For The LadyGang’s Keltie Knight, the topic of women’s sexual health has stayed under the covers long enough.
“We really wanted to use this as an opportunity to have an actual conversation where we can talk about things we’re embarrassed to talk about,” Knight, 44, said during Wake Up Horny: A Pink Pajama Party, an exclusive Facebook livestream hosted by The LadyGang on Tuesday, September 29.
The three-time Emmy Award-winning TV personality and her fellow podcast hosts, Glee alum Becca Tobin and fashion entrepreneur Jac Vanek, opened the floor to fans eager to ask their own questions about desire, pleasure and women’s sexual health.
The “LadyGang” cohost candidly discussed the toll her prescription SSRI has taken on her sex drive — and the frustrating trade-off she faced when she tried lowering her dosage.
“I just have been lowering my Prozac, and one of the main reasons I’ve wanted to is because I know that it has been killing my sex drive,” Knight said. “I then went down and I started to feel not so bananas, and I was like, ‘Oh, I guess I can’t have both.’”
The confession came after a fan dialed in with a question for the evening’s guests, Sprout Pharmaceuticals founder Cindy Eckert and OB-GYN Dr. Sasha Davenport. The viewer explained that while her SSRIs had helped her mental health, increasing her dosage had also lowered her libido.
“I was going to ask that question, but I wasn’t brave enough because I don’t want the whole world to know that,” Knight said, thanking the fan “for being brave enough to do that.”
Vulnerability may have been a big theme of the stream, but for Knight, it’s also becoming a personal mantra as she enters her “radical honesty era” before releasing her new book, The F-Them Theory, out November 24.
That same openness is the center point of the documentary The Pink Pill: Sex, Drugs & Who Has Control, which follows Eckert’s push to receive FDA approval for a drug designed to increase women’s sexual desire while taking a wider look at the disparities surrounding women’s sexual health care.
“What matters to women should matter to medicine,” Eckert said on Tuesday. “That’s the revolution that we’re having right now. You don’t have to show up and ask for their permission about whether or not it should matter to you.”
At the center of the fight was Addyi, the brand name for flibanserin, which Eckert brought to market as a treatment for hypoactive sexual desire disorder, also known as HSDD.
Knight put the disparity that ignited the fight into perspective, telling viewers that there had been “26 FDA-approved drugs for men’s sexual health, and exactly zero for women.”
“Then Cindy called bulls***,” Knight added. “She did something about it.”
But getting Addyi approved was only part of Eckert’s fight. After selling her company, she said the new owner didn’t make the drug widely available, pushing her to fight to get it back. “They bought the technology, and they didn’t launch it. Women couldn’t get it,” Eckert said. “That’s what really bothered me, and why I went back and fought for it.”
According to Eckert, the bigger issue is how often women’s sexual health concerns are still brushed aside. “It’s not just about Addyi. Addyi’s just the case study,” she said. “It’s a conversation about how this can be what happens in women’s health.”
“We either show up to the doctor and they tell us to relax and drink a glass of wine, or they gatekeep a solution from us that is FDA-approved with 13,000 women in clinical trials,” she continued. “That’s crazy, and that’s what we’re here to change.”
