On October 27, the Food and Drug Administration invited women to a public summit on female sexual dysfunction—and what the medical community should do about it. The FDA heard directly from women about losing their desire for sex and the daily experience of living with, according to the agency’s invitation, the most common form of sexual dysfunction for women: female sexual interest/arousal disorder, or FSIAD. The following day, the FDA held a scientific workshop on the challenges of diagnosing and measuring FSIAD, reigniting a public debate about whether there’s a need for female dysfunction drugs in the first place. Leonore Tiefer, clinical associate professor of psychiatry at New York University’s School of Medicine and founder of the New View Campaign, which challenges the medicalization of sex, co-wrote a Los Angeles Times op-ed in which she claims women at the hearings “appeared to have been coached to demand drug solutions,” and insisted they had “no non-medical problems” that may affect their sex drive. At the same time, numerous medical groups, such as the Society for Women’s Health Research, the American College of Nurse-Midwives, and the Association of Reproductive Health Professionals, strongly urged Dr. Janet Woodcock, director of the FDA’s center for drug evaluation and research, to approve a treatment for female sexual dysfunction.

It’s unclear how prevalent desire issues are among women to begin with. Medical sites and the media present vastly different pictures of the problem, some putting it at around 10 percent of the population (16 million people in the U.S.), others putting it closer to 40 percent of women suffering from some kind of sexual dysfunction.

The first figure comes from a 2008 study, published in the Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology, which surveyed more than 30,000 women. Researchers found that 12 percent of respondents had a sexual problem and felt distress over it. In a healthcare setting, doctors can struggle with what constitutes female sexual dysfunction—a catchall term for women who have trouble with interest or arousal, who experience pain during sex, or have difficulty achieving orgasm—and somebody who reports a lack of a desire may not be concerned about it. It’s also difficult to separate biological factors from emotional and social ones. But a woman isn’t diagnosed with FSAID or considered a candidate for medical treatment if her lack of interest isn’t causing her distress.

The second statistic comes from a 1999 study in the Journal of the American Medical Association, which found that 43 percent of the 1,749 women sampled (as opposed to 31 percent of men) had experienced some form of broadly-defined sexual dissatisfaction, including lack of desire and arousal, in the past two months. But researchers noted that the women surveyed were more likely to suffer from sexual dysfunction if they had unsatisfying personal experiences and relationships—something a pill can’t solve. And while the FDA appears to be of the opinion that female desire disorder (a woman’s body responds to sex but she has no interest in it) and female arousal disorder (a woman wants to have sex, but her body doesn’t seem to respond) can be lumped into one diagnosis, FSAID, most of the letters in support of a female dysfunction drug and many of the scientific studies refer to a different diagnosis: Hypoactive Sexual Desire Disorder (HSDD), which deals with a woman’s “interest level” in sex, but not necessarily her physiological responses to stimulation.