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Magazine|‘I’m on Fire’: Testosterone Is Giving Women Back Their Sex Drive — and Then Some
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/10/22/magazine/testosterone-women-health-sex-libido-menopause.html
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Spend enough time speaking to women who are taking testosterone — specifically, in very high doses — and you start to notice that they sound messianic. They’re often talking fast and intensely; they’re amped up; they’re describing what they clearly consider a miracle drug; and they have no intention of lowering their dose, despite the unknown risks or some problems with facial hair. After all, how can they worry about facial hair when they feel so alive? It’s nothing they can’t take care of with a quick waxing, which they now have the energy to do at the end of the day — right after they prepare a high-protein dinner for their family and before they put the finishing touches on their spreadsheets, close their laptops and light a few mood candles for the sex that they know will be great, maybe even better than the sex they had last night, even though they’re a day older.
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“It’s changed my marriage,” Jessica Medina, a 41-year-old marketing consultant in Orange County, Calif., told me. With four kids in the house, and sex happening six times a week (up from “How about never?” pre-testosterone), she had to put a lock on the bedroom door. She and her husband had attended a “marriage growth” group at church for years, but it took testosterone for their relationship to be, as she put it, “100 times closer.” She was a little less emotional, a little less sentimental than she used to be, but she didn’t have time for that kind of thing, anyway. “It’s more like: Get stuff done, handle business, work out,” she said. “In order to do all that and still have time for our kids and their sports, there’s no time to whine about how hard it is.”
Catherine Lin, a single mother who ran a bicoastal fashion media company, went on testosterone in her early 40s to raise her energy. She got the boost she wanted, started lifting heavier weights, decided to pursue a degree in holistic nutrition and enjoyed an unexpected side effect: She started having orgasms for the first time in years.
Both Medina and Lin are taking an amount of testosterone that’s brought their levels higher than what women produce naturally at any point in their lifetimes. The way they and many women on these high doses talk about their relationships sometimes has the ring of romantasy: fantastic tales of sexual rejuvenation and newfound intimacy. One woman in her 50s told me that after years of revulsion at so much as the thought of her husband’s breath, she now looked forward to having sex with him almost every night; even in the middle of sex, she said, she was thinking about the next time they could have sex. Another woman told me she’d had more orgasms in the past two years on testosterone than in the entirety of her previous life; a third said that after years of “wanting to rip someone’s face off” if her husband so much as touched her, she now actively pursued sex with him — if anything, she now worried, she wanted it more often than he did.
