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Not this year, dear | page 1, 2
I was wracked with shame and guilt. "Even that can't turn me on," I'd
lament after each attempted recipe for lust. We saw a big-shot sex therapist but were helped neither by the
psychoanalytic explanations (e.g., a dominating mother) nor the exercises
(20 minutes of non-genital touching with and without peacock feathers). The
therapy's main positive effect was that as soon as we'd leave the
therapist's office we'd laugh at his beside-the-point nostrums. His
$115- More recently, I've searched the Net's most powerful metasearch engines on
such terms as "low libido, "low sex drive" and the official term for my
disorder, "hypoactive sexual desire disorder." But I find only the
aforementioned advice or advertisements for "aphrodisiacs," none of which
have good data supporting their effectiveness and safety. Bernie
Zilbergeld, sex therapist and author of "The New Male
Sexuality" (Revised edition, Crown, 1999), concurs. "Unfortunately, there is
no Viagra for low sex drive," he says. Viagra may give you an erection but it
doesn't create the desire to use it. I thought that maybe our problem was sexual incompatibility, and that with
the right woman, things would be different. So I had affairs, but after a
short time with each woman, I found my lust for her waning even more
quickly than it had with my wife, so I resumed monogamy. Now, except for
that get-together with my wife once in a very blue moon, I'm celibate. I suspect that even if Heather
Locklear stood three inches in front of me in a lace negligee, nothing
would stir inside of me. Also Today Dear Mr. Blue: Healthy urges
I know what you're thinking and no, I'm not gay. While intellectually, I respect the rights of people to sleep with whomever they please, the thought of getting busy with a man doesn't appeal to me in the least. I do like women -- especially my wife. I even love them. But not in such a way that when faced with the possibility of our bodies merging in a love-drunken tangle, no lust rises within me. The confounding thing is that there's nothing wrong with my plumbing. I've been cardiovascularly and neurologically checked out, I still play full-court basketball and can masturbate quite well, thank you. (Although such self-pleasuring always includes fantasies of women, it never translates to an urge to make love with real women. The work of turning a woman on usually is enough to dissipate what little lust had been aroused.) Even so, I was tempted to try Viagra until my friend complained that it made his head throb more than his penis. And I knew that Viagra was really beside the point -- even if it could give me a hard-on, it wouldn't alter my abiding sense of apathy to the act of making love. Apfelbaum, of the sex therapy group, says many of his male clients exhibit a similar indifference. "Why bother with a half-hour warming up my wife and worrying about whether I'll be able to perform, when I can masturbate with no pressure in front of some babe on my computer screen?" he asks in characterizing their logic. This may sound like performance anxiety is creating low-sex drive, but for me at least it's the reverse. My lack of enthusiasm creates bad performance, which, of course, makes me terribly self-conscious. Nor does anything psychological inhibit me from enjoying sex. As an atheist, there are no religious strictures tugging at my unconscious. And so far as I know, I have no sexual trauma buried in my childhood despite a good shrink's efforts to unearth one. Is the problem that my wife and I have simply grown stale? Or that my wife has some particularly unsettling sexual predilections? No on both counts. My wife, if I give her half a chance, is a good lover. And our marriage, outside of bed, is better than most. After 25 years together, we still would rather hang out with each other than with anyone else. Yet I have more interest in anything than in sex -- I'd rather clean out the basement than make love. After years of contemplating my libido, I'm absolutely convinced that my problem is physiological: I simply have a low sex drive. And until I started to do the research for this article, it felt completely hopeless. Apfelbaum suggests that the best solution is to "accept it." If you feel you're not going to be an ace performer (strong sexual urges, erections and orgasms), you should trust your instinct and redefine sex as primarily cuddling and closeness. He advises his clients to admit to their partners that they don't get turned on anymore and acknowledge any feelings of guilt and anxiety. Apfelbaum has found that the partner will often respond with acceptance of a sensual life in which cuddling and touching are ends in themselves. And with the pressure off, some couples even find that their desire to "do it" increases. Unfortunately, that prescription was virtually the same as our sex therapist gave us 20 years ago. Yeah, we accepted the lack of sexuality, but it didn't motivate us to cuddle. It motivated us to spend our recreational time reading novels and watching TV. Indeed, sex therapy fails for plenty of people with low-sex desire. Zilbergeld says that what Masters & Johnson found 20 years ago is still true today: Low sexual desire has the lowest cure rate of all sexual dysfunctions. But there is a ray of hope. Of late, molecular medicine has made truly extraordinary progress; for example, scientists have recently found a gene that when inserted into mice, increases their intelligence. If medical science can do that, I'm hoping they can find a molecular aphrodisiac to awaken me. In fact, scientists are optimistic about that very thing. Zilbergeld says, "What they're doing with physiological research is incredible. I wouldn't be surprised if there's something on the market in the next 10-15 years that will light people's fires." Dr. James Fallon, professor of anatomy and neurobiology at the University of California, Irvine, is more specific. He predicts that within 10 years, we'll have a hormone cocktail that will increase sexual ardor. "We're very close. And that's not just happy talk ... We're like giddy kids at the possibility." Me too.
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