Letters to the Editor
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Relative terminology
I am all for women having choices in their sexuality. But I am also aware that "low" is a relative term. In comparison to what is my sex drive low? I think it is possible that there is a very wide range of "normal", and my normal may be lower than your normal. Does that mean I am medically afflicted? Can't I just communicate with my partner to work out our version of normal, and not be told that I am inferior to those who are more sexually driven than I am?
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MY libido became a victim of my menopause
I've read all the philosophical posts so far. But not a lot of medical/technical discussion.
Who would use this prescription? I would!
I don't have any known hangups with sex; I have a loving, attractive (and younger) partner and we enjoyed ourselves well and often before menopause struck.
I would give my eyeteeth to get a tingle "down there" again.
I'll be watching for the availability of this one.
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New View
How this medication will work, if it will work for all women, and when it will actually be available is speculation for the future.
I went to the New View site and thought it insighful.
For instance this (numbering is mine):
1. The right to sexual freedom, excluding all forms of sexual coercion, exploitation and abuse;
2. The right to sexual autonomy and safety of the sexual body;
3. The right to sexual pleasure, which is a source of physical, psychological, intellectual and spiritual well-being;
4. The right to sexual information...generated through unencumbered yet scientifically ethical inquiry;
5. The right to comprehensive sexuality education;
6. The right to sexual health care, which should be available for prevention and treatment of all sexual concerns, problems, and disorders.
Look at the first one. If that right alone were fulfilled, it would literally transform the feelings of millions of women about sex. It would be nice if they defined sexual coercion and exploitation and abuse, but most women have a pretty good idea what is being referred to here. It is more difficult to enjoy sex when a woman has been made to feel that her sexuality is somehow not her own. That it belongs in some way to men. When that has been compounded by outright perversions of male power. Defining it as rape alone is defining it too narrowly.
For instance, look at how fetboy as a better example of male thinking has still taken steps to "own" almost sexually Tracy Clark-Flory and AKA Smith. He is not even aware that he is doing this.
Look at number 6. How many times have the trolls complained about the money given to research on breast cancer. They think it is discriminatory. They are the first to usually act as if breasts are something they have a right to enjoy, comment on, and exploit. The imbue the female breast with sexuality rather than priviledging its function as food for the continuation of the human race. You cannot sexualize female breasts, encourage a culture in which breasts are icons, and then expect women who have had mastectomies not to feel acutely a loss of sexual desirability.
Understand it. Men cannot own women's bodies in a cultural way and still expect women to be well enough in touch with our own bodies to have the personal connection and power to ourselves that make orgasm and sexual desire most possible.
If the drug envisioned is successful and approved, I can actually envision women using it to attain sexual pleasure often without a man. I can envision women it using it to attain masturbatory pleasure alone.
What men simply do not understand about women is that sexual pleasure for a woman begins in her brain. It is a product of self-esteem and imagination.
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No doubt about it.
Menopause or hysterectomy can utterly change the equation of desire. Now hormone replacement is a health risk. I suspect lots of women are suffering in silence.
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New View again
Look at number 2. How can women have this safety when in many place in the world women are forced to undergo FGM, which robs them of their best source of sexual enjoyment? When they undergo this horror, they are not of an age to make an informed choice. Why? Because they are so often not of an age to enjoy sex. The whole point of FGM is to take from them that knowledge.
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Look at numbers 4 and 5
We deny young girls the right to knowledge about pregnancy prevention in our public schools by an emphasis on abstinence education. Worldwide the US withholds aid if health care providers and international agencies who would distribute that aid mention ways to prevent pregnancy.
Women's bodies are being held captive by governments run mostly by men.
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Do you think that fear of pregnancy and expensive birth control
does not affect women's sexual choices and even sometimes the quality of women's desire? Think again!
But trolls to Broadsheets threads would make women solely responsible for preventing pregnancy and would force women to bear the financial responsibility and child care responsibility of unintended pregnancy. Those same whiners complain that women do not provide men with enough sex. They complain women have a lower sex drive. They complain that women are not sexually assertive enough. Brightstar, I am referring to you!
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This is not just a medical issue.
It is a personal issue for women and it is also political. Men who want to control what goes on in sex and who want sex all their own way deserve what they get. Bad sex. Less sex. No sex.
They deserve the fake orgasms that women stage for them rather than the true and powerful orgasms that they could enjoy with women if they understood that women do not enjoy great sex with men they do not respect who do not respect them.
Men need to accept that they cannot verbally abuse or treat like a house slave or make fun of and downgrade their female partners and still expect an eager sex partner. The female sex drive is different. It begins in the brain and the imagination.
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Whereas before this drug...
There's also the potential to invalidate women's sexual complaints; if her private bits aren't working properly, it can be seen as simply her -- rather than her lover's -- fault.
Whereas before this drug, it was impossible to see this problem as her fault. Because now, when a woman has low desire, it's automatically seen as her partner's fault. Right.
Seriously, why are we even concerned about whose "fault" it is? If a woman wishes she had a higher sex drive, and this stuff provides it to her, why shouldn't she be able to get it? I think we're overanalyzing this.