Low Sex Drive? Or Just Tired?

A committee of reproductive health experts at the FDA will vote today on the efficacy and safety of the drug flibanserin, an anti-depressant medication that didn’t work so well on depression, but whose makers found that instead, it boosted women’s libidos. For years we’ve been told women who didn’t want to have sex, say, as often as their male partners, were dysfunctional. Or had a low sex drive. Or needed something, and sometimes not just a glass of wine and an erotic movie. Maybe, perhaps, a pill.

The FDA’s not convinced. It reviewed studies and found that when you compared flibanserin  with a placebo, the response rate wasn’t that great and the drug gave women only a slight improvement in their sex drive.

For women with lagging sex drives looking for some help, there aren’t many options, it’s true. And some estimates have it that more than 40 million women have some problem with sexual desire. But does not having a strong sex drive qualify as a medical condition that needs fixing—in 40 million women? Or is that we’re all supposed to be Samantha in Sex and the City? The Mayo Clinic reports that although more than 40 percent of women complain of low sexual desire at some point, the percentage with actual, ongoing problems is much smaller: 5 to 15 percent. And researchers acknowledge, according to the Clinic’s information on low sex drive in women, that it’s difficult to measure what’s normal and what’s not.

With that in mind, Joan Sewell writes on her very entertaining Daily Beast blog:

The parade of TV psychologists approach me with those overly sympathetic, simpering smiles, explaining that if a woman has lower desire than her man, there is sadly something wrong with her world: she doesn’t feel emotionally safe enough to have sex, she’s too stressed, she’s too tired, she hasn’t been romanced enough, or she’s a stay-at-home mom, or she’s a working mom, or not a mom, and on and on. In other words, a mythos is posited that women would have equal sexual drives to men if it weren’t for the overly-full, over-extended, livin’-it-to-the-max life we girls have to live.

Teri Hatcher’s much ballyhooed lifestyle site, GetHatched, at family.go.com asked which women would prefer: eight hours of really great sex or eight hours of really great sleep? The subtext reads, boy that’s a toughie, Teri. I love sex, but jeepers, I’m so gosh darn busy with charity work, career, multiple babies, and exploring the effects of gamma rays, I barely have any me time! It’s a tableau straight out of an air freshener commercial. But the answer one woman gave in response to the question was revealing: “Who wants to have sex for eight hours?” Ask a dude. Ask even a tired dude. No contest.

As a tired, working mom, eight hours spent in the sack NOT sleeping would probably make me feel mighty sore and exhausted.  But that doesn’t mean I need a drug to kick up the libido. It probably means I’m pretty normal. On WebMD, Edward O. Laumann, professor of sociology and the author of The Social Organization of Sexuality: Sexual Practices in the United States says that sexual desire in women is “extremely sensitive to environment and context.”  The site says many studies illustrate that men’s sex drives are not only stronger than women’s but much more straightforward. “The sources of women’s libidos, by contrast, are much more difficult to pin down.” Which makes me suspicious of any drug that says it can be pinned down and pumped up.

Northwestern University researcher Meredith Chivers and colleagues reported on the site that women don’t even seem to know, not always, what turns them on.  Laumann also had an interesting viewpoint on why women’s sex drives are seemingly weaker than men’s:

Men have every incentive to have sex to pass along their genetic material, Laumann says. By contrast, women may be hard-wired to choose their partners carefully, because they are the ones who can get pregnant and wind up taking care of the baby. They are likely to be more attuned to relationship quality because they want a partner who will stay around to take care of the child. They’re also more likely to choose a man with resources because of his greater ability to support a child.

There’s no denying some women really do have a sexual dysfunction that needs treating, and it has had a profound effect on their lives. But for the majority of women, I think the Mayo Clinic sums it up best. If you want to have sex less often than your partner does that doesn’t mean either of you is necessarily outside the norm for people your age or at your stage in life. “Similarly, even if your sex drive is weaker than it once was, your relationship may be stronger than ever. Bottom line: There is no magic number to define low sex drive. It varies from woman to woman.”