Posted on 07/26/2010 10:01:53 AM PDT by NYer
This year there was a predictable amount of hoopla surrounding the 50th anniversary of “the pill.” Many pundits told us that the pill had delivered as promised: Women had become liberated. Sex in the City! Sex in dorm rooms! Sex behind bleachers! Women have it all.
But wait. Now comes word that women aren’t all that interested in sex any more. Their libidos are waning to the point that pharmaceutical companies are racing to find a Pink Viagra: a new pill; a pill that will restore the desire to have the sex that the pill made possible.
Why don’t women want to have sex? Is it because they are so absorbed in their careers? Is it because these careers force women to sacrifice their femininity and males to sacrifice their masculinity and thus the vivifying difference between males and females no longer exists? Why do women need males? Women have everything males have; they can do everything males do; what do males have to offer?
Certainly the above explanations are not unlikely and almost certainly have a degree of truth but — still — can the desire of female for male be so easily obliterated? Isn’t the attraction even more elemental than caps and chaps and buttons and bows?
I find it strange that commentators have not identified a very likely cause of the lack of female libido. The Pill, indeed all chemical contraceptives, have as a common side effect, a reduced sex drive. It is well documented both scientifically and anecdotally that the hormones in chemical contraceptives prevent a woman from producing the level of testosterone needed for her to have a healthy sex drive. The sex drive is largely physiological: When women change their sexual physiology it should be expected that their sex drive will change. Many of the chemical contraceptives put a woman’s body into a state of pseudo pregnancy. Researchers discovered that pregnant women don’t ovulate (and women who don’t ovulate cannot get pregnant), so they learned how to deceive the female body into “thinking” it is pregnant so it wouldn’t ovulate. Nature also establishes that women who are pregnant generally do not have strong sex drives; it serves no evolutionary benefit.
Studies on the effects of hormones on male/female relationships have been proliferating. The work of Dr. Helen Fisher, among others, shows that women who use chemical contraceptives prefer more feminine looking men or “safer” men; when they stop using chemical contraceptives, they discover they have a higher sex drive but are not much interested in the male they chose when they were using the chemical contraceptives. Males are also much more attracted sexually to women who have fertile cycles; they produce more testosterone when around women who are fertile. Certainly the ardor of the male partner affects the female response.
A friend of mine once told me how her seven brothers and sisters one day had a frank and open discussion of their sex lives. Six couples, double income, no kids, lamented the lack of sex in their marriages; the females, attractive, well dressed and well employed, confessed they felt sex was just one more chore demanded of them at the end of a long day. The males, equally attractive, well dressed and well employed, stated they felt they had to beg for sex from their wives, who would rather be watching TV. The one couple who had four children and were expecting a fifth, were a little pudgy, a little bargain-shoppish in appearance and a little financially stressed. They listened to their siblings and their spouses with incomprehension; their sex life, interrupted not uncommonly by sick or needy kids, was frequent and satisfying. The fatigue of home schooling and stretching a limited income had not encroached upon their lovemaking.
And maybe that is the clue. They thought of having sex not as “having sex” but as “making love.” Not that the others didn’t love each other, but sex for them had become routine and not the occasion of making an emphatic statement of love to each other. The pill had enabled them to have sex before marriage, and sex had become simply one more pleasurable act without much meaning. The couple who were also parents had retained the ability to recognize the act of having sex as a profound expression of love; one of the reasons that their sexual acts could express that meaning was their respect for the baby-making power of the sexual act. When couples who are willing to have a baby make love to one another, they are expressing a willingness to have their whole lives bound up together: “I love you so much; I am willing to be a parent with you.” The act itself is laden with the meanings of affirmation and commitment. Contraceptive sex significantly undermines that meaning. By its very nature it expresses the intent not to become a parent with the other. While couples who use contraception may in fact love one another deeply, contracepted sex expresses a willingness only to engage in a momentary physical pleasure and thus expresses neither love nor commitment. The body language of contraception therefore works against the very love which sex is meant to express and cultivate.
And lest critics wail that women are not baby-making machines, mention must be made of truly green forms of child-spacing, methods of natural family planning (NFP). Modern methods of NFP enable a woman to determine with great reliability the generally 7-10 days a month she is fertile and is not to be confused with the old “rhythm method,” which relied on counting days on a calendar. Requiring no chemicals, totally without harmful physical or environmental effects (consider the carbon footprint of chemical contraceptives), and costing nothing to use, methods of NFP have proven as effective as any form of contraception. They also respect the baby-making power of sex by not treating fertility as some bodily defect that must be corrected. Most couples who use NFP have contracepted at one time and readily testify that their lovemaking when using NFP is markedly different in quality from their having contracepted sex.
