Libido is a myth

Women's lack of desire is not pathological. It’s political.

This is the first installment in a series of essays on the concept of ‘libido’ and the medicalization of desire. These essays evolved from one I wrote for a major publication. That essay was killed in the final stages of editing, so I’ve expanded the work and am including in the series writing that otherwise would have been cut out. In a future essay for paying subscribers, I’ll share more about the challenges of writing feminist criticism in the current media landscape.

Today’s essay is free, and I hope you’ll share it widely so it can reach the larger audience it was intended for. If you want to get the full series and support this work at a time when such support is waning, become a paying subscriber.

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Everyone seems to have libido on the brain. Hardworking people say their libidos have taken a nosedive in response to work stress. Parenting websites feature articles about the effects of pregnancy, breastfeeding, and postpartum on libido. Because I am an aging millennial woman, my social media feed is filled with ads for gummies and pills that promise relief from dips in libido supposedly caused by menopause and aging. Relationship and marital issues these days are also frequently blamed on “mismatched libidos.”

We are meant to understand this cultural conversation as some kind of progress— a move toward a more sexually open and positive culture, in which we can finally talk about the differences in desire that present across our lives and in relationships.

“Low libido” in particular gets lots of airtime on the internet. On TikTok, low libido — defined by one influencer as feeling “numb and dead inside” — is said to be destroying not only lives, but marriages. Not to worry, though. A gaggle of influencers today provide tips and tricks — mostly to straight women, of course — on how to “reverse” or “awaken” low libidos, from exercising, eating whole foods, performing basic self-care, avoiding parabens and phthalates, and taking Maca root.

@sarahgracemeckLow libido can be a sign of hormone imbalances! #hormones #dietitian #health #libido #wellness

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Like all words with high currency in today’s wellness-obsessed landscape, the explosion of libido content points toward a pervasive cultural need— a desire, in and of itself. Although people are overall having less sex, many clearly want some explanation of why, while others are desperately searching for tangible ways to bring more pleasure into their lives.

Libido is a term that helps to wrangle and name the broad sense of desire we all live with, and is a covert way to talk about sex publicly— a subject that still makes many uncomfortable. The notion of libido, therefore, becomes a convenient shorthand for that je ne sai qua that turns one on or shuts one down, for what moves us toward consent or a partner or the bedroom, and for the way one’s attitudes and feelings about sex change over time.

Which means libido signifies different things to different people. While the term ‘libido’ has origins in psychoanalytic theory, it has since found its way squarely into modern consciousness, transforming from a concept that once signaled abstract philosophical ideas like life instinct, psychic energy, and Eros, to a term that now suggests that sexual desire is measurable on some kind of numerical scale, and largely chemical.

Sigmund Freud originally argued that libido was a quantifiable force related to sexual urges, but in his later work, he associated libido with broader theories about pleasure-seeking as motivation for all human behavior. Carl Jung saw libido as a drive on par with thirst and hunger (this has since been contested by many sex experts). He claimed that while libido had no tangible form per se, it could be observed through its symbolic expression—that is, by looking at the broad range of things we want, sexual or otherwise.

Psychoanalytic thinking may have given us one collective good: it helped lessen the religious moralism and biological determinism that dominated conversations about sex prior to the 20^th century. But other problems have lingered.

Many troubled Freudian concepts still hang out in medical dictionaries like the DSM and in the everyday language we use to talk about sex. “If you think about how many times you’ve heard comments about sexually active or non-monogamous women, women that were once termed so-called promiscuous, you might hear some kind of analysis like, oh she’s just craving male attention or she’s obviously seeking a father figure,” sociologist Thea Cacchioni told me. “Those ideas are very Freudian.”

The current embrace of libido is further evidence of that cultural hangover. Today, sex researchers in various disciplines disagree on how exactly to talk about libido while the general public often views any conversation on women’s libidos in particular as a kind of feminist gesture. But it’s a gesture not unlike shooting rich women off into space— it lacks both content and historical awareness.

Most notably, there is a clear through line from the way we talk about “low libido” in women today to earlier theories of feminine frigidity. In the same way that women were once thought frigid if they didn’t enjoy penetrative sex or simply lacked interest in sex with their husbands, the notion of low libido pathologizes women’s reasonable hesitations about — and refusals of — sex and relationships with men today. The very concept of low libido, in other words, ignores the world in which we live and does nothing to advance women’s sense of the erotic, much less an erotic that has as its center a notion of equality and sexual liberation.

