The Guide to Getting It On (145 page)

A Final Perspective

Some evolution experts believe that nature has programmed men to ejaculate into each and every available vagina, while women are programmed to couple with males who will offer the best chance to successfully raise a family (relationship material). The people who take these theories most seriously are the evolutionary psychologists themselves. It’s interesting how with changes in economics and politics, more women are looking to catch more ejaculations from more men than they did fifty years ago.

In spite of what people expect, a man who is straight and masculine-appearing might experience sex in a ways we would typically expect of a woman—sensitive, monogamous and intimacy seeking, while a very feminine-appearing straight woman might enjoy sex with numerous men, value it for the rush of sensation that it offers, and avoid long-term relationships. It’s also possible that what we want at one point in our lives may be totally different from what we want at another.

The most important thing to be aware of about sexual differences is that a partner might experience sex differently than you do. Instead of making assumptions about how a partner experiences sex, why not ask, explore, and find out for yourself? Maybe their responses will not be as tied to gender role stereotypes as you might think.

CHAPTER

72

The Panty-Dropping Pill, Patch & Shot

T
his chapter is about women’s sexual desire when it is at its low ebb. It might seem strange that a chapter on low desire would appear in a book like this. After all, if you are reading
The Guide,
the least of your problems is low sexual desire. Right? Well, maybe.

There are things we can learn about normal desire when we look at the attempts that are being made to woo women with low sexual desire.

Why We All Need To Be Concerned

Drug companies have been spending millions and millions of dollars to find a “cure” for women’s low sexual desire, as if it were a disease rather than a communication. They thought they had hit the jackpot when they found Viagra. After all, a woman’s genitals aren’t that much different than a man’s, or so they assumed. If you look at how much blood rushes in when a woman’s genitals are aroused, there isn’t a big difference between that and an erect penis. Fill ‘er up, and she’ll be good to go.

In anticipation of the wonderful success they assumed they were going to have with the girl version of Viagra, the drug giants bought themselves—uh, sponsored—studies that discovered that 43% of woman suffer from sexual dysfunction. So for the longest time, you couldn’t hear a single report about women’s sexuality that didn’t begin with the words “43% of women suffer from sexual dysfunction....” Of course, none of the reports bothered to mention the furor that was brewing behind the scenes when some of the country’s top sex researchers said, “Your definition of ‘dysfunction’ seems a wee bit self-serving.” We also know that the percentages researchers report depend greatly on how the questions are phrased.

With it being announced that 43% of women are on the verge of sexual breakdown, think of how many girls would be running to their physicians for a prescription of the new pink Viagra. It’s that or lose their husbands to some devious babe up the street whose medicine chest is crammed full of the new Pink Prozac for the Pelvis.

But then the drug companies discovered something that they hadn’t expected to find—that a puffed-up pussy does not make desire in the mind. While Viagra can increase the blood flow between a woman’s legs, it no more makes women want to have sex with their partners than sitting on the washing machine during the spin cycle, which also increases the blood flow between her legs. The idea that a woman will want to have sex if we can just give her a swollen vulva turned out to be a colossal flop. They would have done better giving her a trashy novel or a new partner.

And it gets even more complex than that. When researchers were studying the impact of birth-control pills on women’s sexual desire, they found different results among women in Scotland and women in the Philippines. It seems that the women in one country had a different expectation of what they should be getting from sex than women in the other. Although the pill had an equal effect on their bodies, the women in one country were more disappointed by its unwanted side effects than the women in the other. So even culture has an important effect on women’s expectations.

But the drug companies aren’t about to give up on “low sexual desire.” It’s really perfect for them. Like depression, low sexual desire is poorly defined, the kind of thing you can convince anyone they have, given the right kind of marketing campaign. And so they set their sights on testosterone.

Not long ago, Procter and Gamble (P&G) asked the FDA to approve a new testosterone patch called Intrinsa to cure “low sexual desire” in women, a condition that apparently strikes every woman past the age of 37. But unlike Viagra, a woman doesn’t take testosterone pill an hour before sex and she’s good to go. Testosterone is a steroid, the kind of drug that helped female swimmers from the former Eastern Bloc achieve that unique, chiseled look. A woman would need to take it every day.

The interesting thing is that a lot of women who first start taking testosterone really do feel more chipper, more energized. It isn’t for a couple of years until Jacqueline starts to sound like Jack when she answers the phone.

