When Women Lose Their Sexual Desire

This morning everybody is whispering about Daniel Bergner's Sunday Times Magazine article: "Women Who Want to Want." Link here.

According to Bergner: "Studies suggest that around 30% of young and middle-aged women go through extended periods of feeling dim desire-- or feeling no wish for sex whatsoever."

He continues: "More than any other sexual problem-- the elusiveness of orgasm, say, or pain during sex-- women feel plagued by low desire."

This is not a new phenomenon. I recall the Times writing about this years ago. While I am far from confident that we should just accept the number 30% uncritically, clearly something is going on.

Bregner approaches the problem as a clinical phenomenon. Appropriately so. For my part I want to place the problem within a cultural context. For several decades now female sexuality has been a major front in the culture wars.

Beginning in the late 60s counterculture thinkers decided that the capitalist patriarchy had been built at the expense of female sexual desire and its satisfaction.

Where Freud had opined that civilization had advanced at the expense of human sexual desire, countercultural thinkers, especially feminists, narrowed the scope the declared that women's sexual freedom had been stifled by the male will-to-power.

Some thinkers even declared that the greatest threat to the patriarchy was the female orgasm and that women could lead a revolution to overthrow the capitalist order by having more and better orgasms.

It sounds quaint; it might even sound exaggerated; but in the nether regions of advanced theoretical thinking these were commonly accepted precepts.

While women's liberation had everything to do with job opportunities and careers, it also promised to free female sexuality from the shackles of male-dominant cultural mores.

How would this be done? Primarily by eliminating the risk of conception from the female sexual calculus. The birth control pill, a product of the early 60s, contributed to the cause, as did Roe v. Wade in the early 70s.

And, feminists worked overtime to remove the association of feminine sexuality with modesty and mystery. Open and honest were their bywords. A woman who hid her sexuality behind a veil or who did not allow it its fullest expression was denounced for being ashamed of her body.

In an important cultural transformation, virginity and prudery became stigmatized while sexual freedom became a sign of mental and emotional health.

Surely, this had an impact. Women learned how to enjoy their sexuality more freely. They started having sex more often, when and where they wished, with whom they wished, by and large suffering no greater consequences than men suffered when they abandoned themselves to sexual wantonness.

Eventually, a culture of hook-ups, booty calls, girls gone wild, and the New York Magazine "Sex Diaries" was born. For some of my recent thoughts, see this post.

Women became sexually liberated in ways their mothers would never have imagined. Truth be told, their liberation seemed more often to horrify their mothers than the patriarchs.

We should, of course, question the value of making male sexual behavior the gold standard for human sexual freedom. And we should ask whether this caricature of male sexual behavior is more fiction than truth. And we should also ask whether it makes any sense to say that male and female sexuality should ever be the same, or even roughly equivalent.

Finally, we should question the early feminist notion that human sexual experience was about exploitation and repression. Given the radical leftist provenance of advanced feminist theory it is not surprising that exploitation and repression should have been the predicates of choice.

Unfortunately, when you cloak human sexuality in notions about exploitation and oppression you make men and women into enemies, not partners. For men this might be arousing; for women it often kills desire.

But why are we surprised that so many women feel so little sexual desire? Didn't the cultural revolution, mixed with the feminist revolution, wring the femaleness out of female sexual experience.

If you remove fertility from the equation, you also remove notions of emotional connection and attachment. And you remove the extremely important role of relationships in female sexual desire.

Could it be that these cultural transformations ultimately only served to unsex women, to repress female sexual desire?

After all, human sexuality does not exist in a vacuum; it is not a self-contained entity. Sometimes male sexuality seems to function in total disregard of relationships, but female sexuality almost never does. Or, it almost never should.

Most of Bregner's article addresses the efforts of clinicians like Lori Brotto to treat women who have lost their sexual desire. There is good and bad in her technique.

By combining cognitive therapy with Buddhist-inspired mindfulness she has trained women to become sensitized to their sexual arousal. At the least, this seems to be promising.

And yet, when you treat the woman in isolation, and when your technique involves her mind in isolation from her relationships, you also become part of the problem.

We have to await the end of Bergner's article to escape the hyperclinical approach that takes a woman's problem with sexual desire to be hers and hers alone. Bregner says: "What if the lack of excitement is due to a partner's ineptitude? What if it is caused by a lover's emotional disconnection? ... Is it the patient who has the condition, or the partner, or the couple?"

