Non-Italians Trying to Keep Up and Keep It Up (sorry) for 5 Minutes Update...

...or, Why aren't women suspicious of sexual "innovations" for them created by men?

Let's see...First we divorced sexual intercourse from reproduction and convinced women it liberated them, placing them on an equal sexual footing with us. (Courtesy of Big Contraception.)

Next, we created chemical libidio switches for ourselves, (Thanks, Big Pharma.) necessited by the almost complete destruction of our natural libidos. (Courtesy of Big Masturbation and Used Wives, Inc. - formerly Big Divorce.)

Now we have a new and improved chemical libidio switch that acts just as well on the distaff side of the ledger. Oh, joy! If your friendly neighborhood female has five minutes for copulation, all she has to do is whip out the ol' puffer and whamo!, she acts like you're Fabio with Bill Gates' checking account!

Ah, but if the switch can be turned on, kiddies, doesn't it stand to reason it can also be turned off?

Next up? Big Sodomy and Little Anglo-Saxons Ltd. will create an artficial womb (or maybe home cloning kits) where we can grow boys. And only boys.

No icky girls will be needed.

For anything.

Ever again.

Then the huMAN race won't have to worry about those pesky relationships with the Other. And females won't be, period.

Of course, my ancestors were Italian, so all these pills and sprays are just hooey to me.

Personally, I like girls, and I'd hate to see them go the way of the dodo. But the sissified and the sodomized don't agree and they're in charge. You see, kiddies, they are part of the Forces of Progress. And progress is a good thing, no matter how many it kills.

Heck, enough of my proudly reactionary (and even more proudly heterosexual) babblings! Let's move on to the feel good story of the day.

Drudge: SEX IN A SPRAY...


Horn of rhinoceros. Penis of tiger. Root of sea holly. Husk of the emerald-green blister beetle known as the Spanish fly. So colourful and exotic is the list of substances that have been claimed to heighten sexual appetite that it is hard not to feel a twinge of disappointment on first beholding the latest entry - a small, white plastic nasal inhaler containing an odourless, colourless synthetic chemical called PT-141. Plain as it is, however, there is one thing that distinguishes PT-141 from the 4,000 years' worth of recorded medicinal aphrodisiacs that precede it: this one actually works.

And it could reach the market in as little as three years. The full range of possible risks and side effects has yet to be determined, but already this much is known: a dose of PT-141 results, in most cases, in a stirring in the loins in as little as 15 minutes. Women, according to one set of results, feel 'genital warmth, tingling and throbbing', not to mention 'a strong desire to have sex'.

Among men who have been tested with the drug more extensively, the data set is richer: 'With PT-141, you feel good,' reported anonymous patient 007: 'not only sexually aroused, you feel younger and more energetic.' According to another patient, 'It helped the libido. So you have the urge and the desire...' Tales of pharmaceutically induced sexual prowess among 58-year-olds are common enough in the age of the Little Blue Pill, but they don't typically involve quite so urgent a repertoire. Or, as patient 128 put it: 'My wife knows. She can tell the difference between Viagra and PT-141.'

The precise mechanisms by which PT-141 does its job remain unclear, but the rough idea is this: where Viagra acts on the circulatory system, helping blood flow into the penis, PT-141 goes to the brain itself. 'It's not merely allowing a sexual response to take place more easily,' explains Michael A Perelman, co-director of the Human Sexuality Program at New York Presbyterian Hospital and a sexual-medicine adviser on the PT-141 trials. 'It may be having an effect, literally, on how we think and feel.'

Palatin Technologies, the New Jersey-based maker of PT-141, has hopes of its own. Once the company gets Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approval for the drug, Palatin plans to market it to the same people targeted by Viagra: male erectile-dysfunction patients. Approval as a treatment for female sexual dysfunction may follow. In the wake of Pfizer's failed attempts to prove Viagra works for women and amid growing recognition that it also doesn't work for large numbers of men, these two markets alone could make PT-141 a pharmaceutical blockbuster.

But let's face facts: a drug that makes you not only able but eager and willing isn't going to remain the exclusive property of the severely impaired. As with Viagra, there will be extensive off-label use of PT-141. Fast-acting and long-lasting, packaged in an easily concealed, single-use nasal inhaler, unaffected by food or alcohol consumption, PT-141 seems bound to take its place alongside cocaine, poppers and alcohol in the pantheon of club drugs.

