The glorious myth of "female Viagra" By Mark Morford

This much we know for sure: You do not touch the third rail. You do not betray your closest friends. You do not eat the fuzzy part of the cheese.

You do not rise up from the watery depths too rapidly, lest you go quickly insane. You do not drink five cups of coffee and three shots of absinthe and then attempt delicate brain surgery, blindfolded. You do not drill for oil a mile down in the pristine seas and have no reliable backup systems should something go horribly, horribly wrong. You do not mock Mother Nature.

But above all else, for absolute certain, one thing you really, really do not do: You do not mess around with the female sexual response.

I'm wondering if this will be the one to do it. I'm wondering if the current flurry of activity around the long-rumored, hotly debated, coolly mistrusted, still nonexistent "female Viagra," that hugely elusive wonderdrug currently being chased down by a whole slew of eager, cash-hungry major pharmcos, will be the one to change everything. And not necessarily for the better. ...


(Full URL: http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/g/a/2010/06/30/notes063010.DTL&nl=fix)

the pharmas want money makers. it may not cure cancer, but everyone knows viagra.... companies want that, and the money that goes with it. there are many things, though that go into a woman not feeling like having sex. try having kids clinging to you all day, running around trying to clean up the house when it seems to not be any cleaner than when you started.... not being able to even think with the fighting kids and their mindnumbing noise.... at the end of the day if I am lucky enough to not have a 9 month old firmly attached to my nipple, I just want to go to sleep. I feel bad for my husband. he's tried to be helpful. and i am sure my desire will come back at some point. but I was falling asleep in my daughter's room while waiting for her to pick out a book for her bedtime story. i could barely keep my eyes open. how can you feel like fooling around when you don't even feel like a person....

it is definitely about more than mechanics. women have to do a lot as mothers or working mothers in their day. men.... it's like every other thought is about sex. but when you are sitting at your computer while your wife runs around making dinner while doing laundry and changing diapers.... of course YOU still feel like fooling around.... while the wife just wants to friggin run away. of course you worked hard at work all day. and your wife knows that and that's why she doesn't ask for your help. but while you are on the computer and she is doing five things at once, remember that she has been doing five things at once all day. so i bet she has been working hard all day too.

Sheer Madness. It's that eternal search for an aphrodisiac that makes a slob irresistible to the hottie. Is juvenile, not even adolescent.

If there weren't so many truly serious, adult problems in the world, it might be even funny.

By smoking, ingesting or drinking something, but idea of an aphrodisiac is Sheer Madness? Why?

And low libido is a truly, serious, adult problem. The fact you do not accept that is your mistake.

But there are a lot of women who are further along in life and, due to menopause, lose their sex drives. I believe this is the market they would be targeting primarily.

Julie

It isn't only women; men lose their sex drives around mid-50's, especially if they are obese. They produce huge amounts of estrogen and the testerone goes out the window. There are a lot of middle aged women who would love to have sex and are still beautiful, but their husbands are no longer interested.

Don't know why I thought to comment as I did.

:shrug:

.

. . . . . . . their hand gets tired.

Last night's date:


Group sex:


Sex aids:


Airport porn:


Interracial sex:


Necrophilia:


Blind date with a Goth girl:


Victorian bondage:


Safe sex:

I am a homemaker, a dad of a five year old boy and a 21 month old girl. I take my job seriously: I vacuum, do the dishes, cook, do all the laundry, dust, clean the bathrooms, mow the lawn, etc. I do all the things that a female homemaker would do, plus I do all the "outside" things a husband would do, all while raising two delightful, active kids. I don't have nearby relatives to take the kids off my hands like some people do, and so do all the childrearing, at least until my wife gets home. My day begins at 6:30 a.m. and ends after we put the kids to bed at 8:00 (my wife puts one to bed and and I do the other, alternating between them), and then we watch an hour or so of television and retire to bed. Although my natural inclination when I was a bachelor was to keep a messy home, I have internalized my wife's standards of cleanliness, and so I keep my house "woman-clean," and am ready to receive visitors or host a playdate at any time, with only about 10 minutes of picking up. It's the hardest job I've ever done, but I treat it like paid work, and I'm proud that my wife doesn't have to work a second shift at home. I can totally relate to every thing you say about the futility of housework and the demands of children, even to the phenomenon of wanting to fall asleep when you're putting the kids to bed.

My point? After all that, I am bone tired, but I still want to have sex with my wife, the same woman I've been with for 20 years. It's true that I probably don't think about sex nearly as much as I did when I was young, but I put that down to being 42 more than being a homemaker. I don't think it's anything to do with mechanics: it's testosterone. It is a powerful, powerful drug, that operates even on sensitive men such as myself.