To that I would add: What if the lack if excitement is due to past sexual traumas, whether sexual abuse or unwise hook-ups?

In all of the hullabaloo over orgasms we lost sight of the simple fact that for a woman to trust a partner sufficiently to desire him she needs to be able to respect herself. If that self-respect is eroded through a pattern of poor choices, she will have far more difficulty experiencing sexual desire. If she has given away her intimacy indiscriminately she might find it difficult to trust any man.

In other terms, if you do not respect your sexuality it is not going to respect you. And if does not respect you it is not going to stay around for very long.

Obama and the Wages of Guilt

This morning Hopkins Professor Fouad Ajami offers a sobering assessment of the Obama foreign policy "reset." Link here.

In his words: "Steeped in an overarching idea of American guilt, Mr. Obama and his lieutenants offered nothing less than a doctrine, and a policy of American penance. No one told Mr. Obama that [in] the Islamic world, where American power is engaged and so dangerously exposed, it is considered bad form, nay a great moral lapse, to speak ill of one's own tribe when in the midst, and in the lands, of others."

And also: "The crowd may have applauded the cavalier way the new steward of American power referred to his predecessor, but in the privacy of their own language they doubtless wondered about his character and his fidelity."

What does this tell us?

For decades now psychotherapy has been trying to replace traditional American shame culture with a culture based on guilt. Thus, it has worked tirelessly to transform our culture and our values so that our lives in community could become a permanent experience of psychotherapy.

It has been difficult to evaluate the clinical effectiveness of guilt-based therapies because it is nearly impossible to eliminate all extraneous factors from the equation, to discover whether good or bad effects in the patient were the result of therapy or something outside of therapy.

Thus, it has taken over a hundred years for people to have concluded that, by-and-large, therapy that attempts to rewrite your life history as a guilt narrative-- with crimes, guilt, penance, punishment, and redemption-- does not work.

And, I would contend, it has never really worked. Thus the need to inject a guilt narrative into the culture at large, to make the world safe for those who been acculturated in guilt by their therapists.

Be all that as it may, it is relevant to examine what happens when the guilt narrative comes out of the shadows and tries to work its magic in public. In this case, when it takes over American foreign policy.

Once we see this "reset" as therapy-based acculturation writ large, we can examine the results it produces. According the Ajami, a leading expert in foreign policy and the Arab world, the results are that you lose respect and people start suspecting that your character is less than good-- thus, that you are not trustworthy.

Coaching Lessons: Living Your Values

Using Peter Drucker's concept of self-management I have begun to outline the coaching process. For Drucker's article, link here.

In my first post I discussed how an individual should begin by discovering his superskills. It is easier and more interesting to go from good to great than from poor to mediocre. Before choosing a direction in life, and before articulating goals and aspirations, you need to know what you are good at. Link here.

In the second post I followed Drucker's article in recommending that once you discover what you are good at you need to know how best to perform. Where therapy wants you to understand why you cannot perform, coaching wants you to perform at your best. Link here.

Both of these posts concerned you as an individual. The next step starts bringing you into contact with a group...whether a company or a team or bureaucracy. It raises the issue of how you can best choose your voluntary associations?

For Drucker this raises the question of values. You should only join groups whose values harmonize with yours.

This is a very fuzzy issue. Are we talking about the values that pertain to sacred or profane institutions? Religious people follow dietary restrictions because of their values. Which means, following the group's moral precepts. Presumably, doing so will enhance your spirituality and bring you closer to the sacred.

Peter Drucker has a rather different notion of values. A company's values may define its goals in terms of short-term profits or long term viability. Some companies want to make a lot of money quickly; others want to make a solid but reliable income over a long period of time.

For Drucker these types of companies have different values.

Some corporate cultures dictate that executives be promoted from within. Others prefer to bring in new people from outside. For Drucker this is a values-based distinction.

These issues concern corporate culture and strategy. Clearly, if you believe that good business practice involves creating a harmonious work environment you will not want to work at a company that sounds like the Salomon Bros. bond trading floor, as portrayed by Michael Lewis in "Liar's Poker."

I find Drucker's sense of values limited, however. Let's take it a step further and ask: What kind of work do you value? Knowing that you are good with numbers opens a myriad of possible career options. Choosing one from the others will engage your values.

