Will Women Use Librido To Increase Sexual Desire? – Updated

There’s some good understanding of female desire behind these compounds:

1) Women lack urgency due to lower testosterone. As a sex therapist, I see couples in good relationships where she is exhausted from caring for children and/or a demanding career but where nothing makes her husband too tired for sex. Imagining that their bodies are similar because of the matched sexual desire that started their relationship, there is enormous frustration between them. He thinks she is withholding and she begins to believe he is demanding. In reality, he has an unfair advantage when it comes to urgency.

A male body has a range 1000-300 nanograms/deciliter of testosterone whereas a woman has only 70/2 ng/dl. At levels of 300 ng/dl, men come to therapy complaining of low libido perhaps only wanting sex only one time a week, no morning erections, poor erections during sex, and Viagra not working well. While women may metabolize and make use of our testosterone more efficiently, there is a huge gender gap in our inherit bounty of this sex drug. We are nearly different species.

Testosterone does often help women’s sexual hunger but I have some questions. Will a sublingual dose immediately increase her desire timed to a romantic evening?  Will the dose be small enough to avoid any side effects from increasing her hormone levels?

2) Arousal takes longer for women. Desire often kicks in for a woman when she’s already having sex.  About halfway up the mountain of arousal when her genital engorge and her lubrication becomes evident, she starts to crave sex. But getting to the halfway point takes about 20 minutes for most women from a dead start.

Isn’t Viagra the Same?

Technically Viagra works on the mechanics of erections by increasing vasodilation in the genitals helping couple relations because erectile dysfunction is the most commonly disrupted area of male sexual functioning. It make some biological sense that if a woman is physiologically boosted up the mountain to the point that she starts to want it, then this pill fixes her ignition.

Unfortunately, research by Meredith Chivers has shown that women’s genitals and minds are not as hard-wired together as are men’s. For instance, when shown images that cause a sexual response of vasocongestion in her genitals, women did not always feel subjective arousal. She didn’t feel sexual even though her body was turned on. Contrast this with a man.  I’m told that if his penis starts to get an erection – by drug, by erotic stimuli, or by the wind –  he starts to feel sexy.

I’m hopeful, but a sceptic waiting to see the results of Librido.

Alternatives to a Pill

I find many married men & women to lose their sexual desires. So much in so, that they decide to take some sort of pills to get it going again. Thing is, if that married man had sex with a brand new woman, he would have no issue. So it begs the question, do we need all these meds to begin with? Don’t we simply need a discreet partner to have fun with?