andyduckerlinks a female aphrodisiac in a can that really works?Women, according to one set of results, feel 'genital warmth, tingling and throbbing', not to mention 'a strong desire to have sex'.
Hmmm... I thought the point was to stop women having 'a strong desire to have sex'? Otherwise civilisation will crumble, and men get tired out.
I suspect the attraction of this spray is to put this 'female desire to have sex' in the control of some guy with a spray, instead of having to work at it by, you know, being nice to her, helping with the housework, and giving her access to contraception, and control over her own destiny.
In fact, surprise, later in the article we read that:
the effects of giving a female rat greater personal control over her sex life are essentially the same as those of giving her (this spray). Autonomy, in other words, is as real an aphrodisiac as any substance known to science. This doesn't surprise Leonore Tiefer, who sees evidence for it every working day, in sex lives that suffer in direct proportion to her clients' ignorance about desire ... and nothing betrays our autonomy like handing over the job to someone else, whether it's your lover, your doctor, or, worst of all, big pharmaceutical companies.
I think Tiefer has it right - sex is scary because our partner's desire is not in our control, and love demands a lot of work, so we are attracted to any simple solution which seems to bypass that work and risk. That's what pornography is too.
Tiefer is dubious about PT-141, which, as she sees it, is merely the latest expression of a 'big wish' that 'we could just bypass everything we want to bypass' on our way to sexual happiness, skipping the complicated, often lifelong work of sorting out all the emotional, physical and autobiographical triggers that turn us off and on. Her prognosis for the discovery of a drug that will render that work unnecessary? 'Sorry, it's never going to happen.'
Prediction - Next year they'll invent a spray to switch 'a strong desire to have sex' off again. That one won't work either.