Some people value commerce and finance; others find greater value in charity work; still others believe that the highest value lies in professions like medicine and teaching.

But these are not the only considerations. You also need to ask: What kind of work does the culture value?

Your self-esteem depends more on which groups you choose to join than in how many times you can tell yourself you are a wonderful person.

Clearly, cultures place different values on different occupations and professions. I would even say that cultures create a hierarchy of values. It values some work more than others.

You can tell by seeing how much prestige and compensation the culture grants to different professions.

Everyone believes that teaching is a noble profession. You may believe that your personal values can only be fulfilled by teaching children.

Yet, our society does not grant very much compensation or prestige to teachers. To teach is to make sacrifices. As our culture sees it, teaching is more a sacred calling than a way of participating in the world's business.

Some professions grant more prestige than monetary compensation. Soldiers and diplomats are not very well paid, but they are certainly high-prestige occupations.

And some occupations grant their practitioners great monetary rewards and high social prestige. Until recently bankers and financiers have fallen into this category. Lately, of course, many of them have lost their jobs and much of their prestige in the market crash.

When we arrive at the world of celebrity, we find successful entertainers being very well compensated, but, lacking in either prestige or respect.

Yet, great success in the entertainment field is only granted to very, very few aspirants. Most people who want to become artists and entertainers gain neither fortune nor prestige.

All of which means that you are not the sole arbiter of your value to society. All groups have a hierarchy of values; they reward some kinds of work more than others.

If your values involve being financially comfortable and highly respected in your community, this will direct you toward some professions and away from some others.

If respect and prestige are more important than money you might decide to work for a company or in a profession that does not pay very well but that does induce people to speak of you with awe. Exercising political power falls within this category.

Coaching Lessons: Preparing for the New

As human beings we are creatures of habit. We seek out the familiar and cling to our routines and rituals.

These bring harmony to our lives; they give us a positive rhythm. It is better for our lives to have a rhythm than to be drowned in noise.

We are right to routinize our lives. Anyone who tells you otherwise is doing you a disservice.

A life without routines is a life full of stress. Practically speaking, it would be unlivable.

Routines have their enemies. Those who proselytize the values of the therapy culture tell us to be independent and autonomous, to indulge in spontaneity and individual self-expression. They pretend that routines make us into conformists.

In fact, the absence of routines would make us all crazy. Routines are a way to economize your mental exertion. If you need to spend time and energy every morning trying to think of a new and exciting way to get to work you will have wasted your most precious resources on an unnecessary exercise.

When routines are disrupted people suffer traumas. This is not quite the same as saying that traumas disrupt routines, even though they do.

The path to recovery from trauma involves reconstituting your routines and participating in community rituals. Lose your routines and rituals, whether voluntarily or involuntarily, and you will feel like a pariah.

Just as there is no such thing as a productive human life without routines, there is no such thing as a life without disrupted routines. People grow and change. They live in different places at different times. They assume different career challenges. And they engage in different personal alliances, from marriages to club memberships.

All of these involve transitions. You may not like to think of them as traumas, but they do involve disrupted routines. And the term trauma does alert you to the difficulties you will inevitably encounter in any transition to something new.

Take marriage. Marriage is guaranteed to disrupt your bachelor routines. To some extent the success of your marriage will depend on whether you and your spouse can replace your old routines with new shared routines.

The same is true of a promotion. If you, as an outsider, have been hired to work as an executive in a new company, you will need to prepare for the disruption your presence will cause, both for you and for those who will be working with you.

Whether you are facing a new job, or have just moved to a new country or city, or are beginning a new marriage, or are facing a new normal or a new reality, you will need to learn how best to prepare for the new.

Michael Watkins works with corporate executives. He advises them on how best to plan and execute transitions into new jobs. When executives take on new positions, they often ask someone like Watkins to help them to plan out the transition. For his seven step approach to transitions, follow this link.

While reading his article I was struck by its applicability to other life-transitions. It is useful to break down the walls we use to compartmentalize disciplines and show how Watkins' precepts apply to other situations.

For example, Watkins believes that an executive preparing for a new position should exercise good self-management skills. Considering that the new job will be an emotional drain, his judgment will often be compromised by the stress and the trauma.

How should he prepare for this? By having in place a network of people whose advice he can rely on.

If we apply some of his precepts to a new marriage, we will gain some oinsights that you will rarely find in marriage manuals or even in couples counseling. These latter believe too fervently that the power of love will cure all the ills that attend a new marriage.

