Medicalization Of Sexuality Research Articles

The association between pre‐diagnostic levels of psychological distress and adverse effects after radical prostatectomy

AbstractObjectivesTo prospectively analyse the associations between pre‐diagnostic levels of anxiety and depression and patient‐reported urinary and sexual adverse effects after radical prostatectomy in a population‐based setting.Patients and MethodsIn three Norwegian county hospitals, men referred with a suspicion of prostate cancer were asked to fill out a patient‐reported outcome measurement (PROM) questionnaire prior to prostate biopsy. Those who later underwent radical prostatectomy were stratified into three distress groups according to their Hopkins Symptom Checklist 5‐score. Additional PROM questionnaires, including the EPIC‐26 to measure adverse effects, were collected at 6 and 12 months postoperatively. Multivariable mixed models were estimated and post hoc pairwise comparisons performed to explore differences in adverse effects between distress groups.ResultsA total of 416 men were included at baseline and of those, 365 (88%) returned questionnaires at 6 months and 360 (87%) at 12 months. After adjusting for confounders, men with high distress at baseline had worse urinary incontinence domain score (58.9 vs. 66.8, p = 0.028), more urinary bother (64.7 vs. 73.6, p = 0.04) and a higher risk of using incontinence pads (70.6% vs. 54.2%, p = 0.034) at 6 months than those with low distress. There was no difference in the sexual domain scores between distress groups postoperatively, but the high‐distress group expressed more sexual bother (24.9 vs. 37.5, p = 0.015) and the intermediate‐distress group had a greater probability of using sexual medications or devices (63.8% vs. 50.0%, p = 0.015) than the low‐distress group at 6 months. At 12 months scores generally improved slightly and differences between distress groups were less evident.ConclusionMen with higher levels of anxiety and depression before prostate biopsy report more urinary and sexual adverse effects after radical prostatectomy. This should be considered both in treatment decision‐making and during follow‐up after radical prostatectomy.

A comprehensive interventional program based on the needs and concerns related to female genital cosmetic surgeries: protocol for a multistage mixed methods study

BackgroundDissatisfaction with one's body and the subsequent rise in the cosmetic surgery trend pose significant public health concerns today. One unusual cosmetic surgical procedure involves enhancing the genital area. Numerous healthy women and girls have recently sought Genital Cosmetic Surgery (GCS) for beauty or improved sexual performance. There is a concern that this phenomenon may be linked to developing a new standard for vulvovaginal appearance. This stringent standard could potentially adversely affect women's mental health in the future, growing feelings of insecurity and possibly leading teenagers to consider plastic surgery.Implementing empowering and awareness-raising programs for women and girls is crucial, especially in light of the constantly evolving gender norms and the medicalization of sexuality and beauty as social constructs. It is essential that such training is integrated into comprehensive sexual education programs for adolescents. These efforts align perfectly with the SDG, recognizing that education in sexual and reproductive health, ensuring access to health, and empowering women are fundamental rights for women and girls. To accomplish these objectives, we will conduct this study to elucidate the needs and concerns related to the increasing trend of GCS. By doing so, we can concentrate on the factors motivating women to undergo GCS. This approach will enable us to develop effective interventions to empower women and girls considering GCS, thus enhancing their sexual and reproductive health.Methods and objectivesThe objectives of this multistage exploratory sequential mixed-method study will be structured into three phases:First phase: qualitative study.In-depth interviews will be conducted to elucidate the needs and concerns associated with GCS with women with a history of GCS, spouses of willing participants, and women actively seeking these procedures.A literature review in parallel with the qualitative phase will be conducted to gain insights into the needs and concerns of women worldwide considering GCS.Second phase: program design.To formulate an intervention grounded in the primary priorities identified during the qualitative stage and informed by the literature review.To prioritize the needs and concerns of women seeking GCS and to validate and endorse the intervention through input from an expert panel.Third phase: quantitative study.To assess and determine the effectiveness of the intervention designed to address the needs and concerns of women applying for GCS procedures.DiscussionThis study marks the first attempt to design and assess an intervention addressing the needs and concerns of cosmetic surgeries performed on the female genital and reproductive system. The hope is that this study's compilation and implementation will yield substantial evidence and documentation regarding the impact of educational interventions on women's and girls' sexual and reproductive empowerment. Given the rising prevalence of GCS among unmarried teenagers, this approach is of utmost significance. It underscores the necessity for gynecological and midwifery service providers to have comprehensive guidance on GCS. Such guidance can be an essential resource for healthcare providers in this field.

