British Doctors Tell Women How Much Sex Is Enough

The British Drug and Therapeutics Bulletin issued an article on the testosterone patch Intrinsa, designed to boost the libidos of post-menopausal women, and they don’t recommend it. Women probably just like sex too much anyway.

One of their major criticisms is that the study left out women with physical or mental health problems – other than lower testosterone levels – that could affect their sex drives, and included women who self-reported “low sexual desire causing distress.” The doctors at the DTB had this to say about that:

In some instances women reported having sex up to three times a month before the trials – raising questions over whether they had a poor sex drive at all from the outset.

Right. Well, as we all know, women only have sex when they really, really want to, so the incidence of intercourse and the incidence of libidinous urges leading to intercourse is obviously a 1-to-1 correlation. Furthermore, as a drug designed to treat diminished sexual desire in post-menopausal women, if the women want to have sex three times a month, that’s plenty good enough for all women, so they should just shut up about what sex addicts they used to be and enjoy “normal” sexual desire, am I right?

I mean, normal sexual desire is normal for the person experiencing it. So, for some people — men and women — they might be totally cool with three times a month. Other people have the urge to bump uglies once or twice a day. Some people might really only want it a few times a year, or even not at all, based on their individual libidos. For a woman who was once a once-a-day sexing kind of person, to hit menopause and find herself wanting it less than once a week probably does cause distress, in the same way that a woman who only ever wanted it once a week and finds herself craving it once a day might wonder what is happening to her. The idea that there’s no way that a woman who has sex three times a month — even if one assumes a 1-to-1 correlation between intercourse and the desire to have intercourse — could be suffering from a lack of sexual desire is a pretty sexist way to view healthy female sexuality.

Furthermore, the doctors at the DTB criticized the patch’s relatively high placebo effect, in which women who got a fake patch still found themselves wanting sex more. Yes, how terrible to discover that some component of libido is based in one’s head and that, expecting that they would want sex more, women found themselves wanting sex more. And, really, when the side effects are (ironically) headaches, skin irritation, hair loss and gain, weight gain and zits, a woman wouldn’t want to risk those just to feel sexually normal to herself again, especially if the testosterone isn’t replacing lost testosterone. It’s not that important to women at all.

I mean, it’s not like some men go around popping Viagra and Cialis willy-nilly just to live up to certain expectations and feelings about normal sexual performance or anything. Oh, wait, they do. Well, women are just different, right?