Ever since Viagra became man's best friend, pharmaceutical companies have been racing to find an equivalent for women. But the essentially mechanical boost to erection that the drug provides, by pumping more blood to the penis, doesn't do a thing for females; their most common sexual complaint—voiced by 40 percent of women in large-scale surveys—is low libido. Desire turns out to be a much more elusive companion to arousal. And that may be the best and worst thing about it.
While the push to discover a female drug for desire has so far yielded nothing comparable to the little blue pill, it has spurred considerable research into what is proving to be a very complex phenomenon. It has also spurred nearly as much ideological debate, some of which has actually helped guide research in productive ways.
There are clinicians and academics—many of them female and feminist—who contend that disorders of desire are manufactured by drug companies to create markets for products that are unneeded because women's libido problems come from the way society views female sexuality. Others believe that desire problems have real, if poorly understood, roots in biology and that more research might yield good treatments. Many feel that assumptions of male-female sexual equivalency have at best hampered research and at worst led to erroneous adoption of male experiences of arousal and performance as the standards for women as well.
But scientists do seem to agree on a few things. One is that gender stereotypes seem to hold. When it comes to desire, men have more of it, both in frequency and intensity. Among women, levels of desire vary much more than among men. They also vary more within individual women, depending on time of the month and across the lifespan. Sexual desire in women is less directly tied to physical arousal than it is in men; in fact, it often follows arousal, rather than precedes it. In women, desire is much more a matter of mind than mechanics and seems to be more affected by partner relationships, what's going on around them and, perhaps most important, how they feel about themselves. Female sexual desire is not just more complex but more fragile, too. But it may be something that women can learn to feel.
Lines and Circles: Diagrams of Desire
When in 1966 Masters and Johnson described what they called Human Sexual Response, they focused exclusively on the functioning of the genital equipment without even addressing the matter of desire. Following up with their 1970 book, Human Sexual Inadequacy, they viewed biological equipment problems as the cause of impotence and failure to achieve orgasm.
With women newly liberated by the pill to enjoy casual sex, attention gradually shifted to desire. In 1979, psychiatrist Helen Singer Kaplan, who opened the country's first sex therapy clinic in New York, put forth a model of sexuality in which genital excitement and orgasm were preceded by desire. At the same time, she introduced the idea of disorders of desire, and the term hypoactive sexual desire took up residence in the diagnostic bible, the DSM.
Critics have found many faults with the official DSM definition of hypoactive sexual desire, but the primary concern is that countless women have been deemed dysfunctional because their sexual response doesn't look like a man's—which is tied tightly to physiology and progresses sequentially to orgasm. What about the many women who enjoy sex without ever experiencing orgasm? And low desire compared to what?
At the University of British Columbia, where she directs the sexual medicine program, clinician Rosemary Basson put forth a new model of female sexual response. It depicts sexual response as more circular than linear, with many physical and contextual cues prompting desire and arousal and many points of entry. Her model accounts not only for spontaneous desire but also for the experience of the many women who report that they engage in sex feeling neutral and experience desire only after they are physiologically aroused.
The Relationship Thing
The importance of relationships and emotional attachment to female desire emerges from many sources. Numerous studies show that women are far less interested in casual sex than men are. In 1996, researchers reported that 35 percent of women but only 13 percent of men cited love and emotional intimacy as goals of sexual desire; 70 percent of men, versus 43 percent of women, said that sex in and of itself was the goal of sexual desire. Men tend to have sex for sex's sake, research suggests, but women's sexual desire tends to aim at relationship outcomes.
Not everyone agrees things are quite so straightforward. Marta Meana at the University of Nevada Las Vegas contends it's possible to overemphasize the importance of relationships to desire in women. In fact, she finds, relationships can have a dampening effect on desire and sex for both genders—and as relationships progress, desire declines.
"It could be that relationships are very arousing to women at first, but there are not a lot of data showing that it lasts for long. The longer you are in relationships, the more fantasies steer away from touchy-feely concepts. I think relationships are important to sexuality. I think women probably care more about relationships than about having sex, but that doesn't mean relationships are what turn women on," Meana says. "If safety, comfort, love, and respect were as facilitative to female sexual desire as some of the relationally focused literature claims, then we should not see as many married women in happy relationships complaining of low desire," she notes.
Tags:
academics,
adoption,
assumptions,
biology,
clinicians,
companion,
equivalency,
erection,
female sexuality,
females,
gender stereotypes,
intensity,
lifespan,
low libido,
mechanics,
pharmaceutical companies,
phenomenon,
scale surveys,
sexual desire,
time of the month