Understanding Hypoactive Sexual Desire Disorder (HSDD) in Women: Etiology, Diagnosis, and Treatment.

Hypoactive Sexual Desire Disorder (HSDD) is a complex and multifaceted condition that significantly impacts the sexual well-being and overall quality of life of women. This comprehensive review aims to provide a holistic understanding of HSDD by exploring its etiology, diagnostic criteria, treatment approaches, and broader societal implications. The review delves into the intricate interplay of biological factors, including hormonal changes and neurotransmitter imbalances, that contribute to HSDD. Psychological factors, such as relationship issues, body image, and stress, are examined with sociocultural factors like societal norms, cultural influences, and media portrayals of sexuality. Diagnostic criteria and assessment methods, including The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fifth Edition criteria, and self-report questionnaires, are explored to facilitate accurate identification of HSDD and differentiation from other sexual disorders. The impact of HSDD on women's quality of life and relationships is examined, highlighting the emotional strain and interpersonal challenges associated with the disorder. Societal and personal consequences of untreated HSDD underscore the need for increased awareness and support. Treatment approaches encompass non-pharmacological interventions such as cognitive-behavioral therapy, sex therapy, and couples therapy and pharmacological interventions like hormone therapy and selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors. Novel treatments like bremelanotide, flibanserin, and integrative strategies combining psychotherapy and lifestyle changes are discussed. Challenges and controversies surrounding HSDD, including the lack of consensus on diagnostic criteria, debates about the medicalization of sexuality, ethical concerns regarding pharmaceutical interventions, and cultural considerations, are addressed. Future directions in research, including advances in neurobiological understanding, personalized medicine, long-term treatment studies, and destigmatization initiatives, offer promising pathways for enhancing the management of HSDD.

Medicalization of sexuality and sexual health: A perspective review

Sexuality has become a medical issue in the context of aging due to a variety of aspects, such as growing life expectancy, an optimistic societal paradigm that indorses sexuality as significant for the superiority of life with age, and the medicalization of sexuality with the emergence of remedial medicines to extravagance sexual dysfunction. At any age, a reduction in the desire for sexual activity or inadequate performance of sexual intercourse is considered atypical and requires a medicinal treatment response. However, despite concerns that this is leading to an unhealthy obsession with sexuality from a medical perspective, this line of thinking is likely to continue. In this context, people can identify and take advantage of sexual problems. Sexual desire and performance are affected by normal physiological changes associated with aging in both genders. Medical experts must understand these changes to optimize sexual functioning in older patients. Sexual health can only be improved by addressing both sexual rights and enjoyment, even in the current politically charged context. Through legislation, programming, and lobbying, we may all work to enhance health, happiness, and quality of life by fostering more positive associations between sexual health, sexual rights, and sexual pleasure. This calls for not just a thorough understanding of the real-world consequences of these ideas' interconnectivity, but also conceptual, individual, and systemic approaches that properly acknowledge and alleviate the problems imposed on people's lives due to insufficient consideration of these links. This review describes the factors associated with aging and sexuality, the normalization and medicalization of sexual health, and unusual situations associated with aging, including institutionalized care and the prospects of elder abuse.

