"From the feminist point of view, it's an extremely narrow take on women's sexual potential," Tiefer continues. "Women want romance, tenderness, pleasure, intimacy. They are perfectly content with other forms of sexual satisfaction. Penetration is not at the top of the list."

"I hear women all the time worry about breast cancer, health insurance, their children's illnesses, their husband not going to get medical care for chest pains because he's too afraid," says the feminist writer Susan Faludi. "But I never hear anyone talking about the fact that they don't come every time they have sex." Faludi, like Tiefer, believes that much of what's referred to as the "medicalization" of female sexuality is really a veil for the "commercialization" of female sexuality -- a move on the part of doctors and pharmaceutical companies to tap into a lucrative field. "It's the same mentality that pushes these anti-depressant drugs on women when they're a little off," she says, "the idea that the body is a machine and must be running at top performance all the time."

What happens when you slap the label dysfunctional on a woman who just doesn't want to have sex? Many women, particularly menopausal women, are deeply distressed by the loss of their libido, which researchers have discovered can often be due to decreased testosterone levels. But what about those who are not distressed? Are they dysfunctional? And what if they're not bothered by the situation -- but their husbands are? Whose problem is it? "Some women come in here, and they're perfectly happy doing the grocery list while they're having sex," says Siskind. "But their husband is bothered by it. Maybe it's not the woman's problem."

As sex therapists are fond of saying, no drug will cure a woman who simply hates her husband. (Or as a friend recently quipped, "Most women don't need Viagra. They just need a pill that will turn their husbands into Johnny Depp.")

Tiefer is also adamant that the entire basis for diagnosing a woman with FSD is flawed, citing as evidence the fact that there are few established norms for sexual function in women (although those are precisely what the Bermans are trying to develop at their clinics): "Nobody studies normal people, so we don't have any idea what the range is."

"I didn't feel passionate. My 22-year-old daughter is so passionate, and I was feeling so blah. I needed to take something to get back to being me."

Dr. Beverly Whipple, a Rutgers professor and sex researcher (best known for helping locate the G-spot) who was on the panel that determined the criteria for diagnosing FSD, takes issue with the criteria that made the cut. "One thing that was voted down was satisfaction as a criterion," says Whipple. "A woman could have no desire but she could have arousal and orgasm and be very satisfied, and yet she would be seen to be dysfunctional. Or she could have desire, arousal, and orgasm and yet not be satisfied. And yet that wouldn't be considered dysfunction."

"There's been so much brouhaha about this," says Chenoweth. "Should the criteria be personal stress or relationship stress? There are different camps about whose distress we're talking about, whose dysfunction."

"A lot of these women are not dysfunctional," says Kaminetsky. "They don't have a disease. Female sexual dysfunction is not a disease. It's a symptom of another problem."

In some cases, the problem might be abysmal sex education. Tiefer recently counseled a 27-year-old college-educated woman who was convinced she was anatomically abnormal. "She had no idea that there was such a range of women's genitalia," Tiefer exclaims. "Had she ever seen photographs? No. She needed comprehensive sex education. I'm not saying that her whole sexual problem was lack of knowledge. But that was a piece of it."

There's also the powerful Puritanism that still makes people -- men and women -- uncomfortable discussing female sexuality. Chenoweth recalls teaching a human-sexuality course to undergraduates in which she displayed diagrams of male and female anatomy. "When I threw up the anatomy of the male, people were looking at it and taking it in," she says. "Then I threw up the comparable picture of female anatomy, and I looked at the class and everyone's head was down."

There are subtle distinctions among the sexual problems that men confront, but the bulk fall into the relatively simple category of mechanics: Either a guy can get it up, or he can't. Like so many things female, though, women's problems are vastly more complicated. The already complex symptoms of FSD cycle into one another: If having sex is painful, then desire might very quickly vanish. Without sensitivity, it's rather tough to have an orgasm. There are medical and psychological factors, too, that contribute to each of the problems -- not to mention factors specific to a given relationship.

Which is why the Bermans' goal from the start was to create a place that would treat women's problems holistically, providing help whether the problems were in their body, in their head, or both. Heartened by the success of the clinic and Goldstein's support but frustrated by what Jennifer Berman describes as "a constant uphill battle" against sexually and politically conservative attitudes in the hospital and in Boston, the Bermans relocated to Los Angeles, where they opened the Female Sexual Medicine Center at UCLA this winter. "It's not a matter of medicalizing sexuality but really 'relationizing' it," says Laura Berman. "It's about the relationship between mind and body, and treating the cause. It's not about treating a sexual-function complaint with medicine when it's caused by poor body image. The key is in diagnosis. So we can make a holistic evaluation."

But even the efforts of health-care professionals like the Bermans to emphasize the mind-body connection and the need for education won't stop some women from looking for a miracle pill. "A lot of Americans or women in Western society want that quick fix," says Siskind, who is optimistic that there are just as many women who will opt for the holistic route. "They want the pill. They want the magic button."

Now that Viagra has given medical legitimacy to the quest for more pleasure between the sheets -- and particularly now that pharmaceutical companies are dumping dollars into research -- data and remedies are already piling up.

One treatment gaining in popularity is testosterone. "Testosterone is really the most promising development in terms of facilitating effective female response," says Dr. Sandra Leiblum, professor of psychiatry and director of the Center for Sexual and Marital Health at Robert Wood Johnson University Hospital in Piscataway, New Jersey, and president of the 900-member fledgling Female Sexual Function Forum. "It does for women what Viagra does for men."

Dr. Lauri Romanzi, a uro-gynecologist affiliated with New York Hospital-Cornell Medical Center, has begun screening some patients for low testosterone levels, based on their answers to a new questionnaire that asks all patients about their libido, sexual sensitivity, and orgasmic intensity. "I'm finding, with women in their late forties and early fifties and sometimes beyond, that very often if they complain of a sudden drop in their appetite for sex, and there doesn't seem to be anything else -- there wasn't a death in the family, they haven't suddenly started taking four different types of blood-pressure medication -- their testosterone levels are often quite low," says Romanzi, seated at her desk in her high-ceilinged Park Avenue office.