More to the point, there is no medical test a doctor can use to measure or assess libido. Many picture libido like an electrical, organic force coursing through the body inexplicably, best kept alive and throbbing, perhaps issuing from our most primal, animal urges. Or maybe you imagine a biological substance or process in its own right, something that can be assessed medically and quantitatively, akin to cholesterol, pulse, or body temperature.

In fact, there is no location in the body where libido resides, no standard or normal amount of libido, and no libidinal scale that measures its volume in the body. Why, then, do we talk about libido as though it can be “high” or “low”?

One reason is that many people believe libido is synonymous with sex hormones. In All Fours, Miranda July’s libidinal 2024 perimenopausal novel, the 45-year-old protagonist panics at the thought of her libido “falling off a cliff” as she approaches menopause. She studies a graph that shows how women’s hormones fluctuate with age, remarking with concern to a friend, “Look how sharply estrogen drops. That’s libido.”

“Isn’t libido sort of a combination of—” the friend says, interrupted before she can finish her question. The joke is that libido is so frequently misunderstood, no one really knows what it is. Maybe it’s just… estrogen? Or some vague cocktail of all the hormones? By the end of the book, the protagonist, now horny as can be, can’t even locate the graph that orginally frightened her so much. We are all too often haunted by vague statistics and studies taken as universal truth, but which have no bearing on our actual lives.

Most of the middle-aged women I know share the belief that women’s libidos plunge or disappear altogether as they age, and that this is a major element of aging with which women have to contend. And, yes, hormonal changes can cause physical changes like vaginal dryness that can decrease sexual enjoyment. But it’s a slippery slope to draw from this conclusions about an overall, inevitable decrease in desire, especially when one considers the many other factors that can influence women’s desire and relationships as they age.

Libido, as we have come to understand it, is a myth. But it’s a myth that persists because it’s highly profitable.

When we talk about libido today, we are nearly always talking about heterosexual women’s “low” libidos, often just a euphemism for women who are no longer interested in having sex with their husbands. Opinions and advice on what to do about libido “loss” skew toward the medical and are usually written for and about straight women. In 2023, the Cleveland Clinic ran an advice piece titled “Low Libido? Ways for Women to Increase Their Sex Drive,” which included frequently referenced methods like medications and therapy.

Since then, low libido has gained high currency in the digital landscape, especially in marketing campaigns for women’s sex drugs (which have been hotly contested by feminists as treatments for made-up diseases, and which I’ll say more about in a future essay), but also ads for therapy programs, coaching services, viral supplements, even couples counseling.

In part, the digital popularity of a term like libido comes from the ease with which the word moves on social media platforms that censor and downgrade words like “sex” (who actually wants to read anything about “seggs”?). But the effect has been that companies and influencers hawk homeopathic and pharmaceutical treatments that claim to improve not just libido, but entire sex lives, even relationships.

While the stories we tell about libido today are almost always couched in medical and biological certainty, most issues attributed to low libido actually arise from the social scripts, gendered inequality, and economic concerns that shape our sex lives just as much as factors like aging and hormones, if not more.

We compare what and how we want to popular culture; we conform to or repress our desires based on ideology and dogged moralism; we are stressed and strapped for the time it takes to find real pleasure in our lives because we are overworked, underpaid, and feeling stuck in a rat race of professional and personal and relationship optimization that de-prioritizes real eroticism, creativity, and connection. All of this without even touching how compulsory norms of gender and sexuality shape sex.

So, yes, there are indeed biological and physical factors to sexual enjoyment and satisfaction, which can affect sexual interest and our willingness to have or want certain types of sex. But the notion that all straight women are suffering from some socially and politically contextless sex disease is threatening to overtake mainstream conversations about relationships and sexual “health.”

The medical framework we’ve applied to sex is also creating its own system of suffering. In her book, Big Pharma, Women, and the Labour of Love, Cacchioni argues that the sexual wellness industry has created a whole new category of work for women. In her interviews with subjects, Cacchioni found that women who identified as having sexual problems absorbed the same basic messages from a variety of cultural sources.

