Not feeling the heat? Pop a pill, baby.

Satsya said:

It's been implied all throughout the thread, at least the way I've interpreted it.

Basically:

1) discourage stigmas against low (and high) sex drives.

2) discourage the cultures teaching women they should place men's wants above their self-respect.

Goal: an environment where woman can take this pill if they want, but don't feel pressured to against their will.

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that too

Satsya said:

It's been implied all throughout the thread, at least the way I've interpreted it.

Basically:

1) discourage stigmas against low (and high) sex drives.

2) discourage the cultures teaching women they should place men's wants above their self-respect.

Goal: an environment where women can take this pill if they want, but don't feel pressured to against their will.

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And one of the good ways to do both of those things is to keep having discussions like these, I think.

Kuwisdelu, I understand your frustration. It feels like navel-gazing sometimes, but I think some level of repetition is unavoidable with these issues. Even if we're just working through the umpteenth iteration of the same principle, at least we're reinforcing ideas and addressing new details. Frustrating, yes, but I don't think it's pointless.

Captcha said:

And one of the good ways to do both of those things is to keep having discussions like these, I think.

Kuwisdelu, I understand your frustration. It feels like navel-gazing sometimes, but I think some level of repetition is unavoidable with these issues. Even if we're just working through the umpteenth iteration of the same principle, at least we're reinforcing ideas and addressing new details. Frustrating, yes, but I don't think it's pointless.

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I agree it's important to have discussions about these issues, but AW is so cool and mature it feels like preaching to the choir here. Maybe there are indeed some here who find it helpful.

This is why I sometimes take a Devil's advocate position just to get some interesting discussion going.

kuwisdelu said:

But that doesn't actually mean anything in terms of action.

We all here basically agree if it's such a vague abstraction, just as pretty much everything will agree with "stop violence in Africa". It's the specifics that actually matter.

How do we do that?

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How we do it is through conversation and media, teaching kids, teens, adults... well, what I just said above. Anything more specific than that will vary person to person. Whether someone chooses to work via book message or school lecture, for instance.

It really is mostly preaching to the choir here, but outside the forums, a lot can be done by encouraging these viewpoints.

Random thoughts:

A pill that makes someone desire something they previously didn't want is super sketchy to me. But the description in the OP of "throbbing" and wanting to have sex after you finished having sex makes me wonder whether it doesn't just lead to another type of dissatisfaction.

Someone brought up MDMA upthread. You can definitely use it to increase sex drive, but if you're taking pure MDMA you are very unlikely to climax. I had a friend who worked as an escort. She used to have a client that would take MDMA (she would take it too) and then they'd spend 3 days having sex (she made a killing, obviously). Almost non-stop. I'm realizing this probably sounds ridiculous, but it's true. Anyway sex with no climax for three days must be like scratching but never actually reaching the itch (so maddening?)

One interesting thing is that obviously any pill that increases desire is only temporary. So when it wears off, you still might not want to. Only in retrospect.

Anyway I recall reading that the majority of women who experience decreased libido still enjoy sex once it begins. So what they need is that initial spark. This could obviously be that. And lots of other things. I don't think the coercive angle is that far fetched. Obviously it's possible to be raped by someone you regularily enjoy sex with and therefore are sexually attracted to. And we can acknowledge that in this scenario, it would be wrong for one partner to physically force the other, right? We can also acknowledge that it would be wrong to drug them so that they couldn't physically resist. The question is how many steps are there between drugging someone so they can't physically resist and drugging someone so that they wouldn't want to. I'd still call it rape.

Not that I think that's an argument against the pill.

Anyway, sometimes it's depressing that there are so many interesting experiences in life and yet we devote all of this time and money an effort to making our genitals tingle.

/rambling

^What she said.

The last time I had sex on X, I was immersed in imagery of swimming with dolphins, and I was like oh, oh, the dolphins! I'm swimming with them! And my boyfriend was like, oh, oh yeah, cool, right on! Dolphins!

missesdash said:

but if you're taking pure MDMA you are very unlikely to climax

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That's not exactly correct because the street dose is typically 10-100 x the prescription dose and typically has been cut with psychotropics and antidepressants which can interfere with orgasm. It was only when it was being abused and then sold illegally where it got cut with other things that there were significant issues.

I took care of a guy with priapism from his cocaine. Technically it wasn't the cocaine which normally would be protective with regards to priapism. It had been cut with a lot of antipsychotics. There's just no product purity on the black market.

Equating black market ecstacy with prescription is like equating a quart of moonshine with a glass of wine

There's a really good documentary on this very subject called Orgasm, Inc. If you have Netflix, they have it both by mail and on their streaming service right now.

Website: http://orgasminc.org/

Here's the trailer:

www.youtube.com/watch?v=TUY-iTf2T1A

missesdash said:

Anyway I recall reading that the majority of women who experience decreased libido still enjoy sex once it begins. So what they need is that initial spark. This could obviously be that.

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Yeah, my ex said the same thing, but we were never really able to figure out how to turn that observation into actually having more sex, for reasons as you stated, the transition feeling far too rapey. If this could change that for women who want it, that would be great.

GeorgeK said:

That's not exactly correct because the street dose is typically 10-100 x the prescription dose and typically has been cut with psychotropics and antidepressants which can interfere with orgasm. It was only when it was being abused and then sold illegally where it got cut with other things that there were significant issues.

I took care of a guy with priapism from his cocaine. Technically it wasn't the cocaine which normally would be protective with regards to priapism. It had been cut with a lot of antipsychotics. There's just no product purity on the black market.

Equating black market ecstacy with prescription is like equating a quart of moonshine with a glass of wine

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Eh, but I'm not really talking about "ecstasy." I'm talking about Methylenedioxymethamphetamine. From what I understand it does interfere with orgasm and sexual performance.

