The Medicalization of Women’s Sexuality

As you may have noted by now, women’s sexuality is a huge passion of mine. I’m a woman. I love studying and learning about human sexuality. This combination means that I especially love studying and learning about women’s sexuality.

In my Master’s degree, I dedicated a great deal of my academic efforts to decoding the medicalization of women’s sexuality (essentially, make a common problem of life into a ‘dysfunction’ in need of medical or pharmaceutical treatment). If you aren’t sure how this applies to women’s sexuality, check out the second one down in this video.

Essentially, ever since the success (and $$$) the pharm industry saw from Sildenafil Citrate (aka Viagra), there has been a race against time to figure out some sort of similar pill for women. This would be great if women worked the same as men. However, we don’t. And we won’t. And a pill won’t fix the lost libidos of women suffering. Unfortunately. It’s much more complex than that (for both women and men), and requires more than a quick pill fix.

There is a great campaign that I am a part of looking to fight and advocate against this medicalization called The New View. Dr. Leonore Tiefer (my hero) is a leading activist for this group, and she does amazing work surrounding this issue.

I also blogged about this issue in Kinsey Confidential this week. So you can read more here.