The real threat to heterosexual monogamy? Female boredom in the bedroom, says Lindy West at Jezebel. Well, "what if you could take a pill and fix your broken relationship?" Daniel Bergner's article in this week's New York Times Magazine about the ongoing search for a "female Viagra" — a pill to boost a woman's desire — has some fascinating new research suggesting that women's "libidos wane much more rapidly and drastically than men's." That's a problem for long-term relationships, and it's not a function of biology — "Bergner's reading of the body of research on women's libidos points to a much different conclusion: Boredom." That means we either open up marriage, live in sexless misery, or rev up the female eros. An excerpt:
So what do you do? What do you do if you're a gal who thinks cultural conditioning is bullshit but you feel biologically monogamous and then suddenly you find yourself avoiding sex a decade into your relationship with your awesome husband or wife or partner but the only thing worse than bed-death, to you, is the idea of bringing other people into that bed? Well, that's where lady Viagra — the magic pill — would come in. Lybrido and Lybridos, the drugs profiled in Bergner's article, haven't seen much measurable success yet. But they could be just the workaround that some couples need to save their monogamous relationships — or, to allow monogamy and longterm sexual satisfaction to coexist for couples grappling with HSDD [hypoactive sexual-desire disorder].