Medicalization of Sexuality on Clinic Websites : Focused on the Promotion of Genital Cosmetic Surgery

본 연구는 의료법 개정 이후 급증해온 여성의원 및 남성의원의 온라인 의료광고에 대한 담론분석을 통해 사회역사적 구성물로서의 성(性)의 의료화와 성별 고정관념을 고찰하였다. 연구자료는 국내 3대 포털사이트에서 ‘여성의원’ 및 ‘남성의원’을 검색하여 우선순위 및 적극성을 고려해 선정된 총 14곳(여성의원 6곳, 남성의원 8곳) 의원 웹사이트의 성기성형 의료광고물이다. 연구방법은 비판적 담론분석과 여성주의 질적 내용분석법을 활용하였다. 연구결과, 의원 웹사이트의 성기성형 광고홍보물은 공통적인 ‘의료광고를 통해 표상되는 성의 의료화’와 성별에 따라 ‘의료광고를 통해 확대 재생산되는 성차별적 고정관념’이라는 두 영역으로 나누어 의료사회학적으로 해석할 수 있었다. 본 연구는 성이의료화되는 양상과 그 과정에서 영속화될 수 있는 성별 규범을 확인하였다는 데에서 의의를 찾을 수 있다. 의과학의 권위는 의료광고를 개인의 건강과 직결시킴은 물론 성적인 몸을 상업적으로 의료화하며 사회의 성차별을 정당화하는 성차를 재생산할 수 있으므로, 이에 대한 사전심의 및 사후관리가 요구된다.

Therapists' and non-therapists' constructions of heterosex: A qualitative story completion study.

Little research has examined the discourses that shape therapists' sense-making around heterosex. This paper explores the discourses of sexuality and gender underpinning therapists' and non-therapists' responses to a sexual experimentation scenario in a heterosexual relationship. It also considers the value of the novel technique of story completion (SC), in which participants are asked to write a story in response to a hypothetical scenario, for qualitative psychology and psychotherapy research. This research used a comparative SC design (Kitzinger & Powell, 1995). Participants were sequentially presented with and invited to complete two story stems: one in which a male character suggested 'trying something new' to his female partner and one in which the female character made the suggestion. The stems were otherwise identical. A total of 100 SCs were written by 49 (28 female; 21 male) therapists and 51 (29 female; 22 male) non-therapists. Participants were recruited mainly via UK-based email lists and Facebook groups, and therapeutic training organizations, and the data were analysed using a feminist post-structuralist thematic analysis (Braun & Clarke, 2006). Both groups of participants drew on heteronormative discourses of sexuality and gender to make sense of the stem. Engaging in sexual experimentation was often depicted as a demonstration of being normal. In some stories written by women, sex was framed as a site for negotiating 'equality' and reciprocity in relationships. Therapists were more likely than non-therapists to frame 'difficulties' within relationships as opportunities for personal growth and increased emotional depth, and their stories included greater emotional complexity. These findings raise questions about practitioner training and whether it results in therapists drawing on narrow and restrictive discourses of heterosex in clinical practice. Training on sexual issues is largely absent from non-specialist practitioner training courses, which potentially means therapists are ill-equipped to respond to clients' anxiety about sexual issues. Evidence from this and other research indicates that therapists' sense-making around heterosexual sexual relationships is underpinned by narrow and restrictive discourses that entrench traditional gender relations and limit sexual agency. Psychologists are increasingly taking up positions of clinical leadership and are looked to for models of best practice. Drawing on theorizations of sexual difficulties, and of anxieties about sexual practice, that challenge traditional gender and heteronorms, and the commodification and medicalization of sex, is important for effective psychological leadership relating to the treatment of sexual issues and the furthering of social justice agendas.

From Sin to Sick: Digital Judaism and Pornography

ABSTRACTThis article explores how a Jewish religious website dedicated to solving pornography addiction negotiates religion/tradition and science/technological modernity. Further, the article discusses how medicalization of sexuality is used to resolve inherent tensions in the practice of digital usage. Medicalization language transforms the GuardYourEyes.com website from a forbidden medium for ultra-Orthodox members into a clinical space, a tool for healing. Furthermore, medicalization language allows religious digital prosumers to speak freely about sexuality. By framing sexuality as a “problem of truth” (Foucault, 1998), the ultra-Orthodox authors of GuardYourEyes.com can speak about sex, without being guilty of breaking the admonition that forbids speaking about sex. However, this open discussion serves as a tool to discipline and regulate sexual behavior, thus maintaining the accepted community norms, albeit in a way that is revolutionary for this community. Furthermore, by supporting religious language with medical language, religion and science blur in a way that could potentially undermine both.