But the potential market for PT-141 is all of us. Consider the precedent: a little more than four decades ago, it was another drug's arrival in the marketplace that triggered the sexual revolution. Before the advent of the birth-control pill, sex and procreation had been eternally, inseparably linked. After it, the link was pretty much optional. Momentous things ensued: chiefly women's liberation and the abortion controversy, all of them arguably the pill's indirect consequences, all of them reverberating to this day. And if all that can follow from a drug which simply made pregnancy less a matter of fate than of choice, what then to expect from a drug that does the same thing to passion itself?

Only when and if PT-141 reaches the market will we be in a position to even start answering that question. But, for now, there probably isn't a better way to hone the question than to turn to the rats of the Palatin Technologies research labs...

Due to time constraints, we now move to further action...(Sorry to those of you fascinated by the sex lives of rats.)

It was in pursuit of this market that Shadiack approached Concordia University behavioural-neurobiology researcher Jim Pfaus, whose work with sexual response in female rats had caught her attention. Where the bulk of research into female-rat sexual behaviour has focused on lordosis - that reflexive arching of the lower back that signifies the female is ready - Pfaus has taken what might be called a more feminist approach. Instead of lordosis's almost climactic spasm, Pfaus prefers to look at foreplay: the wiggling of ears, kicking of faces, and other acts of solicitation with which female rats reveal their desire to the partner of their choice. Pfaus discovered that PT-141 significantly increases the incidence of these behaviours. He even detected an increase in the rarer phenomenon in which a female rat will throw coyness to the winds and, in a performance worthy of Kim Cattrall, mount the chosen male herself.

And thus the case was made. Pfaus's results were powerful evidence not only of PT-141's potential as a treatment for women but of its ability to do more than just move blood around. A male rat's erection on its own doesn't say much about the rat's state of mind. A female rat's coquetry, on the other hand, says all we need to know about her intentions and desires. Rats aren't people, to be sure, and as test subjects they suffer from a frustrating inability to tell us, in words, how they experience what they're subjected to. But that has an upside, too, explains Pfaus. 'The bad thing about animals is they don't talk. The good thing is they don't lie.'

So the testimony of rats - notwithstanding that of the 900 articulate, full-grown human subjects who have since reported enhanced arousal and desire from taking PT-141 - remains the most objective evaluation the drug has yet received, or ever will.

'I see a lot of couples in my practice who don't know how to relax,' says Leonore Tiefer, a professor of psychiatry at New York University School of Medicine. 'That's fine - it's a big asset to them in their corporate lifestyle, where they can work 80 hours a week. They're trained to multi-task. Well, it doesn't seem that that is really doable when it comes to sex. And they're angry about that: they need it to be doable because they only have their five minutes.'

The five-minute meaningful sexual encounter: if ever there was a holy grail for the age of the tight-wired global economy - with its time-strapped labour force and its glut of bright, shiny distractions - that is it. And if ever there was a reason to be wary of the pharmaceutical industry's designs on the market for sexual healing, say critics such as Tiefer, it's the attractiveness of that simple-minded ideal.

Tiefer is one of the leading figures in a movement of academic researchers, sex therapists and women's-health activists contesting the increasing medicalisation of women's sexual problems, and when Procter & Gamble sought FDA approval in December 2004 for its 'female sexual-desire disorder' treatment - a testosterone patch called Intrinsa - her testimony helped sway the agency to deny the request. Unlike the counting of erections, assessing subjective phenomena such as desire and satisfaction is, she testified, 'subtle, complex - and arbitrary'. P&G's findings were thus too inconclusive to hold their own against the established risks of long-term testosterone use. 'Intrinsa is not a glass of chardonnay,' Tiefer remarked, 'and yet we have already seen that it may well be promoted with a giggle and a wink as "the female Viagra".'

Tiefer is just as dubious about PT-141, which, as she sees it, is merely the latest expression of a 'big wish' that 'we could just bypass everything we want to bypass' on our way to sexual happiness, skipping the complicated, often lifelong work of sorting out all the emotional, physical and autobiographical triggers that turn us off and on. Her prognosis for the discovery of a drug that will render that work unnecessary? 'Sorry, it's never going to happen.'

Even assuming that PT-141 ultimately performs as well in broad use as it has in trials, even granting that it can improve sex lives as effectively as a lifetime of erotic exploration, the deeper challenge posed by the prospect of a sexual techno-fix remains: is this really the kind of fix we want? To have desire available at any time, from the nozzle of an inhaler?