The FDA’s advisory panel voted seventeen to zero against approving P&G’s horny patch. There were issues of increased chances of breast cancer, heart problems, liver ailments, skin inflammation, excessive hair growth and masculinization that P&G didn’t sufficiently address. There are also unanswered questions about the impact of testosterone on a woman who is 30 as opposed to 60. How would the extra testosterone affect her fertility or future children? And how would it effect women of different ethnicities?

Then came a report from a task force of the Endocrine Society that strongly recommended against the generalized use of testosterone by women until a number of very important questions are addressed and answered.

You would think if we were going to give women a potent steroid we would have a test to tell if a woman actually needs it. But scientists can’t agree what form of testosterone should be measured and what to make of the results. One woman can have a very low reading of free testosterone and be a lioness in bed, while another can have a decent amount and not be interested in sex at all. In fact, there’s now a fairly definitive study that shows there is little correlation between a woman’s hormones and her level of horniness.

There is no question
that supplemental testosterone can be helpful for some women who are experiencing certain physical conditions, such as the loss of their ovaries or after taking hormonal methods of birth control that might have shut down the female body’s ability to make its own testosterone.

The Panty-Dropping Pill from Germany

Not long ago, the marketing people–uh, scientists–from the German drug giant Boehringer-Ingelheim (BI) presented their panty-dropping pill to the FDA. The pill was called flibanserin. The FDA sent it back to the bullpen.

America’s media remained clueless, as they referred to it as the “pink Viagra.” Viagra works below the belt to help the penis have more of the chemicals it needs to get hard. It doesn’t concern itself with whether a man wants to have sex or not. The German panty-dropping pill worked very differently. It assumed the woman’s pelvic plumbing was just fine. Its job was to turn her feeling of “ho-hum” into “I’ve gotta have it,” although its effects were much more subtle and it was not going to dramatically change anyone’s sex life. Unlike Viagra, flibanserin operated on the woman’s brain and could have potentially impacted her thought processes.

BI had to show that its panty-dropping pill worked better than sugar pills. The trouble is, if you tell someone with sexual issues that the sugar pill you are about to give them might actually be the drug of their dreams, the chances are good they will report that the pill increased their sexual satisfaction, at least while the study is still going on.

You also need to ask how a pill like flibanserin compares to a vacation when you are working a full-time job and raising kids, or to having friendly conversations and fun when that’s been missing from your relationship. How does it compare to a few sessions of couples therapy?

And finally, should female sexual desire be regarded as a disease? A woman who wants sex with her partner doesn’t have the disease of low desire, but if she’s lost her desire for him, she needs to take a pill? So how often is loss of desire like a disease which has a physiological cause, and how often is it situational, where it might be due to stress, overwork, boredom, money issues, or a lack of communication and no romance in the relationship? And if only 1% or 2% of women with low desire actually need to take a pill for it, how do you know which ones?

We at Goofy Foot Press had our own marketing plan for flibanserin, with flibanserin being sold in three different strengths: Flibanserin-Light, Flibanserin-Regular and Flibanserin-Super:

FLIBANSERIN-LIGHT will increase your chances of
getting a hand job
by 7% more than placebo, and 3% more than a fun evening together that includes a nice dinner and lots of conversation.

FLIBANSERIN-REGULAR will increase your chances of
getting a blow job
by 8% more than placebo, and 2.5% more than a fun evening together that includes a nice dinner and lots of conversation.

FLIBANSERIN-SUPER will increase your chances of
getting vaginal intercourse
by 9% more than placebo, and 2% more than a fun evening together that includes a nice dinner and lots of conversation.

We’d also make sure that every ad for flibanserin would include a pair of panties that appeared as though they had been tossed there by a woman in the throes of sexual passion.

Batter Up—What’s Next in the Panty-Dropping Pill Lineup?

In a word: bremelanotide. This compound was originally tested as a sunless tanning lotion. Imagine the surprise when men who were test subjects got boners in addition to tans and women test subjects wanted to jump the male test subjects. Development was stopped in due to side effects including high blood pressure. But then the company showed that injecting bremelanotide subcutaneously does not appear to cause the elevated blood pressure side effects of the original nasal application. It is currently in testing. According to one female user, “It won’t make you want to have sex, but it will make things much easier, and once things are going, it will keep them going.”

Now that’s a romantic thought, “Honey, pull up your shirt and let me stick this needle under your skin!”

CHAPTER

73

God & Sex