Is female Viagra a pill to thrill - or just a new headache for weary wives?

Could one tiny pill really spell the end for those eternal words: ‘Not tonight, dear, I’ve got a headache’?

News that a female Viagra that boosts a woman’s sex drive is set to hit shelves in three years’ time suggests so.

But do women really want it? SHONA SIBARY and JULIE BURCHILL find out….

My worst nightmare says Shona Sibary

Any woman who has been married for more than a year will, at some point, have climbed into bed next to an expectant husband keen to exercise his conjugal rights and had the following thought: ‘I’d rather chew off my left arm than have sex with you right now.’

Indeed, it occurs to me that at 42, 14 years into my marriage to my husband, Keith, I am spending more time finding ways to avoid sex than I am actually having it.

Of course, this isn’t something I’m proud of. I don’t want to lie in bed at night praying that my husband’s hand stays firmly on his side of the invisible line between us.

And I don’t want my heart to sink when he asks, for the hundredth time, if I am ever going to sleep naked again?

I know it isn’t fair on him and the constant guilt I feel is equal only to the relief when I do eventually get myself in the mood and think afterwards: ‘Thank God I don’t have to do that again for a few more weeks.’

So you might think that I am the perfect candidate for a Viagra pill for women. The news should, by rights, have had me buying sexy lingerie and hauling myself down to a waxing salon in anticipation.

Apparently, trials of the pill have been so impressive that it could be on bedside cabinets within three years.

I don’t know what makes me laugh more. The name of the drug, Lybrido — which sounds like a nit shampoo — or the fact that this idea, surely, must have been dreamed up by a team of male scientists?

Because, despite the fact the company is called Emotional Brain (come on guys, it’s a little clue) they have spectacularly failed to understand what it is that puts a woman in the mood for sex.

Perhaps none of them are married, so let me help a little here. What boosts my libido more than any little pill ever will is having someone else not only cook me dinner, but doing so without splattering the entire hob with oil and leaving the dirty plates in the sink afterwards.

That’s just for starters. Then, it would be nice to get through an evening without having to ball odd socks, tackle an ironing pile as high as the national debt and wrestle truculent, over-tired offspring into their beds.

And if I ever do feel the overwhelming urge to leap on Keith, I want to do so knowing, beyond doubt, that we will not be disturbed by a young child wandering into our bedroom halfway through the act and inquiring: ‘Mummy, are you being sick?’

Probably, there are many women who will take the marital moral high ground and advise me to do whatever it takes to keep the passion burning and my husband from straying.

Others will pity me and talk about how sex is the ‘glue’ that keeps a  marriage together.

I can’t tell you how fed up I am of hearing that phrase as if children, a mortgage and a lifetime of memories are not enough when up against what goes on between the sheets.

I’m not saying sex isn’t important, merely that for many thousands of women in a similar position to me the suggestion that a pill is going to give us a shortcut to swinging from the chandeliers is laughable.

And I know I’m not alone.

The largest recent  survey of sexual behaviour in Britain — conducted in 2000 — found that married women aged 45 to 59 had sex on average just twice a month.

Paula Hall, sex and relationship psychotherapist for Relate and author of Improving Your Relationship For Dummies, says it can be partly blamed on biology.

‘When we first get together with somebody we’re producing PEA [phenylethylamine] — the chemical responsible for lust, fluttery stomachs and the fact we can’t keep our hands off each other,’ she explains.

‘Unfortunately, that wears off after 18 months, which is the time in which evolution reckons you should get pregnant.

‘After that, we’re producing oxytocin — a bonding chemical — which is all about keeping us together. Nobody, after a decade of marriage, feels huge amounts of lust for their partner — especially women, who have around 40 per cent less testosterone than men. They have to work harder to keep their sex drive going.’

Which is why, despite the success of male Viagra — worldwide sales are £1.5 billion a year — I’m not convinced that the female version is the answer to womanhood’s flagging libido.

For men and women are wired differently. How many husbands do you know who can’t bring themselves to make love to their wives because they’re still fuming over a marital humdinger from two days ago? Or because they can’t quell their irritation at dirty socks left on the floor?

Because every woman knows, deep down, that it’s not a medical solution we need to boost our mojos — it’s a foot rub on the sofa in the evening and a man who makes us laugh.

Yes! Yes! Yes please! says Julie Burchill

When I read that a female equivalent of the Viagra pill, called Lybrido, could soon be available, my first reaction was: ‘Where do I sign up?’

For ten years ago — look away here, oh sensitive of stomach! — I was  having sex three times a day; now, it’s nearer once a day, probably twice on the weekend — more than most, perhaps, but not enough for me. 

I am 53, menopausal and have been with my third husband for nearly 20 years — no one expects couples to be at it like rabbits forever.

But anything that could help me recapture those feelings of youthful lust would be welcome.

For I do believe that sex is the glue that keeps marriages together — apart from those few fortunate instances when two sexless types marry each other.

I’m sure that Cliff Richard and Germaine Greer, for example, would be deliriously happy in what our French friends call a mariage blanc.

But for most of us, a marriage without sex is basically being room-mates. And whoever bothered being sexually faithful to their room-mate?

Reports yesterday said that the Dutch firm, Emotional Brain, which is making this new She-agra would be under pressure to make sure the drugs didn’t turn women into nymphomaniacs. Well, all I can say is: what a shame!

I well remember the term nymphomaniac — ‘nympho’, as the nudging and winking lads had it — from my teenage years, and what a sun-dappled Seventies word it remains.

It celebrates a saucy, cheery age after smelly hippies stopped giving free love a bad name but before big diseases with little names made everything grim and scary.

‘Happiness is never found by  hopping from bed to bed,’ the  agony aunts would frown from  my mother’s magazines when I was a child.

As someone who’s been married three times consecutively since she was 19, I really do wish that I’d spent more time hopping between beds when I was young, and rather less time  making them.

My only fear is that the new pill will be sold in a sanctimonious, prissy way — it’s already a bit of a warning sign that it’s mint- flavoured, as though even when seeking to please themselves women must always be worrying about being ‘nice’ to be around.

-Adapted from Daily Mail