of the women in our research were pre-menopausal, but by no means all. And often the younger women’s distress was off the charts, because there’s a certain learned acceptance that as we get older we lose our sex drives, when I would argue that sex remains foundational to our life experience, to how we show up in the world.” The daughter of a New York state senator, Eckert became extremely popular at cocktail parties, where women would take her into corners, always “asking for a friend”. “And I learnt that a lot of these women are in healthy, loving relationships: there’s just this one piece that’s not working, and that’s starting to tear away at the rest of it. Because when things break down in the bedroom, they’re
‘British women should never have to lie there and think of England again’
often also breaking down at the breakfast table and in other profound ways.”
Eckert sold off Slate – the drug business she had co-founded with her then husband, Bob Whitehead (the two have since divorced) – founded Sprout Pharmaceuticals and stormed from (predominantly male) boardroom to boardroom, seeking investment for Addyi. “Nobody is going to lose their life from this,” she kept being told. To which Eckert would reply: “Go and talk to these women – they’re losing their life as they know it.” And when yet another path ended with “No”, Eckert would always sign off with the same question: “What if the pill had been blue?”
Viagra was approved in six months, Eckert tells me. “In fact, it was fast-tracked, which can be done if a drug is meeting an important unmet medical need,” she adds with a wry smile. “If that isn’t emblematic of how we rank the needs of men above women, I don’t know what is.”
When the FDA turned Addyi down a second time, Eckert burst into tears, convinced “this really was the end”. But as she wallowed, she re-read the “very private stories women all over the world had so graciously shared with me via email”, and one in particular stood out. “She was this real ‘type-a’ woman who had built her own company, raised beautiful boys and had a great marriage. And she had said to me: ‘I feel I have succeeded at everything in life other than this.’ What I saw was the portrait of a woman who had raised her hand a thousand times saying ‘something’s wrong’, only to be patted on the head and told to ‘read Fifty Shades of
Grey’ and ‘buy sexy lingerie’ – and it ignited something in me, because I wasn’t going to let this bias stand in the way of progress.”
Eckert disputed the FDA’S findings, and in 2015, at the end of four long years, finally got Addyi approved in the US. Though it has not yet been licensed for use in the UK, it can be bought online for upwards of £700 for a month’s supply.
In tandem with her work on the drug, Eckert runs an incubator for several women’s health-related start-ups. Currently, she is investing in Undercover Colours, a date-rape prevention company that has devised a “medallion” women can stick to the back of their mobile phones (“So you dip your finger in your drink, touch the medallion and it will test it for drugs like Rohypnol, GHB … etc”); and in LIA Diagnostics, creators of the first flushable pregnancy test. “Because not only is that an environmental conversation we should be having, but maybe a lot of women trying for babies don’t want to be reminded every day that they’re still not pregnant.”
In the meantime, Eckert is trying to get back on to the dating scene. But when you’re the woman who invented female Viagra, that’s easier said than done.
“When the first line every man comes out with is ‘But I’m female Viagra!…’,” she says, “it can be wearisome.”
‘Women are patted on the head and told to read Fifty Shades or buy sexy lingerie’