I think what complicates this is that there are a few issues that are often concurring:

1. People receive messages from society, friends, or sexual partners that they "should" be able to perform in a certain way, or feel a certain way about sex. These messages can be shaming both to people with low and high sex drives, and there are a lot of biases and assumptions about how men and women relate to sex. For example, the idea that women are more interested in sex if it's part of a loving relationship, or are less interested in having sex to achieve orgasm.

2. The ways female-bodied people enjoy sex aren't always obvious considering sex education in the U.S. often isn't very comprehensive and there's a lot of focus on intercourse at the exclusion of other kinds of sex. I think there's an expectation that intercourse will be pleasurable. But not all female-bodied people enjoy vaginal penetration, or can enjoy sex with just that. Historically, there hasn't been much encouragement for women to experiment.

3. Some people know their bodies and want to have sex more than they do, but honestly can't get their bodies to cooperate. This is when drugs might be helpful for some people. And the first two issues don't mean that this issue doesn't exist at all. Wanting to do something doesn't always mean that you feel like you can, or that your body is on the same page with you.

There was some comparison to wanting to write, and yeah, actually, there are a lot of times when I want to write but have trouble focusing.

kuwisdelu said:

Monitoring by whom?

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By Big Brother Who Knows What's Best For Us.

Or, you know, by consumers and rights activists and people who educate others about civil rights (our own and other people's).

Seriously, Kuwis?

muravyets said:

By Big Brother Who Knows What's Best For Us.

Or, you know, by consumers and rights activists and people who educate others about civil rights (our own and other people's).

Seriously, Kuwis?

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You don't think it was a worthwhile and legitimate question?

I have no idea what this has to do with civil rights, either.

Captcha said:

But do you WANT to want to write? If someone else doesn't want to write, should they take a drug in order to want to?

I'm probably getting carried away with this, but... Writing is probably a source of satisfaction and pleasure to most of the people on this board, but there are other people who are leading rich, meaningful lives with no interest whatsoever in writing. If those people lived in world filled with writers, in which writing was a hugely popular subject of conversation, in which people were expected to form life-long writing partnerships, in which they were bombarded by images of writing at every turn... might these people, who are happy and healthy in our world, not feel as if they were unhappy and unhealthy in a different setting? If they chose to take a drug that would make them want to write... would it be because they truly wanted to?

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I agree.

Or to use another analogy, how about people who are gay in a world where the majority are hetero, where society expects people to form lasting hetero relationships, conform to a certain image of family lifestyle, where they are bombarded at every turn with social reinforcement of those ideas, and where feeling differently and wanting a different kind of life is considered abnormal? How would gay people have felt about themselves, say, all through the first two-thirds of the 20th century, for example?

Or how about women who didn't want to marry and have children with just one man for their whole adult life, but preferred to work at a career and live out their sexuality as they pleased?

Hell, we could look at many alternative lifestyle choices from within the lifespans of every poster on AW, even the young'uns, for examples of the social pressure to conform to expectations, and the lengths to which some people will go so they can fit in and find acceptance.

We can also find examples of the lengths to which some people will go to make others conform to their expectations.

GeorgeK said:

No, the first rule about population statistics is that they are meaningless with regard to individuals

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That applies to the rules of marketing, too. Hence my concern that pharma companies with a drug to sell really don't care whether their product is only good for a narrow set of conditions. If it can profitably be sold to a wider market by just tweaking people's anxieties about themselves, they'll do it. Who care what the needs of the individual fish are? Getting the school to move as desired is how the money gets made.

Satsya said:

It's been implied all throughout the thread, at least the way I've interpreted it.

Basically:

1) discourage stigmas against low (and high) sex drives.

2) discourage the cultures teaching women they should place men's wants above their self-respect.

Goal: an environment where women can take this pill if they want, but don't feel pressured to against their will.

Click to expand...

This ^^ !

And I'd add some nice media watchdogs (Media Matters, the Ad Council, whatever association the pharmacists have, maybe) to blow the whistle on the manufacturers if they start marketing this thing, or on medical providers if it starts getting prescribed, in a pressuring manner that exploits negative attitudes about women and sex.

kuwisdelu said:

You don't think it was a worthwhile and legitimate question?

I have no idea what this has to do with civil rights, either.

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No, I don't think it was a legitimate question because it ignored almost the entirety of my argument and because the answer is so obvious that I perceive the question as little more than bait for yet another derailment.

And what it has to do with civil rights is the same thing that gay rights have to do with civil rights and protection against spousal abuse has to do with civil rights, etc. It's about society recognizing people's rights to be themselves and live their lives. Women have the right to control their own sex lives, and that includes the right to say yes and the right to say no. Western society has consistently, historically and to this very day, pushed against the idea of women having the right to control their sexuality the same as men do. A huge part of the movement for women's rights has been to gain wide social acceptance for women as owners of their sex and their bodies with full rights and powers of self-determination. This struggle is ongoing. The attitude that treats women's behaviors as somehow dysfunctional is part of the problem.

Not being labeled as abnormal or in need of medication just for being different from others or for not conforming to others' expectations is an important advancement for any group in the struggle for social equality and protection of civil rights.

I stated this explicitly in my original post.

missesdash said:

Eh, but I'm not really talking about "ecstasy." I'm talking about Methylenedioxymethamphetamine. From what I understand it does interfere with orgasm and sexual performance.

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I'm talking about proper dosing by prescription. When people take 1-2 orders of magnitude higher dosing receptors get flooded, metabolites build up and virtually anything can do anything. Do an experiment. Next time before having sex, drink 8 oz water and see if that interferes with any aspect of sex and the time after that drink 800 ounces of water prior and see if that makes a difference.