Camille Paglia Overthinks Loss of Libido as We Age

First there was Viagra, a medicine to help men who had a physical problem being sexual, for example due to prostate maladies.  (Remember those awful Bob Dole ads?) But very quickly, the proper therapeutic use of the medicine mutated into something else—using the drug to create hyper sex drives in the young, and to make 60 something men feel as if they were 18.  That is to say, it became an enhancement chemical.

Some think that is unfair to women, that they too deserve a drug to make them friskier in their middle and later years.  So far, no go.  Camille Paglia opines about this in the NYT, and blames middle class morality for the supposed loss of sex drive in the country.  From her column, “No Sex Please: We’re Middle Class:”

The implication is that a new pill, despite its unforeseen side effects, is necessary to cure the sexual malaise that appears to have sunk over the country. But to what extent do these complaints about sexual apathy reflect a medical reality, and how much do they actually emanate from the anxious, overachieving, white upper middle class?

In the 1950s, female “frigidity” was attributed to social conformism and religious puritanism. But since the sexual revolution of the 1960s, American society has become increasingly secular, with a media environment drenched in sex. The real culprit, originating in the 19th century, is bourgeois propriety. As respectability became the central middle-class value, censorship and repression became the norm...

Pharmaceutical companies will never find the holy grail of a female Viagra — not in this culture driven and drained by middle-class values. Inhibitions are stubbornly internal. And lust is too fiery to be left to the pharmacist.

Please.  This is way over thought and a throwback to 1960s nonsense about repression and hang ups.  Aging people have less sex because of biology.  Our sex drives normally ebb as we age, allowing us to gain better control over our urges rather than the other way around.

That’s not in any way unhealthy (although absence of all sexual desire can certainly indicate a problem).  It’s simply part of life.  Indeed, I think we do middle age and older men and women a distinct disservice trying to convince them—us, I’m 61—that we are somehow inadequate if our hormones don’t froth as they did during our teenage and early adult years. In fact, it seems rather pathetic to me when someone who has moved past the urgency of a high sex drive wants to use chemicals (or porn) to get it back (as opposed, again, to using it therapeutically).  It’s a form of transhumanism-light that says normal humanity isn’t good enough and that there’s something wrong with getting old.