Sex, Lies, and Pharmaceuticals

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Ray Moynihan. Sex, Lies, and Pharmaceuticals

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PHARMACEUTICALS

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Like Kinsey, Masters and Johnson didn’t like the word ‘frigidity’, and they chose instead to use words considered then to be less judgemental like ‘inadequacy’ or ‘dysfunction’. As for the sources of people’s sexual problems, the couple saw a complex set of causes, including physical or biological factors. But even though they were working within a medical framework, they also emphasised the psychological, social and cultural causes of sexual problems—including forces like religions, responsible for so much guilt and shame. These cultural causes, they said, more often than not placed a woman in a position where ‘she must adapt, sublimate, inhibit or even distort her natural capacity to function sexually’.20

These comments about women ‘inhibiting’ and ‘adapting’ their sexuality foreshadowed debates that would appear much later about how to define women’s sexual troubles. Where drug companies are now trying to portray an individual with low desire as having a disorder to be fixed with pills, others see the normal behaviour of a healthy woman adapting to her surroundings, whether that might be an unhappy relationship, an early experience of abuse, or simply the pressures of trying to juggle the toddlers, the job and a chronic lack of sleep. No one dismisses the pain of a woman distressed by a debilitating lack of desire, or by the damage to her relationship that can come if her partner is saddened or angered by it. The question is how to best describe, understand and deal with it.

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