Those of you who follow this blog (all two of you) might be aware that I'm a psychiatric survivor from way back. Since about fifteen, my moods have pinballed, dragging me through the muck of depression and occasionally springboarding me into Shangri-la.

In this society, that means drugs, and over those forty years I've had my innings with them. From the thuglike "major tranks" like Thorazine to the first antidepressant (Imipramine) to the blessed miracle of Prozac (ha-ha) and on and on, I've struggled to find that magic balance that will allow me to live better pharmaceutically.

I'm no less bipolar now, though the last several years have been blessedly free of wrenching extremes. But just today, it happened again. Damn, it happened again! And all I did was add a tiny microgram of thyroid medication to my complicated regime.

Let me back up a little. For the past four decades, I've had variations of the following conversation with my doctor (or psychiatrist, whoever was on board).

Me: Doctor, my little problem is back.

Doc: What little problem?

You know, my. . . well, it's that sexual. . .

Oh, you mean low libido. Maybe it's the Paxil.

No, it's not low libido exactly. It's that I can't -

Not low libido?

I can't have an orgasm.

Oh?

I can't. . . you see, I can get 99% of the way there, but there's just that last little bit, and I can't seem to get past it and get the, well, you know, the release I'm looking for, and -

Low libido can be corrected with a change of doseage.

It's not low libido. I can get 99 -

Let's change the doseage and see what happens.

(Six months of rapturous bliss! I have conquered the 1%, and my orgasm is back.)

Doctor: So how is the low libido?

Me: Oh, it's completely gone. Worked like a charm.

This is the sort of thing I STILL go through (and the above doctor was a woman, by the way). There's something unspoken going on here - is there not? - though no one even notices or wants to acknowledge it.

For women, low libido is "OK". It's to be expected, in fact. A friend of mine once was told, "Well, your depression is better now.  Isn't that a small price to pay?" Another shrink said I was "trading off" orgasm for relief from my symptoms. All psychological, you know.

If I hadn't made a bloody racket over the past 40 years, I wouldn't have been able to come at all. I have never had low libido. Well, almost never: maybe at 9 months pregnant. (The other 8 months I masturbated my head off.) The 1% horror, the hanging, the oh-no feeling, the ohGODitcouldn'tbenotagain, is still something I apparently have to cope with, and it pisses me off royal.

I remember another doctor said the change of doseage couldn't have been sufficient to correct my low libido, oops, lack of orgasm. So the fact that I did regain orgasm (oops, my libido) proved that the whole thing had been "psychological". Fine, it can be in my head, my cunt or my solar plexus, just let me COME, you idiots! Like many women who feel they have to keep their mouths shut or be seen as sluts, I not only enjoy orgasms, I REQUIRE them to hang on to the sense that, even for those three or four minutes a day, life can be good, very good, very very good indeed.

Though it seems impossible, in the past three years or so my orgasmic capacity has about tripled. I was always under the impression that "old" (postmenopausal) women like me were so dried up their ovaries fell out onto the sidewalk and shattered like marbles. I didn't know hot surges of sweet dark maple syrup would gush through my bloodstream at a million miles an hour. I didn't know there would be a glorygloryglorygloryglory in the flesh that superceded anything remotely spiritual.

Thus, postmenopause. So sizzling-hot-in-the-brain-and-groin that I barely can believe it. Sizzling, that is, until its opposite appears to put out all those unholy fires. . . the fizzle.

I like to call it "lack-of-libido/can't-come". I still have to call it what the doctor wants to hear (so she won't think I'm a raving slut, or possibly dangerous). I have to beg for a solution, for she/he will surely say, "Now now, you do feel better these days, don't you? Well, isn't that. . ."

NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO, fucking-NO.

I had my first dose of this bloody thyroid today - a billionth of a milligram, or some-such - and because I am a slut who can't keep her hands off herself, I test-drove it for, ahem,  "low libido". My libido was its usual searing popping self, so it was no problem getting it in gear. And oh god, and oh god, and oh god and and and

SHIT!

Shit, it wasn't going to happen! Well, that's what you get for being an old woman whose ovaries should have dried up by now.

As you can see, I'm trying to make a point beyond my fizzled ka-boom. Women aren't supposed to be sexual (except sexy-looking, which is an entirely different thing); older women who are sexual are a fright, even offensive, unless they haul their faces up like Joan Collins and try to be 30.

There are certain models for the older woman. The polyester-slacks-with-elastic-waist-wearing garden club member. The Crone (and who or what exactly IS this crone, anyway? Sounds like something incredibly wrinkled, or dry like a cornstalk.) Crones hang out with other crones and drink herbal tea and have croning ceremonies, but I don't think they get laid.

I don't think they like 'em hot 'n hard.

That brings me to another thing (this is going to be a marathon, so bear with me). These Viagra ads make me sick. They're all sort of sniggering and precious (wife shooting husband a demure smile, then looking down and blushing), with the guy striding around as if he's hard in his pants even as we speak. Hoo-ha! Their sex life is wonderful again! A hard prick will do that, you know? In fact, that's all it takes.

Oh?

There is no female equivalent to the Viagra ad, and there won't be. There is this little organ, a wondrous little organ really, a pearl of great price, and it's called the clitoris. We keep discovering, then undiscovering this organ, revealing it and reburying it. In the '70s, women were encouraged to take a hand mirror and look "down there" and try to find the little nipper. There must've been something wrong with me, because at thirteen mine was already in high gear. I didn't really know what it looked like, and I didn't care.

Back then, there were no fizzles because I wasn't on any drugs except alcohol and pot (yet). I read somewhere that "manic-depressives" were "hypersexual", not a good thing (for a girl, anyway). But by then the habit was fixed. No matter how wretched my world, and many times it was wretched unto suicide, I could have these brief spasms of gladness, and for that I was supremely grateful.

That is, except when I couldn't.

Men can talk about blue balls, and everyone sympathizes. But blue ovaries? (Hey, that'd make a nice name for a girl band.) It's a joke. Why is she even thinking about this stuff, anyway? Where are the polyester pants?

Or the chastity belt? It's the rare woman who hasn't been scorched by sexual shame. We're still told, one way another, that we're fat and we smell bad and it's hopeless. (This thing about women smelling bad is an obsession. Have you ever taken a sniff at the average guy's underwear?). Many women learn to turn their "low" libido off, as it's all just too problematic and painful to deal with.

There's a nearly sure fix for this: a few micrograms of testosterone, but very few doctors will agree to prescribe it. There's something kind of offensive about a woman taking male hormones, as if she wants to strut around like those Viagra guys.

I don't know why my own libido, decidedly NOT low, still wheels and tears around like a wild horse, so much so that I've been known to scream when "it" happens. But it only responds to careful handling, and kindness. New drugs interact with the existing regime, and the whole delicately-balanced mobile begins to swing and clang and tangle up.

Result: a fizzle.

Pray for me, will you, folks? Both of you? I can't stand much more of this. My grinding, yowling, cat-leaping midnight pussy demands release, and will no longer be denied.