It is one of the most popular methods of contraception among women of reproductive age. However, the common belief states that the pill decreases a woman’s sexual desire and the scientific evidence supporting or denying this belief has been inconclusive or even contradictory.
Now, a team of researchers from the University of Kentucky and Indiana University (USA) led by expert Kristen Mark, set out to examine the real impact of the use of oral hormonal contraceptives on female sexual desire.
To do this, they carried out two separate studies. Both investigated the impact of different types of contraceptives on sexual desire in women and examined sexual desire in men who related to women who used contraceptives.
The first study looked at how contraceptive use affected heterosexual couples in short, medium, or long-term relationships, while the second investigated this impact exclusively on long-term relationships.
Using the Sexual Desires Inventory (a questionnaire to measure sexual desire in cognitive rather than non-behavioral terms), the researchers inspected two types of sexual desire in more than 900 participants: solitary and dyadic (dyadic desire refers to the desire to participate in a sexual activity with another person and the desire to share intimacy; lonely desire describes the libido that a person has on their own.
Contraceptives were classified into oral hormonal, hormonal and non-hormonal. The results showed that the type of contraceptive used significantly affected solitary sexual desire.
Women using non-hormonal contraceptives reported higher libido alone than women using hormonal contraceptives. However, women using hormonal oral contraceptives had higher levels of dyadic sexual desire than women using non-hormonal contraceptives. However, when looking at contextual factors such as the length of the relationship and age, the differences were no longer significant. This suggests that the context of the relationship has a much more significant impact on sexual desire than the type of contraceptive used. In addition, when examining the results in pairs, they did not observe any association between the type of contraceptive used and solitary or dyadic sexual desire in men and women.
“Sometimes women are looking for something to explain changes in their sexual desire and the message that hormonal pills decrease desire is really prevalent. Our findings are clear: the pill does not kill desire ; This research helps to bust those myths and hopefully eventually shed this common cultural script in our society, ”says Kristen Mark, leader of the work.
The results have been published in The Journal of Sexual Medicine.
