LAST WEEK was a really bad one for sex, what with teenage girls having too much of it unprotected, Viagra poppers being warned that they could touch but not look because some of them were going blind, and British men blowing their own trumpets because they can last a whole seven and half minutes in bed. (And what was bad news about that was that they considered it good news.) But the biggest story — the one about the Pill possibly killing female libido — really didn’t generate the kind of surgery-phoning hysteria that was expected.

In fact it was probably a collective sigh of relief you might have heard last week, as opposed to one of post-coital satisfaction, when women all over the UK opened their morning papers to find another excuse to get out of sex. This was the study reported in New Scientist that the Pill has an added-value contraceptive effect on top of the hormonal stuff that stops women getting pregnant.

The extra effect is abstinence — a method of contraception even the Pope would condone — caused by low libido. Unlike the official bods, such as the Royal College of GPs and the Family Planning Association who were concerned that a story like this might cause women to abandon the Pill en masse, I predicted that hordes of sexually disinterested women would be clamouring for the ultimate chemical get-out clause, because according to the study, the anti-sex hormones linger in some women for like, ever, and how much easier to blame a pill than the usual stuff: feeling tired, out of lust, depressed, or on libido- reducing antidepressants, out of the habit, out of time, post-baby, pre-menopause, familiarity breeding sexual repulsion, and the pressure to do fetishy, multi-orgasmic sex like what they write about in the magazines. As Billy Bragg sang: “How can you lie there and think of England when you don’t even know who’s in the team? ”

“I don’t care who is in the team,” reports a long-married friend of mine, “as long as its over by the Archers’ Omnibus.”

“The Pill lowers libido?” smirks another friend in her mid thirties with two young children. “So does having children who wake up every half hour, so you can’t win. But I’m not on the Pill. Can’t they find something like that out about the coil?”

“I don't think the Pill lowered my libido,” says a sexually active single friend who now uses condoms, “but the fact that it made me fat and spotty, and depressed about being fat and spotty, absolutely reduced my pulling potential.”

The truth is, if the libido-lowering effect of the Pill bothered that many women, we would have heard about it long before now, from their boyfriends. And this report is not all that much to shout about, because the study looked at a small, biased sample. The authors recruited 125 women — from a group attending a clinic for sexual dysfunction anyway.

Dr David Goldmeier, a consultant physician at the Jane Wadsworth sexual health clinic at St Mary’s Hospital in London, says: “My hunch is that this is a small problem, in terms of the Pill, but that low desire in women is one of the most common problems. Now this is interesting, because though an American study said that this is a problem in about a third of women, a British study said that only about one woman in seven actually minds.”

But what is a “normal” female libido anyway, and does “abnormal” mean “not in sync with men”? Alan Riley, professor of sexual medicine at the University of Central Lancaster, has discovered that while men appear to be on a five-day cycle when it comes to wanting sex, women are on a ten-day cycle.

If British women decide they don't actually have a problem, then a pharmaceutical industry that is trying to push a testosterone patch to make us all gagging for it might have trouble selling a “cure” for a condition the Americans like to call FSAD — female sexual arousal disorder.

Dr David Delvin, a family planning doctor and former consultant to the Family Planning Association, says: “I think this acronym is mad, and there is a figure of 43 per cent of women suffering from this which is absurdly overinflated. But once a condition has a name, they can pump lots of money into research for developing a drug for it. But it is very unlikely that the answer is in a pill. We gave out lots of testosterone in the 1970s for female lack of libido, but there was a lack of results and many side-effects.”

Female sexual desire is such a brain-driven thing that some women don’t even know when they are aroused. In an unintentionally hilarious study on the effects of Viagra on women, they were given the drug and shown porn while researchers looked at their genital blood flow. In terms of what was going on down below, the women were deemed to be physiologically aroused, but they said they were not turned on. So not only do we not care that we are not turned on, but we don’t even know when we are.

But should we be looking at hormones and blood flow at all? Paula Hall, a sex therapist who works for Relate, says: “Many women go off sex because their partner is crap in bed. You find low sexual desire in women who have never had an orgasm. Or I’ll see a couple and the man will be this big, bloated, smelly guy in a filthy T-shirt and he’ll say: ‘I dunno why she don’t want a shag’.”