Hot-sex generation feels a chill in relations

By Adele Horin
January 8, 2005

This month the film Kinsey, starring Liam Neeson, opens nationwide. Neeson plays the pioneering sex researcher Alfred Kinsey, who created a sensation in the late 1940s and early 1950s with his books on men's and women's sex lives.

Based on painstaking interviews with 18,000 Americans, Kinsey's data shocked the puritanical West. It revealed the rich variety of people's sex lives for the first time. For example, 11 per cent of married males had anal sex, and 50 per cent of married men had an extramarital affair, as did 26 per cent of married women.

In those stitched-up times, people were having more sex, and in all its forms, than was publicly acknowledged. Not since Darwin's On the Origin of Species had books unleashed such controversy.

Fast-forward 50 years, and the controversy of the 21st century is entirely different. Now the shock news is that lack of sex and lack of desire are more common than once believed. If people worried in Kinsey's time about how to restrain the natural sex drive, now the worry is how to boost it, and extend it into old age, through chemical fixes if need be.

Seven years after Viagra was unleashed, the attention has turned to baby boomer women whose sex drive has gone into low gear. In Kinsey's day women who showed too much interest in sex were called nymphomaniacs. Now grandmothers are pitied if they can't conjure up a sexual thought about husbands of 40 years' standing.

Lack of desire among post-menopausal women is being turned into a serious medical problem, with a scary name - Hypoactive Sexual Desire Disorder. And drug companies are moving in to capitalise on it.

Procter & Gamble, which brought us soap and nappies, has produced a testosterone patch, Intrinsa, designed to fix post-menopausal women's fading libidos. Not in the mood? No worries, there's a patch.

It has caused a huge furore, dividing feminists and medical experts. Last month the United States Food and Drug Administration advisory panel refused to approve the patch for release just yet, saying that the possible health risks outweighed what some saw as only a modest benefit in increasing desire and the frequency of sex. It won't get on the market without more testing. But Intrinsa is only the first of a line of testosterone products aimed at the post-menopausal market.

Women's flagging drive, due in part to reduced testosterone levels as they age, represents big bucks to pharmaceutical companies - just as men's limp penises (and inflated expectations) were turned into the Viagra goldmine for Pfizer.

Just because a multinational drug company is flogging it, doesn't mean the proposed chemical fixes are bad. Pharmaceutical companies brought us the pill, too. And for all the problems and false starts, the pill liberated millions of women. But it does indicate baby boomer women might need to exercise caution before they accept they have a medical problem that needs fixing. Extended drug treatment may be a premature solution when so little is understood about the science of desire.

We're only starting to learn that women's sexual desire and arousal are more complex than previously thought; grandmothers who don't burn with desire, can't conjure up a sexual thought or fantasy, and don't particularly crave intercourse are perfectly normal. And they can still have satisfactory sex once they get going, sexologists tell us.

It turns out that Kinsey's famed successors, William Masters and Virginia Johnson, led us up the garden path with their strict account of women's sexual response. Research by guru sexologist Professor Rosemary Basson, from British Columbia, shows the linear sequence Masters and Johnson laid down - desire, arousal, plateau, orgasm, resolution - does not necessarily apply, especially to women in long-term relationships. Desire may be absent at the outset for women, rather there's a wish to please their partner, or to feel emotionally close. Desire may come later, near orgasm. But there is no set pattern.

Many ageing baby boomers, foot soldiers of the sexual revolution, who have tasted the joy of sex, aren't going to take a flagging libido lying down. They won't go quietly into the night. I suspect many want the kind of jump-on-your-partner sex they had in their younger days. Unlike their grandmothers, baby boomer women may not regard lack of desire as a relief; they will see it as a loss. The usual turn-offs - uncaring, inept partners, lack of intimacy, repressed anger, fatigue and boredom - may not apply in their cases. These women are not necessarily pawns and dupes of the pharmaceutical companies or their husbands.

Even so, the advice from Juliet Richters, co-author of Doing It Down Under, a book on Australia's sexual practices to be released this month, is to adjust. Don't wait to feel randy, schedule sex, don't focus on intercourse, "rewrite the script". And enjoy.

Baby boomer women, after the pill and hormone replacement therapy, need some consideration from hormonal assault. A testosterone patch, after a lot more testing, may prove as benign and helpful as aspirin. Right now in trials it has been shown to offer one "satisfying" experience a month more than a placebo; not enough to outweigh worries about heart disease and cancer.

Kinsey shocked the world when he revealed people's interest in sex; 50 years later, lack of interest has us in a stew. The hot-sex generation is having trouble cooling down. But the drug companies are all fired up.