Error Made Beautiful

Error Made Beautiful Eric Longfellow (bio) Intersex: A Memoir Aaron Apps Tarpaulin Sky Press www.tarpaulinsky.com/aaron-apps/ 88 Pages; Print, $16.00 Aaron Apps’s Intersex: A Memoir attends to the points of intersection between object and subject. What we quickly come to discover is that these points serve not really as points at all but rather as a “contract […] to draw in the loose, sexing silt,” or, perhaps, as “grooves folding into grooves in a harsh ecology of funhouse mirrors.” Again: “A nauseating, beautiful knotting that knots. A flash of contingent tongues, slick with saliva and formed like clay, working out as they knot along.” And thus, we move through an achronological history of Apps’s encounters with various forms of violence both biological and not, both conscious and not, both insistent and not. Oftentimes these violences interweave. A description of a barbecue is given early on: “We ate silver fat. We ate gray-pink animal,” the narrator tells us, with “sauce on us like we are wounds.” And this blends into graphic vignettes involving live alligators, diarrhea in department store bathrooms, domesticity, dissected animals, and the medicalization of sex. With a page of epigraphs from past to present recognizable thinkers such as Merleau-Ponty, Sarah Ahmed, and Simone De Beauvoir (the latter in line with a rather timely third wave resurgence), Apps makes no illusions as to the theoretical underpinnings of his work. What’s interesting about these particular “epigraphs,” aside from a phenomenological thread tying them together, is that they come on page 11 of the text after an introductory epigraph by Clarice Lispector, which opens the text: “Not to be devoured is the secret objective of a whole existence.” This quote is followed by a series of seven sections making up what Apps refers to as a narrative line. This first of these narrative lines, prior to the second set of epigraphs, is the before-mentioned scene titled Barbeque Catharsis. A final epigraph from Georges Bataille on page 19 reads, “The animal is in the world like water in water,” and thus, the reader enters into a tangled web of connections where Apps stumbles between metaphors groping, as it were, for something that sticks, something that “stains deep into the flesh-sanded skin.” Whether Apps turns to the zoo, the deep sea, architecture, grammar, photography, it would be easy to dismiss these incursions as hackneyed or banal as they seem to get lost before they can serve much of a purpose, but to do so would be to overlook the ways that these tenuous connections between slipping relations allow the reader the leeway to traverse what may turn out to be a map of sorts, a loose cartography of lines and points, which move beyond the spaces they mark. Apps makes it very clear, though, that he is not searching for or trying to outline a point of origin in his discussion of intersex and the issues the narrator faces, but rather, he explains that the narrator is seduced by the rhythm of repetition: “I say this thing that I say about the womb not to make the memory before memory foundational. I say this not to ground anything at a point. I say this because the chant that flows from that point amid points is incantatory when I say it. And I continue to say it all the while as the lines play their music.” This distinction becomes important as this searching and stumbling between metaphors takes on a rhythm of its own—a rhythm that lulls the reader, coaxing them gently out of the purported comforts of identity, of the categorical, and into a material world of bodies. Put differently, in a section that briefly explores different fruits before abandoning the topic and moving on, “And I say that inside of the orange when you remove the meat there is a cave full of shadows full of caves that extrude fluids between the folds between folds in the smallest of intestines.” Here we see just a momentary glimpse of the ability to focus something continually shifting, too vast and multiple to name, into this private and vulnerable thing. Later, we...

