MARGIE ORFORD ON FEMALE VIAGRA
Desire is not something that can or should be unlocked by a drug, writes Margie Orford
‘THE great question that has never been answered, and which I have not yet been able to answer, despite my 30 years of research into the feminine soul, is ‘What does a woman want?’ ”
Sigmund Freud’s famously unanswered question echoed through the last century, unanswered to his satisfaction. Freud did come up with the rather literal suggestion that what little girls wanted was a penis — their own, not the borrowed ones for which he advised adult women to settle — rather than social, familial, sexual and economic parity with men.
This profitable question has been plaguing Big Pharma, too. Drug companies have spent years developing a drug that is billed as the answer to what women want — or a cure for what they don’t want. So, drum roll please, ladies and gentlemen: Flibanserin is here.
I have yet to see one, but I am guessing it’s pink. It is, if we are to swallow the hype, The Answer. We are going to be saved by the much-lobbied-for female Viagra, which has just been approved by the Food and Drug Administration, the US body that licenses new drugs.
Apparently it will “fix” women’s supposedly flagging libidos. Which, I guess, translates in drugspeak to making choosy/ tired/pissed-off/not-in-love women more willing to have sex.
Ours is an era that has been sold the quick fix, but it is altogether too simple, too reductionist to say that women’s ambivalence and, frequently, outright refusal to put out on demand will be solved by a tablet.
The previous pill for women — apart from the contraceptive pill that has liberated us from the slavery of unchosen reproduction — was Valium, immortalised as Mother’s Little Helper by the Rolling Stones. This is how the song goes: “And though she’s not really ill, there’s a little yellow pill. She goes running for the shelter of a mother’s little helper.”
I first heard those lines, filled with Mick Jagger’s sneer, as a teenager when I was first discovering a feminist view of the world and what it was telling me I wanted. The heartbreak of those trapped, reduced, desperate housewives cooking and cleaning and going mad stuck with me. That was not what I wanted.
Much of the 20th century has provided an answer to Freud’s question. We still want and fight for equal rights. We want those rights on our own terms. We want a social order that is not defined by patriarchy and its enduring and often violent power structures. We want to define how we work, how we play, how we love. We want our bodies for ourselves and we want to share them if and when we feel like it.
The 20th century has seen remarkable progress for women politically, socially and economically. We’ve come a long way, but we have a long way to go.
Female Viagra is not what we want and, I don’t imagine it is what we need either.
First, if it is the silver bullet that is going to kill off the malaise of women’s ebbs of li- bido then it seems astonishingly feeble.
The New Scientist reported that women who took it during the test phase said it made them have sex once more a month. I suppose if you were having no sex at all then that is a 100% increase, but it does not seem like much to me.
The side effects sound especially unpleasant. Headaches, nausea, dizziness and fainting. If it makes you pass out then we are into really dodgy consent territory, I would have thought.
There does seem something off about the medical premise of Flibanserin — if it is medical at all.
Viagra is set up as the norm against which this new drug is measured. But Viagra — the very name a combination of the words virility and aggression — was developed to deal with erectile dysfunction. This is often, although not always, a mechanical problem.
The impotence that is a symptom of some medical conditions and of male ageing can be fixed by increasing blood flow to that unreliable organ to which men attach so much importance.
Viagra can be a helpful solution if it makes everyone calm down. Any woman who has slept with a man over a certain age will know the intense anxiety that the failure to have an erection can cause. Many will also have felt the anxiety as her own, as if she has somehow failed to be pleasing enough.
With women, it works differently. You only have to think of the famous orgasm-faking scene in the movie When Harry Met Sally to know that with women, sex and performance are not all that they seem.
Flibanserin is not dealing with a mechanical problem. That said, the rather startling erections produced by Viagra do not solve the underlying emo- tional problems that beset so many relationships, or so my friends tell me.
The female Viagra is not promising women better sex or more orgasms. It does not promise to make men into more skilled or considerate lovers. The drug works not on the genitals but on the brain, on the release of serotonin and dopamine — those magical substances that make us feel good. It promises something much more vague — that it will solve an apparent lack of female desire. As if that were in and of itself a problem.
It seems to me that, once again, the whole way of being a woman in the world and in bed is being pathologised. That there is something wrong with women because we don’t want to have sex all the time or on demand. That if we only altered ourselves a bit — chemically, in this iteration — all would be well.
As far as my limited fieldwork has shown, women in love and women who feel loved and listened to want to have sex. And they do when they get the chance. Women who are stressed and tired and who feel unloved do not. There is no pill that is going to change that.
Women have sex for a wide range of reasons — for pleasure, for conquest, for revenge, for fun. But from what I know of women, we make love to feel intimate and close to the person with whom we are in bed.
One of the problems with Viagra is that the whole business of the body is reduced to one rather expensively induced erection. It makes sex, to use the feminist term of an earlier era, phallocentric. As if rigidity is all a woman needs. It’s nice, but it isn’t all we want.
It is clear from the results of tests of the female version that fiddling around with brain biochemicals and blood flows doesn’t solve the underlying issues that affect female desire. You don’t need to be a rocket scientist to understand them.
Your partner not sharing the housework and childcare 50-50 can cause vaginal malfunction quicker than you can say Flibanserin. The exhaustion that comes from being a working mother, for one, is not that sexy. Then there’s the date you go on with some guy who spends the whole evening mansplaining your life to you. No matter how many little pink pills you swallow, no normal woman is going to want to sleep with him later.
No pill is going to fix the fear that women who have suffered sexual violence feel.
Sex might be a private activity, but it takes place in a social context and it is done by socialised human beings. Most women are making love in a world that is steeped in misogyny. We live in a world in which women are reduced to being sexual objects, which robs us of our sense of agency and entitlement to having our needs respected and met.
Women must navigate our desire in a world that has told us that we are worth less than men, that we deserve less, that we should ask for less, that our purpose is to serve and to please and to acquiesce and to be quiet. It is also a world that tells women from infancy that their own self-defined sexuality is wrong, that they are sluts if they express desire.
Feminism has changed some of this, but it remains the dominant message put out by a patriarchal culture. It invalidates our assertiveness, our sense of self and our bodily integrity.
Sex is not a performance, Viagra advertisements to the contrary. It is a language of the body; a dialogue of touch, trust and pleasure.
Flibanserin misses the mark. I am sure it will be lucrative — there is an ocean of unhappiness that this product will tap by telling women that they are wrong (again), that if they just took this pill (again) they will be right. This Lover’s Little Helper, to nick from Mick Jagger, is not going to do the trick, though.
It was not tranquillisers that helped women of the ’ 50s and ’60s out of the maddening confines of domesticity, it was feminism and opportunity.
It is not a little pink pill that will help men and women out of the sense of lack and loss so many clearly feel in their intimate relationships.
The cure lies in communication and openness and a redefining of sexual experience that centres on women’s bodies, women’s voices and women’s desires. If you want to know what those are — ask. And listen, because that is what women want. To be heard, to be touched, to be loved, to be equal, to be listened to.
Orford is the author, most recently, of ‘Water Music’
It promises that it will solve an apparent lack of female desire. As if that were in and of itself a problem It seems to me that the whole way of being a woman in the world and in bed is being pathologised
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