According to the Washington Post story, research at Harvard Med School funded by a pharma company that makes drugs for female “sexual dysfunction” finds that “Forty percent of patients have sexual concerns, and 12 percent have enough of a concern that it’s a significant dysfunction in life. This needs to be addressed.” And it needs to be addressed with drugs and by medicalizing sexuality. Fuckin’ brilliant.
The survey included “problems” like “diminished sexual desire.” Um, why is not wanting to have sex as often as cosmo seems to indicate you should or maybe even your partner thinks you should your problem that you should fix by pathologizing your body?
This topic of medicalized sexuality has probably been touched on a lot in queer history, at least, but I feel like some sort of historical and anthropological intervention to place sexuality, sickness, sexual citizenship, medicine, and capital in their proper relations.
I see this as one of those very rare areas where being at the back of the queue has been to women’s advantage. For two decades, it’s been all about fixing men’s supposedly flagging sexuallity with rather nasty drugs (and, not incidentally, wasting tons of public and private money in the process). It was surely inevitable women would get their turn to be fixed up in this particular way, since fixing women up is still one of the prime directives of this culture.
Lilly’s central point is a critical one– that is, the degree to which you can pathologize anything by skewing and narrowing the norm towards one end of a spectrum (just as has been done by normalizing anorexic weights for women). And surely some of this dysfunction is real and is actually produced by prior attempts to fix women– there’s clear evidence that breast implants, liposuction, botoxing, face lifts, labiaplasty (!!), etc., can be seriously toxic both to one’s self-image and to one’s sensual relationship to one’s own body.