A feminist information engagement framework for gynecological cancer patients

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to present a three-part framework of information engagement for situated gynecological cancers. These particular cancers intertwine with medicalization of sexuality and gender power dynamics, situating information behaviors and interactions in women’s socio-health perceptions. Using Kavanagh and Broom’s feminist risk framework, the framework establishes functional and temporal parameters for sense-making and information engagement. Design/methodology/approach – This paper employs a structured, reiterative literature review with emergent thematic analysis. Nine indices from medicine, information studies, and sociology were searched using combinations of five terms on cervical cancer (CC) and 14 terms on information engagement in the title, abstract, and subject fields. Results were examined on a reiterative basis to identify emergent themes pertaining to knowledge development and information interactions. Findings – Environmentally, social stigma and gender roles inhibit information seeking; normalizing CC helps integrate medical, moral, and sexual information. Internally, living with the dichotomy between “having” a body and “being” a body requires high-trust information resources that are presented gradually. Actively, choosing to make or cede medical decision-making requires personally relevant information delivered in the form of concrete facts and explanations. Research limitations/implications – The study covers only one country. Originality/value – This study’s information framework and suggestions for future research encourage consideration of gender power dynamics, medicalization of sexuality, and autonomy in women’s health information interactions.

Philosophy of Sex

AbstractSex raises fundamental philosophical questions about topics such as personal identity and well‐being, the relationship between emotion and reason, the nature of autonomy and consent, and the dual nature of persons as individuals but also social beings. This article serves as an overview of the philosophy of sex in the English‐speaking philosophical tradition and explicates philosophical debate in several specific areas: sexual objectification, rape and consent, sex work, sexual identities and queer theory, the medicalization of sexuality, and polyamory. It situates these topics in a framework of shifting cultural attitudes and argues for the importance of the philosophy of sex. It ends with some suggestions about future research, particularly with regard to the changing nature of pornography and sexual justice in legal theory.

The Medicalization of Sexuality: Conceptual, Normative, and Professional Issues

(1996). The Medicalization of Sexuality: Conceptual, Normative, and Professional Issues. Annual Review of Sex Research: Vol. 7, No. 1, pp. 252-282.

The Sexualization of the Medical

The medicalization of sex is part of an already-in-place discursive problem that can be illuminated by looking at efforts to sexualize the medical. “Erectile dysfunction,” “female sexual dysfunction,” and their real and imagined pharmacopia, do not constitute the medicalization of sex; they are effects of sex already having been—to borrow a term from Peter Conrad (1992)—healthicized. The equation of sex and health, as cultural common sense, has made health seem like the natural discourse for thinking about sex in the first place. Reversing the terms of this special issue, and using the methodology of rhetorical analysis, this article looks at the person with cancer as a sexualized subject—someone whose health is represented as intimately tied to his or her sex life. It suggests that, in public discourse—and notably in movies and on television—sex is the comic ending of the illness narrative. In light of this narrative move, the ability to have good sex joins the ability to be positive and cheerful as a (Western) cultural imperative of illness experience, in general, and cancer experience, in particular. Public representations of illness virtues often fail, then, to answer realistically the compelling question, “How shall I be ill?”

Transformations in the Medicalization of Sex: HIV Prevention between Discipline and Biopolitics

This article examines transformations in HIV prevention strategies from the 1980s to the present. Drawing on the concepts of medicalization (Conrad, 2007), discipline and biopolitics (Foucault, 1976/1988), and biomedicalization (Clarke, Fishman, Fosket, Mamo, & Shim, 2003), it explores the shift from behavioral to biomedical and surgical prevention techniques—a shift symbolic of a more general trend toward the biomedicalization of sexuality. It argues that, although biomedical and surgical approaches (chemoprevention and male circumcision) have certain benefits, their efficacy is limited and uncertain. They do not guarantee individual protection. The aim is no longer the modification of sexual behavior through disciplinary strategies aimed at the development of subjective and sexual awareness, but the modification of health behavior as a positive response to biomedical recommendations. Through the use of preventative or curative drugs, the same type of sexual awareness is seen as no longer required.