“Whether they were medical or holistic or from influencer culture, or wherever they came from, they were calling upon women to change and discipline their bodies and their minds toward the standards of sexual desire, arousal, and orgasm, rather than changing or rethinking the standards themselves,” she said. Women in her study also felt they were expected to attain a kind of mastery over their sexual lives.

“The idea that men would have any role in this in heterosexual relationships was really just not talked about, other than that they felt pressure from their male partners. But there wasn’t a big expectation that men should change what they were doing.” Queer women, she found, put less pressure on themselves.

As the gains of the sexual revolution have been absorbed by medical consumerism, even potentially enjoyable sexual activities like reading books about sex, talking with a partner, watching porn, and using sex toys — believed by many experts to be the most effective answers to lost desire — are now increasingly associated with getting one’s sex life right. “We got rid of one problem — this lack of recognition of women’s sexuality — and we’ve created potentially a new one, which is this culture of compulsory sexuality, the idea that you’re supposed to be sexual at all times,” Cacchioni said.

Dr. Jessica Hille, a gender and sexuality scholar who studies asexuality, thinks viewing sex as a medical or wellness issue also suggests that people are only normal if they constantly crave sex. “Having low desire or attraction shouldn’t be treated as a disorder,” Hille says.

Even those who study the brain are skeptical of an overemphasis on the biomedical aspects of what we call libido. Nan Wise, a neuroscientist and sex therapist, has conducted numerous studies on women’s brains during orgasm. Wise has found that the stories women tell themselves, even when they are alone in a brain scan, have profound effects on sexual experience and pleasure.

When it comes to aging, the belief that one’s libido will inevitably fall off a cliff can also quickly become a self-fulfilling prophecy. “The mind is the most important sex organ,” Wise says, and the power of belief to either destroy or nurture pleasure is incredibly strong. “If you believe that you are going to be no longer a sexual person, or no longer valued as a sexual person, because you are no longer menstruating, the belief becomes biology.”

Looking too narrowly at one’s sex life can similarly exacerbate the problem. In her research, Cacchioni has found that women in heterosexual relationships tend to blame themselves for their unsatisfying sex lives and are prone to absorbing messages — whether from doctors, from partners, or online — about how much sex they should be having and the kind of sex they should enjoy. This often leads to women forcing themselves into more sex they don’t like, rather than discovering what they do like.

Libido products and services may be framed as sexually empowering, as a path toward better sex, even as self-care, but above and beyond the rampant consumerism of it all, they reinforce damaging and misleading ideas about what it takes to find pleasure in one’s life, and about women as inherently broken people ever-teetering on the edge of sexual dysfunction.

Sex therapists see such systems of belief play out frequently in their practices, as women pick up the message that any lapse in desire is a sexual problem they must solve and begin to think there is something medically wrong with them.

Wise has seen this cycle show up in her practice many times. Patients who complain of low libido, she has found, are picking up these ideas from the culture and dealing with pressure from partners to have more sex. “When I think about the people who come to me, mostly women who are thinking they don’t have enough of that active sexual desire, it’s usually because they are being told by a partner you don’t want to have sex enough,” Wise says.

“Women are trying to pacify their partners because they are feeling their partners are disappointed and unhappy with them, which creates more stress,” she says. The demanding attitude from male partners only further saps desire. “Being demanding of sex is not a turn-on, being told there’s something wrong with you is not a turn-on.”

As discussion crops up around partners with “mismatched libidos,” we miss more complex questions about how cultural practices like monogamy and marriage dampen desire, and most glaringly, about the inequality baked into traditional heterosexuality. The current dating scene is also fraught, and any cursory glance at the state of American politics and culture today explains why Americans are having less sex overall and more women are choosing to remain single.

In era of strained gender relations, as well as increasing misogyny, is it really any surprise that straight women might not be turned on by the men in their lives? As I’ll explain in a future essay, what we talk about when we talk about libido is desire. And desire is not only personal, social, psychological, and biological, it’s shaped by politics and culture.

Desire is also, to some degree, always going to feel unruly, nebulous, even overwhelming. Smoothing confounding sexual questions, complaints, and yearnings into a medical framework can make our bodies — and relationships — feel more manageable, perhaps even controllable. But the stakes of simplifying desire in this way are high.

Without a medicalizing framework, and without clear solutions to complex questions about what we want and don’t want, sexuality becomes harder to capture, pathologize, sort, and treat. And that’s not a bad thing.