Sure work, stress, and lifestyle are different for men & women but often times people want to pretend that men & women aren't radically different on a biochemical level.

women have their own chemicals....

libido varies with both genders

but to totally ignore social constructs that have been implemented from beginning of time is part of the problem. like from birth on men encourage, cajoled, demanded to embrace their sexuality boisterously, visibly and girls strongly encourage and more to repress.

who are all these men having sex with, i wonder.....

now that girls are encourage more in the manner of males, we see a huge shift.

but better to ignore all that and just exclaim.... testosterone.

gender conditioning is just one example.

It's obviously important. I just know that my work situation is similar to that of many women with small children who stay at home with small children, and so I'm a bit of a natural experiment: I work as a homemaker at least 14 hours a day, and have not had any decrease in libido from before, other than what I might assume would be a normal part of aging, going from having sex five times a week when I was in my early twenties, to three times a week nowadays, which is pretty much how my wife and I like it (thankfully, we're on the same page on that one, though I do take care to remember that she's a crockpot and I'm a microwave).

I apologize if you found my post to be thoughtless with regard to the changes in society, and thoughtless in that regard--rest assured, I have given thought to these, it's just that I was reporting personal experience, and so culture was held relatively constant, having already been defined by my early socialization. I was raised by a feminist mom, so I didn't get much in the way of exhortation to embrace traditional masculinity.

Of course I know that individuals can vary, that it's not all down to hormones--I have a boy and a girl, and girls are supposed to develop early, and I've done the same things with both of them. Nonetheless, my boy is extraordinarily precocious, hitting all his developmental milestones very, very early, whereas my girl is right on schedule, though I have no doubt that she's a very bright child who is just not as freakishly early in her development as the boy is--she's like me in that respect, because I didn't really speak until I was three. You can do the same things as parents, but people still turn out different, with an individualitiy that defies statistics.

As for testosterone, I stand by what I said: it is a powerful, powerful chemical, one that men are under the influence of from the time we hit puberty. I think that the women who can understand this best transgendered people who have transitioned from female to male using, in part, testosterone.

http://www.ftmtransition.com/transition/testosterone/tphotoshead.html

As striking as the outward changes are, many men who used to be women also report that the most profound changes occur on the inside, in things like emotions, cognition and, yes, sex. I don't think that reporting that sex hormones can influence sex drive makes me guilty of "ignoring" anything, or simple reductionism.

I am, BTW, conducting my own experiments in gender conditioning, with mixed results. Of course, our whole household defied traditional gender roles. My little girl loves to play with her older brother's train set, and my little boy will happily play kitchen with any group of girls who are so inclined. But I still cannot get him to play with dolls and, even though we have no toy guns in the house, he will avidly engage in mock warfare with little boys who want to do that sort of thing on the playground. My little girl has taken an interest in dressing and undressing herself, something I still cannot get the boy to do on his own. I know my sample size is small, but I have come to the conclusion that gender roles are neither wholly cultural nor biological, but have a complexity that cannot be reduced to either.

we have testosterone and estrogen the way we do for a reason. men tend to need more calories, are stronger and are kind of 'built' to be the hunters. women are smaller, have the capacity to bear the children and feed them. we are the 'nurturers' by nature, even though it may not always be the case. if you look at the survival of the species sort of history, the men are probably hardwired to have sex a lot to further their genes whereas women are hardwired to care for kids. though, again, this is not necessarily true. some women have no desire to have kids. i am speaking strictly in regards to how our body reacts and possibly why men are more driven to have sex and women, while we do want too, we don't think about it generally as much as men do. and i think we are aroused by different things. men tend to be more visually geared whereas women react to different things. i find myself reacting to seeing my husband interact with the kids. that sort of thing. i tend to think a lot of that is connected to our biological history.

The whole "Dads versus cads" phenomenon, wherein women desire to have a man who will stick around to support the offspring, but also want the best genetics available, and so desire short-term relationships with "cads," who might not stick around but whose offspring might be superior in passing on their own genes, particularly if they also have boys who inherit the "cad" trait, and so:

"About 60% of the women said they would prefer to have sex with a cad when considering a brief affair," says researcher Daniel Kruger, a social psychologist at the University of Michigan's Institute for Social Research, in a news release."

http://www.webmd.com/sex-relationships/news/20031024/women-like-cads-sex-dads-mating

Intriguingly, though, a more recent researcher has reported that women use chemistry to select sperm: "Robertson said sperm was more likely to fail if the woman had not previously been exposed to that man's semen for at least three months." So women's bodies seem to be preferring to bear the children of men with whom they have a long term relationship.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20100623/hl_afp/healthaustraliawomenpregnancy_20100623100129

Of course, in the circumstances under which we evolved, there would be an incentive, within kinship groups, for some women to not have their own children, but to contribute to the welfare of the group by helping to care for the children of women to whom they were themselves also probably closely related.