Cultures of the Erotic in Spain 1898–1939 (review)

Reviewed by: Cultures of the Erotic in Spain 1898–1939 Lou Charnon-Deutsch Zubiaurre, Maite. Cultures of the Erotic in Spain 1898–1939. Nashville: Vanderbilt UP, 2012. 398 pp. As Jo Labanyi has observed and Maite Zubiaurre amply demonstrates in this long-awaited study, modern Spain is a “ghost” story in terms of our knowledge of popular culture, but this comprehensive exhibition and interpretation of erotic culture goes a long way towards demystifying certain chapters of the nearly lost, [End Page 605] “ghostly” areas of culture occluded during the Franco regime. It does this in a prose that is both readable and succinct and at the same time adventurously thought provoking, combining engaging discussions of canonical texts of early sexologists of every stripe followed by a compendious survey, copiously illustrated and individually analyzed, of the multifarious subculture of erotica that flooded the market in Spain as in all of Europe during the modernist period about which we know so little. Among the author’s unique contributions is her insistence on the blurring of the boundary between scientific sexology promulgated by prominent figures such as Gregorio Marañón and others, and popular knowledge generated in other forms of literature: pseudo-scientific lectures, manuals and pamphlets, sicaliptic fiction, and all forms of visual culture. The “two Spains,” symbolized by the “circumspect noventayochistas” and the sicaliptic bohemianism of, for example, Álvaro Retana, coexisted and fed off each other (10), giving us a new lens that Zubiaurre dubs the “third Spain” with which to view the sexual conflicts of the period she studies. The story begins helpfully by tracing the early, uneasy, reception of the new study of sexology in Spain, much of it imported from Germany and Great Britain, and exploring the resistant attitudes but also the ambiguity toward sexual matters as they worked their way into the texts of Spanish thinkers. Among the topics necessarily forming the basis for this discussion in addition to foreign influences are Gregorio Marañón’s famous lectures Tres ensayos sobre la vida sexual, the contributions of the Instituto de Medicina Social, numerous articles on sexual themes in scientific journals and pamphlets, conferences on eugenics, and a wide range of pseudo-scientific texts on sexual education, including the “temas sexuales” promulgated by Ángel Martín de Lucenay that all contributed to the growing “medicalization of sex” as normative thinking on sex in the nineteenth century gave way to non-normative sexual knowledge and cultural practices in the twentieth (43). Special attention in chapters two and three is devoted to the reception of psychoanalytic thinking on sex stemming from the writings of Sigmond Freud, Havelock Ellis, and other important sexologists circulating in Spain. Despite their knowledge of imported sexology, however, Spanish intellectual leaders Ramón y Cajal, Marañón, and Ortega kept sexuality at a distance through various sublimations that characterized the “high modernist puritanism” evident even among staunch republicans like Gregorio Marañón (85). This fascinating discussion of the way Spanish canonical writers kept “sex at a distance” is followed in later chapters by what comprised the outer limits of that distance, which obviously these men deplored but could not altogether suppress (59). Even if it rarely erupts to the surface of their writing it never disappears and one of the accomplishments of this book is the successful exploration of what lies below the surface of the writing of elite thinkers on love and sex who sought to “tackle the new sexual conflict, neutralize its disruptive agenda, and preserve the solid virtues of traditionalist Spain” (85). Each in his own fashion constructed philosophical and scientific systems within western heteronormativity and essentialist notions of women’s and men’s mission that Zubiaurre concludes are misogynistic. If the first few chapters display an engagement with the texts of eminent sexologists in which the many sides of the question of reception of sexual knowledge are explored at length, chapter four on the “sexual pedagogy” of postcards [End Page 606] plunges the reader into the products of visual culture that elite sexologists looked upon with dismay. Erotic postcards are catalogued according to their libidinous reception by a wider public (including female consumers) increasingly open to sicaliptic culture, and then compared with...

Activism on the medicalization of sex and female genital cosmetic surgery by the New View Campaign in the United States

The New View Campaign is a grassroots initiative begun in 1999 to challenge the over-medicalization of sex in the wake of publicity following the release of Viagra. This paper describes the history of the campaign and its activities, which started with analysing the construction of female sexual dysfunction, and moved on to develop a critical understanding of sexuality as a market for the pharmaceutical industry to exploit. The campaign has also had much to say about a positive model for sexuality, sex education, treatment of sex problems, and sex research. From 2006, we began to look at the new female cosmetic genital surgery industry. In 2008, we wrote letters to many government and medical professional groups expressing our concerns about female cosmetic genital surgery and asking for support. We also organised a demonstration outside the office of a New York surgeon who was doing this surgery and developed a webpage as a resource for students, scholars, journalists and activists. In 2009, we held an event in an art gallery that celebrated artists who support and encourage female sexual diversity. Supporters and colleagues of the campaign have published books and articles, and created visual and training materials, including a project called Vulvagraphics.

