SexyPrime, a blog by Susan Crain Bakos: A LITTLE PINK PILL CAN’T RESTORE LOST DESIRE—Part Two On The Search For “Female Viagra”

June 01, 2010

A LITTLE PINK PILL CAN’T RESTORE LOST DESIRE—Part Two On The Search For “Female Viagra”

Photo Credit: "Woman In Rose" on Photobucket

"Would You Take The Female Viagra?” queried the red print of last Thursday’s (May 27) New York Post headline in the “Pulse” section. The article, written by Stefanie Cohen, reported on Filbanserin [see last week’s post, “Do We Really Need A Pink Pill?”] the great pink hope currently in drug trials. She consults a few experts, asked a variety of women if they would take the pill or not—and the answers mostly miss the point. A few are just bad like the sex therapist who worries that women will “become sexually indiscriminate” if their libido picks up. Really? I don't recall anyone asking that of men when Viagra was in trials.

Why wouldn’t women miss the point, the big pink elephant in the room, when it is rarely mentioned in books and articles on sex and relationships? The elephant is the ghost of lust past mired in the mud of romantic expectations, present and the future. Nobody ever explained to the elephant how lust evolves in real life outside the fairy tale myths and led the poor girl out of the mud where she has been awaiting the fairy godmother of Hot Monogamy Forever for centuries.

Dahlia, 33, married twelve years told Cohen her familiar story. “We were always having sex. The desire was so great. It was wonderful.” And now—“I just have no interest in it anymore.” Recently, she reports, she realized she could “probably go a whole year without sex” and not miss it.

While some women expressed reservations about taking a pill to create desire, Dahlia says she would take it. If “I could get my sex drive back, that would mean more than anything to me.”

Many factors affect a woman’s sex drive, including a history of disappointing sex/inability to reach orgasm, weight/body issues, stress, career and motherhood demands, relationship issues, medications like antidepressants or birth control pills. Complicating all that is an underlying misunderstanding of desire and arousal. Women deny arousal in the body, waiting for the mind to signal desire. We expect passion to remain what we see in the movies and read in hot novels—and experienced ourselves initially. There is no lust map for women because the stories all end with “lived happily ever after.”

The feeling that Dahlia would like to recreate, NREU, or New Relationship Euphoria, is the high point of The Desire Curve, Nan Wise's elegant theory explaining desire—which you can read in detail in The Sex Bible For Women. In an fMRI machine a brain on NREU resembles drug addiction or obsessive/compulsive disorder. Most people stay in that heady place between eighteen months and three years—with some falling rather precipitously from the high. If your Desire Set Point (sex drive) is naturally high—and your partner’s DSP matches it—you will find ways of creating undulating waves of desire throughout a long-term relationship. Couples with different DSPs often don’t realize that until they’re both out of the drug high.

Women’s desire is a complicated subject. I am not opposed to the development of a pill that could boost desire in some women. But, Babes, there is no magic pink pill that will re-create NREU. That’s why people have affairs, resent their spouses, retire to fantasy lives in cyber-world or their own minds, stop having sex, get divorced, blow the nest egg—and more. Other couples realize they need to do something to stay together so they get into Tantra or swinging or kink or polyamory. I am not your moral guide championing one path or another. Choose your path. Know why you are going there.

Nan Wise says that Operational Intelligence is learning how your equipment works and running your sex life rather than letting it run you. Great advice. Here’s your assignment: Get over the idea that your sex life could be fixed by a pill and read about The Desire Curve.

Two posts to start:

That Desire Thing, Part One--on the anti-desire underpinnings of The Rules and more

That Desire Thing, Part Two--with Nan

"Why Do You Keep Picking The Wrong Guys?"-- with Nan.

In related sex science stories:

In iVillage.com’s “thrill is gone” report, 63% of married women surveyed would rather have an extra hour’s sleep, watch a movie or read a book than have sex with their husbands. More than 80% described their sex lives as “predictable.” Something else that is predictable—the sex and relationship advice therapists have been giving these women for decades. “Date night” won’t do it.

A study of 3500 English couples conducted by The London School of Economics found that marriages were less likely to end in divorce if the husband shared the housework. The New York Daily News ran the results past New York women. The headline: “City gals agree: It’s hot when their men clean.”