Women tell their 'libido' stories

Including 🌶️ NSFW ones—and my own

This is the second installment of a series of essays on libido. The first essay is here. You’ll see a paywall on this one both for privacy and because the research for these essays took many months. It’s hard to place any writing about desire that includes any real structural analysis, much less stories this frank and honest (!). I’ll say more about this in a future essay. For now, if you want to read these stories to better understand your own and/or if you want to support this work precisely because it’s getting harder to tell these stories, upgrade your subscription.

‘Libido’ can mean many different things to people, and people evoke the term to signal and name all sorts of sexual, emotional, social, political, even economic experiences. We are all boiling in a soup, after all, of these forces, and to pretend that our bodies are somehow only affected by biology, or by one or two aspects of the complex world in which we live, is just narrow and unhelpful.

Over many months, I talked to close to fifty women about their perspectives on their own libidos, and about how the concept itself has shown up in their lives. The stories I heard reflected the enormous complexity of what we call “libido.”

But these stories also reveal quite a bit about what we call marriage, motherhood, the postpartum period, domestic labor, aging, heterosexuality, sex, and the body today. As those on the right continue to trying to advance their bro-natal, bro-marriage, bro-sexual agenda, stories like these are all the more important to attend to, for the way they illuminate exactly what is wrong with the world these guys are trying to bring to fruition.

For example, here are just a few of the definitions of “libido” I heard from people—a list so vast it already illustrates some of the bigger issues we dance around by leaning too heavily on this term: