Medication and Women’s Sexual Desire

Medication and Women’s Sexual Desire

                The  New York Times front page from June 17, 2010 has an article by Duff Wilson titled Big Push of Pill to Marketplace Stirs Debate on Sexual Desire.  This is fascinating. On page ten is another article by Namo Abdulla and Timothy Williams titled Kurdistan Is Criticized Over Cutting of Genitals. The  group Human Rights Watch cited the fact that 73% of Kurdistan women over age 14 have suffered genital mutilation or clitorectomies and urged the Kurdistan government to make that practice illegal. Now perhaps the connection is not obvious, but both these stories share a common theme of women losing control over their own sexuality.

                Professor Leonore Tiefer, a professor and sex therapist thinks the marketing of a pill to increase female  sexual desire goes too far. She says "Women’s sex lives are often a struggle, a disappointment, an archipelago of regret." Her point is that women’s sex lives are very complicated and a simple pill is not going to fix such a complicated problem. The roots of female sexual dysfunction are to be found in our culture not our biology.

                The research studies that the German pharmaceutical company Boehringer conducted showed an increase in "sexually satisfying events" to 4.5 per month with the medication compared to 2.7 per month in the control group, and 3.7 a month in the placebo group. The two studies conducted over 24 months consisted of 1,323 premenopausal women with diminished libido and who were distressed by their sexual anorexia. The idea is that this pill would do for women what Viagra does for men. The American market for Viagra, Cialis and Levitra is about 2 billion dollars per year and the estimate is that a female pill to increase sexual desire would generate the same income.

                What this really means is that there are a number of husbands who would like their wife’s sexual desire to increase. What could be better than giving her a pill?

                There is a much deeper problem here, as Dr. Tiefer’s comment suggests. Why should women’s sexual lives be a source of disappointment? The answer is that our society and the values that are emphasized in our cultural myths are very harsh on women and women’s sexuality. That is the area that needs work, not another chemical to manage our brain chemistry and make a huge profit.

                What stories am I talking about? We can start with the idea of a virgin birth that is at the heart of the Christian myth of Jesus. Many pagan heroes (Perseus, Hercules) were demigods, the product of Zeus’ sexual blessing of human women. They were literally the son of God (Zeus), created sexually.  Being a son of God gave someone special powers and a special destiny.  In the Christian myth Jesus is the son of God, with the same special powers and destiny  but there is no sex. What is the significance of the de-sexing of the creation of a hero or savior?

                It is the removal of women’s role as mother. Every human being has a mother. Being a mother is without a doubt the most heroic role any human being ever accepts. You carry within your own body another being that grows at your expense, making your own life secondary to this purpose. It is also the result of a sexual act. Motherhood and sexuality are tied together. While this is true for all animals it is unique in humans because of menses.

                Most animal mothers have a sexuality that is completely tied to procreation through estrus. A female  animal goes into heat and when she is in heat she is compelled to have sex with any male of her species. There is no choice involved. There is never sexual intercourse when she is not ovulating.

                Because humans have menses, women are able to have sex every day, not twice a year. However she chooses when she has sex, it is not dictated by chemistry. This system is 190,000 years old. Men do not like women having choice in sexual matters. Since patriarchy appeared 7,000 years ago, men have fought to take choice away from women. During warfare, women are stolen from other tribes and forcibly raped. Rape as a weapon of war has become extraordinarily common, with rape camps in the Balkans and in Darfur being the most recent examples.

                The myths of Pandora’s Box and of Eve and the serpent in the Garden of Eden, are two parallel myths that blame women and women’s sexuality for all the evil in the world. Now if you grew up hearing stories how your sexuality was bad and the cause of all the problems in the world, and then when you naturally touched yourself you were criticized harshly and made to feel shame for your natural self, don’t you think you might have problems with your sexuality?

                Add to this the stories of witch hunts that lasted for three hundred years in Europe and the United States which was essentially the murdering of women because they were sexual beings.   Add the knowledge of women’s sexual mutilation at age 14 to permanently remove their ability to enjoy sex in many Islamic countries, and it becomes obvious that there is tremendous hatred of women and women’s sexuality called misogyny. Being hated for your sexuality just might affect your sex life, don’t you think?

                And now we get to the last and perhaps most important fact. Women’s sexuality dwarfs men’s sexuality. In Homer’s Odyssey we meet the blind prophet Tiresias in Hades when he gives Odyseus information about his wife Penelope and her suitors. How did Tiresias become a blind prophet? Tiresias was a priest of Zeus. Now Zeus and his wife Hera had an argument over who enjoyed sex more. Zeus claimed it was women and Hera denied that.  So Zeus took his priest Tiresias and turned him into a woman and told him to live as a woman for ten years and then report back to him. Ten years later Tiresias  famous reply is that of the pleasure in human sexuality nine parts out of ten belongs to women. Hera was so mad at Tiresias for giving away this secret she blinded him. Zeus could not undo what Hera did so he made Tiresias into a prophet as compensation.

                Patriarchal culture has made the subject of sexuality taboo. We cannot talk about sexuality and orgasms openly in our sick society, but we can make movies of murder and violence as much as we want. Most men are sexually incompetent at pleasing women, and don’t even care to learn.

                It usually takes a woman many years to overcome all this cultural programming before she learns to use the neurological connections between her brain, her nipples, her clitoris, her goddess spot and her cervix. Post menopausal women, having completed the human evolutionary task of separating sexuality  from procreation,  have the potential to be at their spiritual and sexual peaks if they can throw off all these misogynistic myths and trust themselves and their own bodies. Orgasms can expand in length and duration  bringing a woman to a state of altered consciousness where she is connected to the Divine All in liminal time.

                So there is no need for a pill to increase women’s sexual desire, it is only necessary to throw out all the lies taught about women and sexuality. When these patriarchal lies are exposed for what they are and society stops controlling women and returns to women control over their own selves, then the world will be a much happier place. Once women are in control of their own bodies men will learn how to serve them sexually so they can share the glory that is women’s sexuality or they will be left out.