When you marry you will join a new family. Just as you would need to know the culture and the dynamics of a company you are joining, so too you will need to understand the inner workings of the family that you are going to join.

You should find out who is important, whose opinion holds sway, and whose tastes organize family activities.

And you should be studying this family well before you arrive at the altar. You should be building alliances with your future spouse's parents and siblings.

It is always a good things to offer small, thoughtful gifts to your spouse. But why not think about what you might offer to your spouse's family members. A meaningful gift will go a long way to cement alliances and create good feelings. They will show that you are happy to belong to their family.

If these are done before the wedding, they would count as the kinds of early successes that Watkins recommends for new executives. He suggests that new executives start out by tackling easy problems, thus establishing a record of achievement.

Evidently, a marriage would require something slightly different from changing the furniture, establishing weekly meetings, or buying your staff a new coffee urn.

You might want to organize a brunch for your future in-laws, invite them to a concert, or take care of their pet during a vacation.

Watkins also suggests that new executives need to have a vision for their company or department. All good executives have visions of where they want to take their company. They must share their vision, outline the policies that will help it become realized, and enlist the support of their colleagues and staff.

When it comes to a marriage, you also need to have a vision, in the sense of having a life plan, for the two of you. Most of the basic questions in this plan should be agreed upon before the marriage.

If one person wants children and the other does not, the couple will not be working from the same plan. If one wants to live in the country and the other in the city, they will risk conflict.

Decisions involving life plans need to be negotiated. They will always involve compromise. In that they have more in common with managing a company than you might first have imagined.

Falling Out Of Love With Obama

Sometimes it's much too easy to fall in love. I am not just thinking of love-at-first-sight, but also of those love affairs that begin when you think that your dream lover has magically appeared in the flesh.

Call it wish fulfillment, but when you are convinced that your prayers have been answered, that your dreams have come true, and that your hopes have been realized you are likely to throw yourself into the affair with uncommon haste. As the poker enthusiasts say, you quickly go all-in.

Falling out of love is much harder. Even if your lover betrays your trust, you might just hang on to love because you believe that betrayal is a test of your love.

Besides, it is not very easy to admit to friends and family that you have made a colossal error of judgment. How can you explain why you foisted that error on them, taxing their patience and good feelings?

The first sign of falling out of love is a thought: this is not the person I fell in love with. This thought is almost inevitable because if you fell in love at a single glance you did not fall in love with a person in the first place. You fell in love with your own vision become flesh.

For the record, I do accept that there are some cases where people who fall in love at first sight live happily ever after. I suspect, however, that most of those loves involve people who meet in controlled circumstances, in a club or community where people can vouch for each other's good character.

When you fall in love at first sight with someone you have met at random in a bar or on a street corner you are far less likely to arrive at the kind of happy ending you find in fables.

Now, once you have fallen out of love with someone you fell madly in love with, it is extremely difficult to fall back in love.

If falling in love means buying a story, once you find that the story was a fiction, you will find it far more difficult to blind yourself to the person's faults.

All of that to introduce Peggy Noonan's new column about President Obama. Noonan understands, as many others have before her, that America, especially in precincts on the political left and in the mainstream media, fell madly in love with Barack Obama. Link here.

Obama was their knight in shining armor, their champion, their savior, their Prince Charming who was going to save America from the devil George Bush and those wicked Republicans.

Barack Obama was charming, witty, urbane, sophisticated, eloquent, intelligent... he had all the qualities that the political left was seeking in a lover. He embodied their culture and their values, their hopes and their dreams.

And he was manifestly a winner. For liberal politicians who had, for far too long, been excluded from the corridors of powers, Obama offered a way back in. What was there not to love?

Whatever deficiencies Obama had, they ignored. Blinded by love they went all-in for Obama.

Now, as Noonan notes, the first tangible signs of disappointment and disaffection have appeared in articles by seasoned liberal commentators like Leslie Gelb and Elizabeth Drew. Links to their articles are here and here.

Gelb and Drew offer highly critical assessments of the way Obama is conducting his presidency. They are among the first on the left to declare publicly that Obama is not the man they thought he was. They are saying that Obama is in way over his head. The lack of experience that they and others ignored during the campaign is coming back to bite them.

