Do Women Enjoy Chocolate More Than Sex?

Joan Sewell would rather eat chocolate than have sex according to her new book I'd Rather Eat Chocolate: Learning to Love My Low Libido. The book, hailed as revolutionary and groundbreaking, brave and even brilliant, is an autobiographical cruise through Sewell's attempts to fix her sexual ennui and come to a compromise with Kip, her much hornier hubby who wants sex at least three times a month.

Sewell tries therapy, sexy lingerie and chocolate-based lubes. She tunes into Oprah and reads glossy magazine tutorials and books that support the notion that men and women are from different planets. All to no avail. Eventually Joan and Kip reach a resolution of sorts: sex is a "slog" for her, so Kip will have to make do with the occasional strip show or hand job. She says her much lower libido is "within the normal curve for a woman" due largely to biological gender differences. Yet Sewell ignores a fascinating, growing pile of modern scientific studies disputing the often-repeated stats about a gender libido gap, and the traditional theory that biology drives sexuality, which some researchers claim pathologizes women's sexuality.

The media binge over this slim work of 1950s-style confection is similarly biased towards the superficial sugar-spice model. The Atlantic Monthly dedicated a lot of ink to the topic in its February issue, including an interview with Sewell sporting the headline: "the politically incorrect reality that most married women just aren't that into sex." The National Post also interviewed Sewell, who continued to flog the notion that when women are compared to women, "our libidos are not that low, they are pretty much in a normal range. But are they much lower than men's? Yes."

Writer Dan Savage jumped into the fray with a recent syndicated column, repeating Sewell's claim that women have "naturally lower sex drives" thanks to hormonal and biological differences. "There's no such thing as a woman who wants sex constantly. They don't exist -- never did," writes Savage who cheekily relinquishes heterosexual men from the tyranny of housework, childcare and talking to their partners because "she still won't want to fuck you." The column generated so many letters from women who like sex that he continued the discussion the following week and started a "lusty ladies" link.

Sex on the brain

The debate about how to define healthy or "normal" libido has been heating up over the past decade as doctors, neuroscientists, sociologists, pollsters and pharmaceutical companies gather data, study brains and genitals during orgasm and poll citizens about their lives between the sheets. One often-repeated statistic, based on a 1999 U.S. study, found that approximately 40 per cent of women experience sexual problems. Yet, as some researchers have pointed out, the lead author of the study was a consultant for Pfizer, the makers of Viagra. A more recent Yale study found that almost half of the 56 women studied who had experienced "female sexual dysfunction," (FSD) "had decreased sensation in the clitoris." The researchers underlined "the possibility of a neurological cause for the dysfunction."

It might seem like a no-brainer that decreased genital sensations will adversely affect sexual functioning, but sexuality is a very complex and nuanced thing indeed. Might it not be a huge (profit-driven) leap to say the cause is primarily neurologically based? A group of scientists, doctors and health advocates think so, and have banded together to publish an educational website with a manifesto calling FSD "a new medical myth" and challenging sexual "disease-mongering" promoted in the Diagnostic Statistical Manual of Disorders (DSM), known as the psychiatric bible.

The current DSM (DSM-IV) is an ever-expanding doorstopper of a clinical book used to diagnose and codify psychiatric "disorders" ranging from childhood "oppositional defiant disorder" to "anxiety disorder not otherwise specified." "Female sexual disorders" include "hypoactive sexual desire disorder," defined by a "persistently or recurrently deficient (or absent) sexual fantasies and desire for sexual activity"; and "female sexual arousal disorder": a "persistent or recurrent inability to attain, or to maintain until completion of the sexual activity, an adequate lubrication-swelling response of sexual excitement."