Thanks to 'female Viagra' and government regulation, we women can enjoy sex again – just hopefully not too much
'People like sex. Sex is sexy.' Photograph: Jennifer Szymaszek/AP
We are standing on the brink of the breakdown of society. A world in which the economy grinds to a halt. Schools stand empty; there are no teachers left and the dinner ladies have found something better to do. Hospitals career towards crisis point as nurses become the uniformed sex-crazed bunnies that porn has long suspected them to be. This is the land of the marauding nymphomaniacs – hypersexed women who are hardly able to walk straight, never mind function as citizens.
This is the risk potentially posed by Lybrido, the female arousal drug (or "female Viagra"), according to some "experts" who are worried that this drug won't get past the regulators unless there are assurances that it won't lead to women becoming raptorial sex beasts. Women should like more sex, but not too much.
Of course this is another pharmaceutical attempt to cure social ills with a pill. A lower libido in both men and women may well have more to do with that screaming baby in the next room or the pending redundancy at work than anything physiological. But dealing with individuals' psychology or social circumstances is boring and hard and complex while pharmaceutical marketing is fun and easy and quick.
And this involves SEX. People like sex. Sex is sexy. Diarrhoea isn't sexy, lung disease isn't sexy and things that aren't sexy get less of our attention and investment. Female sexuality is even more dark and mysterious and feeds those odd social constructs that say women don't like sex as much as men do and therefore have to be "fixed", unless they do like sex as much as men do and so must be broken and are either mad, bad or wanton. Maybe women need a recommended daily fornication allowance.
Interestingly, the inspiration for the lady-horn enhancer was not a desire to create a louche legion of loose women, but came from one tragic man's way of getting over a broken heart. Dr Adrian Tuiten, head of the Dutch firm Emotional Brain, which developed the drug, was trying to understand why his long-term girlfriend dumped him in his 20s. Apparently "the breakup inspired a lifelong quest to comprehend female emotion through biochemistry and led to his career as a psychopharmacologist." (I'd suggest the desire to comprehend female emotion through biochemistry might actually be part of the reason for the break-up). The developers of this drug actually want it to promote monogamy, not instigate indiscriminate sex mania.
The trials completed so far on this drug have been exclusively with women in long-term, monogamous relationships where simply the spark has gone. However, increasingly evidence shows that for many women the cause of their sexual malaise appears to be monogamy itself. Evolutionary psychologists (or as I like to call them, Just So Story tellers) claim that it is innate biology that gives men a naturally higher sex drive. But ameta-analysis of studies by psychologists in 2010 shows little sex differences in the sexuality of men and women and where there were differences – such as rates of masturbation or pornography use – they were heavily influenced by culture and the gender equity of the social group studied.
It is almost impossible to separate female sexuality from culture. Depending on a variety of factors from the number of sexual partners you have had, how much flesh you show, whether you use contraception, how much you masturbate (because women do masturbate!), whether or not you "use" pornography (read it, watch it, look at it) and what kind of pornography it is ("it's a book, therefore erotica!") all variously determine whether you are a slut, whore, slag, prude, lesbian, harlot, prig or the veritable Mrs Grundy.
Society is as concerned by women who like sex as those who don't. Nymphomania was a form of mental illness or disease in the Victorian era with seemingly endless symptoms; masturbation, homosexuality, sexual dreams, or in one case the "lascivious leer of her eye and lips, the contortions of her mouth and tongue, the insanity of lust which disfigured [her]". This disease was variously "cured" with abstinence, vegetarianism, cold douches or more viciously with confinement to an asylum or even a form of female genital mutilation where the clitoris was removed.
The modern version is seemingly to attain that perfect balance between women enjoying sex more in their long-term, increasingly loveless, monogamous relationship through some kind of love potion and also resisting the ever-present lure of the strumpet within us. Only a heady combination of drugs, government regulation (through marriage, adultery laws, access to contraception) and overwhelming social pressures seem to be able to regulate female sexuality around the world. Who knows what would happen if we could discover and develop our own sexuality and properly understand how that changes and fluctuates over time and circumstance? Who knows what might have been achieved had people spent their energy on things other than regulating female sexuality? Perhaps everyone might be happier and hornier.