Does your love life really need help?
It’s the Intrinsa patch, an itsy-bitsy flesh-coloured bandage. The plan is most menopausal and post-menopausal women will soon be enthusiastically slapping Intrinsa Patches on their bellies twice a week.
The Intrinsa patch is a testosterone delivery system for females. Now women can now partake of the defining chemical compound that animates Iberian fighting bulls, Rottweilers and Don Cherry.
My advice? Run, ladies. Run and hide. This is a roller coaster you don’t want to ride.
I speak as an expert. Not on the Intrinsa patch but on testosterone in general. I’ve been mainlining the stuff all my life, and take it from me, it’s poison. Nothing but trouble. As Robin Williams said, “There’s a design flaw in the human male. God gave us a brain and a penis but only enough blood to run one at a time.”
Testosterone decides which command centre gets the blood. And testosterone always aims low.
The big selling pitch for the Intrinsa patch is that it will “normalize” the user’s sex life. By “normalize,” the manufacturers are hinting it will make the user as horny as an 18-year-old sailor on shore leave.
But here’s a news flash: people like you ande aren’t supposed to be as randy as buccaneers. As mature adults, we’ve been there, endured that and earned our reward – namely, freedom from around-the-clock lust.
The whole idea of the testosterone patch for women was kick-started by a U.S. study showing nearly half of all post-menopausal women suffer from HSDD – Hypoactive Sexual Desire Disorder. HSDD is defined as a lack of sexual desire causing personal distress.
And how did the authors of this study divine that nearly half of all women surveyed were “personally distressed” about the state of their sex lives? Globe and Mail columnist Margaret Wente wondered about that too. “So far as I can make out,” wrote Wente, “they seem to have included every woman who ever had a headache.”
Call me cynical, but I hear the distant trill of pharmacy cash registers pinging in three-part harmony. Big Pharma’s advertising honchos are doing what they do best: inducing consumer anxiety where it didn’t exist before – in this case, among mature women. And why not? They made billions doing the same thing to mature men.
When guys hit 50, they…slowed down a little. We didn’t stop having sex; we just stopped obsessing about it. Sometimes we’d even settle for a nap. Or go bowling with the guys instead. Sex didn’t disappear; it just went to live where it belongs. In the rumpus room of life.
Frankly, a lot of us guys felt relieved. We even thought we were happy, now that the Leash of Libido had been loosened. But the pharmaceutical industry pronounced us erectiley dysfunctional. And they had just the little blue pill to fix the problem, available from your local pharmacy. At prices that would bring a blush of shame to the cheeks of a cocaine dealer.
So now we have the thoroughly depressing spectacle of middle-aged guys popping pills that will allow them to re-enter the rut race and pretend they’re not middle-aged at all. Soon to be joined by patch-plastered middle-aged women pretending the same thing.
It’s shuck and jive, folks. We don’t need this stuff. Grandpa and Grandma didn’t suffer from Hypoactive Sexual Desire Disorder or Erectile Dysfunction and neither, I’m betting, do you or I.
Reminds me of a line from a very funny West Coast comedian, Mavis Pickett. Mavis is a rarity among stand-up comedians – a senior citizen. Her on-stage routine is speckled with wry observations about the phenomenon of “getting older.”
“Young people are really concerned about what older people think,” she purrs into the microphone. “Just the other day, my granddaughter asked me: ‘Did you and Grandpa have mutual orgasms?’ And I said, “Well, no dear. We had Metropolitan Life.”
Sounds like good policy to me.