Here Are My Ideas for a New Female Sex Pill

What was the best American news headline this week? Was it one of the ones about New York mayoral candidates outlining their views on sucking the blood from a baby’s penis after circumcision? No, the best headline was: “Scientists Fear a Female Libido Booster Is Too Effective”. Yup, a drug called Lybrido has been developed. It's a bit like a female version of Viagra. The pill, which comes in a lovely menthol flavour, is designed to heighten female desire, and should come on the market in 2016 if it gets past the authorities. But it might not, for it is a terrible, terrifying thing. Lock up your sisters. Lock up your mothers. Because their sex lives are about to get really fun and their boners will float to the moon. Like a truly wretched Invasion of the Bodysnatchers, only happening exclusively in women’s knickers, this pill is going to turn women into unrecognisable nympho beasts and we should all run from it, screaming. (Screaming like this: ooooooohhhhhhhh. aaaaaaaahhhhhh. yes yes yes yes yes just like that yes yes don’t stop please don’t stop DO NOT FOR THE LOVE OF ALL THAT IS FUCKING SACRED STOP) The New York Times reported that advisers feared the FDA might reject the drug’s licensing application “out of concern that a chemical would lead to female excesses, crazed binges of infidelity, societal splintering”. Obviously. You definitely don’t want women to go around furiously enjoying sex now, do you? Think of the happy marriages, workplace joyfulness and all-round societal satisfaction that such a phenomenon might wreak. Think of the flushed skin, the glow, the power. The fertility boost. What I mean is: Ban this sick stunt now. Still. I couldn’t find out quite enough details about what this pill will actually, specifically make me feel if I take it, during the sort of sex that I actually have. I wanted to know the exact sensations it could bring, not just to my body, but to my mind. So just in case Lybrido is still at the prototype stage, here are my suggestions for the manufacturers. I suspect I am not alone when I outline, below, what I would really like a sex pill to do: 1) Make me feel like an animal. Specifically, a fox. But wait – don’t foxes have sex by the male forcing his fox todger into the woman, and his todger is actually known as a KNOT, and it swells up inside the female until it actually gets stuck there and she can’t get away even if she wants to? Like some kind of vagina dentata scenario in reverse? I read about it in an urban fox study conducted by Bristol University, and I think that’s why they scream so loud, they’re bloody trapped – oh shit, I am totally losing my vibe while thinking about this, the person I was having sex with has now finished. He’s lying back and breathing a lot. I kind of missed it all. I wonder what he’s thinking about. I wonder if he’s thinking that I could be more like a fox. 2) In fact, I want a sex pill that turns my brain off altogether. That makes you rely on your nerve, instinct, hunger, with not an intellectual thought in your head. That turns you into that thing that Frank O'Hara wrote about poetry, in his manifesto, Personism, about why his writing isn't very academic. "You just go on your nerve," he wrote. "If someone's chasing you down the street with a knife you just run, you don't turn around and shout, 'Give it up! I was a track star for Mineola Prep.'" I would like the pill that makes me stop trying to think about whether I could be considered, in one sense or another, the sort of person who likes to think they might be a track star for Mineola Prep. I just want to grab the knife and run. 3) The pill to make you stop being a feminist. As my friend said last night, "I feel fully ashamed of what I secretly want men to do to me during sex, because I bang on about feminism all day long, and then they get me into bed and I don't know how to admit it. Really I just want to be bent over like a little bitch." However – spoiler alert – you might also have to invent a pill that helps men telepathically know whether the woman they are with wants to be bent over like a little bitch, as some do and some don’t. And the best way to navigate this preferential chasm is probably not, all things told, by asking your potential lover, while you are starting to fumble with her bra, if she fancies being bent over like a little bitch. Don’t ask me why. It just doesn’t work for everyone. 4) The unconditional love pill. Where everybody loves you. Where every move your body makes and their body makes is golden, zinging, perfect. Where every place your limbs move to is both a safe harbour and an exotic destination. Where you can't tell where you end and where they begin any more. Where the heat generated could run a small power plant. Where it all feels like the time that Vanessa Paradis said, in her smoky French husk of a voice, that nobody could love like her and Johnny Depp. Nobody. I know they split up but that only proves her point. Nobody could love like Johnny Depp and Vanessa Paradis. Not even Johnny Depp and Vanessa Paradis. 5) A pill to stop me being English. Turn me into a Latin lover beneath a fiery sunset in the southern hemisphere. Or at least turn me onto dogging – if I can’t be the sort of fantasy Mexican who rolls around on the sand in San Jose del Cabo, at least make me into the sort of person who gets off on the glare from the headlights of another couple’s Mazda in a carpark in Whipps Cross. It seems as good a way as any to meet new people.

Follow Sophie on Twitter: @heawood

Previously – In Ibiza with Endless House