For some reason, my wife thinks it's sexy when I fix things.

three days a week works for your wife.

but still

it is all about you. all about testosterone

even though

three days a week works for your wife. because?.... just cause. she is insignificant. her sexuality doesn't count, but it works for your testosterone body.

something, somewhere, gives her libido a match to yours in all your glorious testosterone.

Together, we have worked out every aspect of our relationship over the course of twenty years. It just happens that we're rather compatible, in this and many other things. It works for her because that's how often she wants to have sex with me. The average American married couple has sex 2.59 times a week, which makes us about average, but somehow, you've got to work that into some story that you have imagined about how she's oppressed by me, a notion that she would just laugh at. Maybe it's because she's a smart woman, a psychologist, and she's put me on an intermittent reinforcement schedule.

She's the mother of my children, my lover, and the breadwinner in this family. Hardly insignificant, nor is she regarded as such, by me or anyone else who knows her. I only mentioned how many times we do have sex it was meant to be illustrative of the comparison between men and women in similar situations: the way my wife expresses her sexuality with me would constitute a rather lengthy tangent, though I can assure you that if it were not working for her she wouldn't have gotten with me in the first place, and she certainly wouldn't have stayed with me over the course of the last 20 years.

What I do know is that you didn't address, substantively, my other points, but only took the discussion as an opportunity to fit my own personal story into some larger narrative of--of what, exactly? Your own story? I'm sorry if you're unhappy, if you've been hurt, but projecting these pathologies won't help you.

what you are saying. my wife wants it the same as me

women dont want sex as much as men. i know this because i have testosterone and that makes us different than women.

my wife and i are compatible on the number of times we want sex

this is my whole point.

women want sex as much as men. and not as much as some men. and more than other men.

If we're spilling all this electronic ink on this subject, why don't I just ask my wife if she'll read this and post a reply?

actually, i did a long post discussing your other points. i really do find your post interesting, insightful and fun.... it is just that the male sexuality so special cause of testosterone and female sexuality, ... meh, is so very tiring in todays culture. i deleted that. then decided to not let stand and answered in a short post

i have an older son that fit so many of the development of young girls. articulate, communicators, readers, well beyond his levels. i had another son that fell shy on all the developmental stages. what i did learn between the two very different children was regardless of the son that was late to his stages, he always caught up, so i was able to let that go.

i have an older son that loved his stuffed animals, and were his to nurture. i had a younger son we bought a doll for because he insisted i have another baby.

i have found that, though boys and girls will dress these stages differently, they go thru the same emotional experiences for development.

if a man wants a passionate wife at night, he should fix dinner and clean up the kitchen. A total turn on.

And mow the lawn. And do laundry. And hand-scrub the wood floor when it needs it. And clean the bathrooms.

.

.

.

.

. . . once a month, twice if I'm lucky . . .

:(

i did well about the first decade or so.... but now, meh. pick up. wait til i can write in dust. we write loving messages. sweep when i get a pile that looks like i really accomplished something. mop? huh? i dont get it

and i get it often.

go figure.

when i hear people (or magazine writers) say that if men want their women to want sex, they would do the dishes, i suspect that those people don't even know what "sexy" is

if you want a woman to want sex, you have to find out what HER turn-on is and link into that -- same thing as you would do w. a man -- now, sure, there is prob. some dominating woman out there who has a fantasy of cracking the whip over hubby while he does the dishes so watching do the dishes makes THAT ONE WOMAN hot but this is a minority fetish

you have to find out what YOUR wife's fetish is and play to that

i'm not gonna say what mine is, but it pretty much works like flipping on a light switch

i realize men can have a fetish and STILL need cialis, viagra, etc. but i think it's because with age the blood pressure etc. issues come into play that interfere w. sustaining an erection, so the problem is not exactly the same problem as with women

some women don't even seem to remember what they liked/desired or, worse, they really only liked/desired men of a certain age (say around 30) -- obv. if your sex drive is linked to wanting a specific age then you're kinda screwed since people only age in one direction...

but he does try to help. just seems like a jeff foxworthy moment.... where he says his wife could be out paving the driveway and he yells out the window... honey i cleaned out the ashtray..... i took care of it for ya!!

that it is just hard. it gets a whole lot easier. i remember when...

i am talking to my niece who has a 6 months old and 2 yr old. it is hard. all the way around.

It's called a romance novel.

I think women should get to choose what they do with their own bodies. This includes sexual respose enhacements, so why would a female Viagra be a bad thing?

:party:

"Dr. Snodgrass's office, may I help you?"

"Yes! Oh my GOD, YESSS!!!"