So instead of supplementing one pill with another, women should go green in their sex lives. Not only will they protect the delicate ecology of their female fertility from libido-reducing chemicals, they may find themselves tickled pink with their sex lives.
Ping!
All I can say is, reducing your sex drive IS effective birth control.
One of the biggest lies ever sold to young women.
If someone is having “green sex”, they must need a ton of penicillin...............
There’s no putting that Genie back in the bottle.
Okay the article states that fertile women have higher sex drives than women on the pill. But it can also be true that the women off the pill have their higher sex drives during those few days of the month that they are actually fertile. Thus the Green method of birth control may not yield up a hungrier wife during those days which are safe for the full sex act.
On the other hand there are advantages to having a randy wife for sexual activities other than those that lead to pregancy.
Why not a female Viagra? What’s the big deal?
I take it you didn't read the article.
I think the issue really is that women’s sex drives are NOT the same as men, but that doesn’t fit into the liberal agenda of men and women being exactly the same except for a few body parts.
The old adage, “Men give love go get sex and women give sex to get love.” had a grain of truth in it. This is not to say women are not sexual beings, but that they are not interested in it to the exclusion of almost everything else. The media, however, does not seem to like this fact, and so they tend to portray women as just like men in that regard. Boys and girls raised on this untruth are likely very disappointed to find out it’s just not true.
The fewer drugs the better ... in everything.
All these chemicals people take these days cannot be good for the body is my thinking.
Modern medicine is great but I think they are inventing drugs for ‘illness’ and ‘disorders’ that most people simply do not have.
I read the article and what I get is that the thinking is that taking women off the pill will increase their sex drives. The pill, the pill the enemy is the pill. Or women working. Or you just don’t want the worry about getting pregnant.
What’s the excuse for the men using Viagra? Last I heard they don’t have to actually prove that they need the Viagra based on some physical problem or just old age. They get handed the Viagra.
So, you’re an older woman past childbearing years and your sex drive is in the dumps. What’s the problem with a female version of Viagra to bring that back? Or you’re not past childbearing years, but you’re just not interested? Maybe this article should rail against Viagra if they want to be fair about it.
1. "The Pill" reduces my wife's sex drive;
2. If she stops taking the pill, her sex drive will increase, but she will want someone else instead of me; and,
3. I now have to wake her up before sex ;-)
This is the worst day ever.........
And husbands of postmenopausal women would be forever grateful for a female viagra.
Well, if I was married to one of those pansies they talked about in the article, I wouldn’t want to have sex with them either.
The article presents “the Pill” and NFP as an “either/or”. There are a number of birth control options which do not involve tampering with the woman’s hormone levels: diaphragm, IUD, condom, sponge, etc (we used the diaphragm very successfully, and only had kids on the timing we chose, and did not experience any lessening in the wife’s libido)
“...If she stops taking the pill, her sex drive will increase, but she will want someone else instead of me...”
Ha! Uh oh, I guess that applies to all of us who met a woman when she was on the pill. I guess I was just wimpy enough to be attractive to her.
Except that Viagra is NOT a pill to give a male the ‘urge’ or increase his drive but rather the ‘ability’ to do something with that drive. The drug sheet will tell you an erectile response will not happen with urge too.
As any woman understands, a man has an enormous amount to offer a woman, and visa versa, because they are complementary.
But as any communist Left-wing community organizing neutered feminist understands, women are too insecure to trust that alone.
SO: "Women" versus "males." Never "females" versus "Men." And never "Women" and "Men."
Why? Because that's what this is about. It is incessant Leftist sexist incitement of women to project hate at men, to reduce men to mere plumbing-identified males while they shriek we women are not only our female plumbing!
Men, of course, tell women who try to reduce them to their plumbing to go straight to hell. So in theri "victory," women are left with the "males" that consent to be reduced to plumbing-identification "males." Who, by the way, don't turn them on, because they aren't men.
What to do? Screw teenage boys, of course (or metrosexuals - more years, same diff). Boys who aren't "males" yet because, being boys, 1) they haven't yet conceived of the existence of such hateful degredation of their very existence by malicious women, and 2) will screw any female thing that moves, stops, hides, smiles or, frankly, exists.
Which is ironic, because by simply refusing to acknowledge that men exist, women end up screwing boys who see them only as females, because they can't see them any other way.
Good going ladies - you've sold your very femininity to communists for votes, only to be be turned into a female sex object for boys by the very feminists you follow, while the men you really want turn away in disgust.
So women don't need "males"? LOL - When women refuse to acknowledge men, all they GET is "males."
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