Surely, Obama is still witty, charming, urbane, sophisticated, intelligent, and eloquent. He still fulfills the conditions of the narrative that they bought in the first place. The trouble is, as Noonan notes, that Obama is beginning to be seen as fundamentally incompetent.

It's one thing to get your hopes up when you see Prince Charming riding to the rescue of the damsel in distress. Quite another when you start thinking that the Prince was a mirage and that a mirage is not going to save the damsel or the country or the world or the earth.

Noonan adds a point that I have blogged about: Obama's failure to understand the most elementary aspects of diplomatic protocol. In her analysis Obama's bow to the Emperor of Japan, following upon his bow to the King of Saudi Arabia, is becoming an iconic image. It is beginning to stick to him, defining him and his presidency.

I would add another striking moment. During an interview with Major Garrett of Fox News, Obama declared with a straight face that we would have to get our fiscal deficits under control, lest we risk a double dip recession.

Barack Obama, budget hawk! The image was jarring because it was so completely out of character. The biggest spending president ever, a president who fought for a massive stimulus program that would save the economy, who signed a supplemental spending bill that added hundreds of billions to the deficit, who was going to work his hardest to pass a health care reform bill that would add further hundreds of billions to the deficit... this Barack Obama was worried about the debt!

To be an effective president or an effective leader you have to know who you are and what you stand for. Perhaps during a campaign you can be all things to all people, you can be Protean, a chameleon, but as president, such arrant posturing will seem false and unlovable.

[Paul Rahe offers some illuminating comments on the same Noonan essay on the Powerline blog. Link here.]

A Message for Thanksgiving Day

Given my preoccupations, it is fitting that I would wish you a wonderful Thanksgiving with the following piece of information.

According to the most recent psychological research, saying "Thank you" is good for your health. Link here.

As the article says, it is not sufficient just to say it today. It is better to make it a habit. Gratitude will stand you in good stead, on this and many other days.

Coaching Lessons: How To Say the Right Thing

We have all said the wrong thing to the wrong person at the wrong time. When it happens, a pleasant conversation can quickly turn into a major fight. All for failing to choose the right words.

Clearly, it is not easy to say the right thing to the right person at the right time. I was thinking about this as I was reading an article called: "The Healthiest Way to Fight With Your Husband." Link here.

In truth, when I saw the title I was tempted to ignore the article. I do not encourage couples to fight; I do not want couples to learn how best to fight with each other: I do not consider reciprocal exchanges of verbal abuse to be healthy for a marriage.

Once I overcame my initial negative reaction, I found myself reading an interesting article about the importance of finding the right wording for certain sentiments. The article was telling wives that saying the right thing can defuse a tense conversation.

I regret that Sarah Elizabeth Edwards, or her editor, did not follow the good advice contained in the article and come up with a more felicitous title.

Saying the right thing will not just help you to avoid fights. It will produce amity and comity, and not just in marriages.

As the article reports, this means that it is not enough to encourage feuding couples to talk things out. Many couples do not have the verbal and social skills, to say nothing of the rhetorical savvy, to control their language well enough to turn a potential verbal sparring match into a negotiation. More often, they do not think, but let fly, and watch the sparring match turn into a brawl.

Research recommends that wives, in particular, use words that refer to thought processes, words that denote understanding and rationality. It is best to take a deep breath, and assert that you are thinking things over or are working to understand what you have heard.

Surely, thoughtfulness is better than an emotional outburst. It brings you closer to the other person and avoids the descent into drama and conflict.

Better yet, using words like think, understand, and reason will open a space in which negotiation can take place.

This research confirms what couples therapists often tell their clients. Couples who are prone to fighting should reply to contentious or tendentious remarks with something like: What I understand you're saying is....

While this exercise in reformulating is a good step, it should be accompanied by an additional step. A wife should assert that she accepts some of the validity of the point her husband is trying to make.

This is an important negotiation tactic, one that we should all practice in all of our everyday conversations. If we tell our friends and colleagues that we respect them sufficiently to take their ideas seriously, up to acknowledging that we grant them a measure of validity, the world will be a more peaceful place.

I am not sure why the article suggests that these skills are more apt for women than for men, but everyone, in my view, should practice the skill of not dismissing other people's ideas out of hand.

The fact is: if you are unwilling to hear your friends out, they will feel obliged to return the favor. And vice versa. If your goal is to find common ground, then you can take a step in the right direction by granting some validity to points of view you disagree with.