Sexual Pharmacology: Love Potions, Pills, and Poisons

The human population is increasingly exposed to chemicals that affect sexual function, from industrial pollutants to life-saving pharmaceuticals. First, the products that can cause dysfunction, including endocrine disruptors, drugs of abuse, and prescription medications, are reviewed. A systemic perspective proves helpful in explaining the large variability in effects and side effects of medications. Secondly, the biological treatments of sexual dysfunction are presented in light of the age-old human wish to control desire and sexual response. It is proposed that the development of the phosphodiesterase type 5 inhibitors (PDE-5 inhibitors) constitutes a turning point in this search for control. They contribute markedly to a shift from seeing sexual dysfunctions as “problems of living” to approaching them as medical disorders. The advantages and pitfalls of this “medicalization of sex” are discussed, focusing in particular on the social roles and expectations that are inherent in the disease model. Finally, the need for a systemic approach to sexual pharmacology, involving the physiological, individual, relational, and socioeconomic levels, is emphasized. A majority of patients with sexual dysfunctions first consult their primary care physician. The tension between the need for a comprehensive, systemic approach and the physician's constraints of time and expertise represents a challenge, the resolution of which is likely to determine the future of the field of sex therapy.

What Every Sex Therapist Needs To Know

This article outlines both the personal attributes and the knowledge base required by aspiring sex therapists. It focuses on the interconnected and interdependent nature of sexuality. The complex concept of social norms, a brief introduction to diagnosis and prevalence of sexual difficulties, the anatomy and physiology of sex, and the sexual response cycle are covered. Areas that are controversial or are currently being debated are identified, including concerns over the medicalization of sexuality and male/female differences. No attempt is made to cover the material in detail except to note their significance. Issue regarding therapy are left to other articles.

The Medicalization of Sex Therapy: A Call to Action for Therapists

Recent years have demonstrated both an increase in the number of medications available by prescription to address the symptoms of sexual dysfunction as well as a dramatic increase in media advertising regarding pharmacological remedies. The trend indicates increased spending by pharmaceutical companies to educate the public about the medications and a propensity for medical doctors to prescribe medications for the treatment of sexual problems without addressing the relational aspects of the dysfunction. Mental health therapy professionals object to the trend of full medicalization, but the field of sex therapy is not growing (McCarthy, 2002) and mental health professionals appear to have been lax in addressing the pressing issues that collude toward full medicalization. Help for clients with the inherent psychological and relational problems that are frequently a component or by-product of sexual dysfunction remains most frequently absent in the current medical model practice. The medicalization of sex th...

Diferenças de gênero e medicalização da sexualidade na criação do diagnóstico das disfunções sexuais

O objetivo do artigo é analisar criticamente as contribuições internacionais mais importantes e atuais que têm tomado a etapa recente da medicalização da sexualidade como tema de pesquisa. A maioria dos trabalhos centra-se na produção da categoria e do diagnóstico de "disfunção sexual", seja considerando o caso masculino, mais amplamente estudado pela via da "disfunção erétil", seja o caso feminino, muitas vezes traduzido pela ideia de uma suposta complexidade da sexualidade das mulheres. A perspectiva que utilizo tem como referência os estudos sociais da ciência e, especialmente, as contribuições da antropologia e da história da medicina. Além disso, incorpora a matriz dos estudos de gênero e ciência que tem produzido uma poderosa visão crítica da produção científica dos dois últimos séculos, revelando como os condicionantes de gênero têm atravessado a relação entre produção do conhecimento e contexto social.

The New View in Activism and Academics 10 Years On

This special issue of Feminism & Psychology presents a sampling of the type of work stimulated by The New View Campaign against the medicalization of sex, c. 2008. In this introduction, I offer a brief history of the New View Campaign (1999—2008) and show how the articles in this special issue illustrate many of its major themes. In closing, I suggest future directions for New View-inspired research and theory.