What Women (Still) Want

Over the course of their lives, many women experience a loss of sexual desire. Where is their little blue pill?

- SARAH BARMAK

GENERATION X and older millennials came of age in the 1990s and early 2000s, a time of ecstasy, Lil’ Kim, Sex and the City, and sex-positive feminism. It was not an era free of misogyny, but still, there was a sense that sex was something women enjoyed, not simply endured or navigated. They are arguably the first North American cohort to be steeped from puberty onward in a culture that allowed for the idea that women might be entitled to, and entitled to be public about, their own sexuality.

These women are also the first to reach maturity in the age of Viagra, which initiated a cultural revolution when it first hit the market, in 1998. Former presidential candidate Bob Dole went on TV and made it okay to talk about impotence — which had been given a new, less stigmatizing name: “erectile dysfunction.” Sales of Viagra (sildenafil citrate) hit nearly $2 billion (US) annually by 2008. Viagra normalized both public discussion of sexual function in old age and the idea that medical science could provide a lifetime of satisfying sex.

Now, Gen X women are in or approaching menopause, with all its attendant complications — which, for many, includes the loss of the sexual desire and arousal they have always taken for granted. They are also starting to be more vocal about the toll that vanishing sex drives and medical indifference are taking — and to demand better. The force of these demands, and growing interest in the field from medical researchers, many of whom are themselves women of this generation, is spurring a new and far more nuanced understanding of sexuality and of what may be happening when desire goes missing.