Sexual medicine experts attribute low female desire and arousal to many factors including hormones, aging, blood flow and medications. 

Several campaigns are underway to find the right medication to help restore desire in women and allow them to function sexually at their best. These campaigns are designed to push the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to approve drugs for low desire, although they haven’t yet really shown that they work.

And there may be many good reasons for that. Women’s sexual desire is complex and influenced by so many factors. As a couple’s and sex therapist, it is clear to see how relationship dynamics and power struggles in the marriage, can contribute to sexual withholding and perpetuate discrepancies in sexual desire.

Furthermore, why assume not having desire is the woman’s fault? Maybe how the partner is initiating sex isn’t exactly turning her on. Perhaps she feels taken for granted, or maybe she has some things she would like to try but has been labeled with “low desire” for so long, she doesn’t see her own wanting as legitimate?

Sometimes we need not ask “why don’t I want to have sex?” but rather, what is it that I do want in the relationship, as well as what kind of sex do I want?

This recent article just published by Ellen Laan and Lenore Teifer, emphasizes investigation of the dynamic and contextual components of why some women don’t feel like having sex. Not likely that any pill will fix that.