A Little Pink Pill for the Ladies?

Apparently, the FDA is unimpressed by the test results for flibanserin, "a pill anticipated to become the first 'female Viagra,'" according to a CNN.com report.

The drug's manufacturer remains unsurprisingly optimistic. "We have conducted a robust program showing that flibanserin shows improvement increasing satisfying sexual events, in improving sexual desire and lowering distress," says Peter Piliero. Satisfying events? Lowering distress? Over-medicalization of sexuality, while understandable given our culture's tendency to turn every ailment into a disease, still troubles me.

Should female sexual dysfunction be treated medically? If low sex drive is troubling to the woman, of course! That we even consider low sex drive an issue worthy of resolution is, overall, a positive change from the old "it's all in her head" approach to "frigidity," or even worse, the expectation that women naturally don't (or shouldn't) enjoy sex.

However, the danger comes when we believe a pill (will this one be pink? please?) is the best or only solution. I worry that doctors and patients will be less likely to consider a range of treatment options--such as hormone monitoring and balancing, therapy, stress reduction, dietary changes, communicating effectively with one's sexual partner(s), to name a few. Availability of even a marginally effective "female Viagra" could pathologize normal variations in sex drive and permit doctors to resort to pill pushing rather than searching for root causes and offering varied, and possibly non-pharmaceutical, solutions.

But for frustrated women who feel they've already tried everything, I sincerely hope flibanserin, if it's safe, becomes available.

Violet Blue Versus Stop Porn Culture: Part 3, Critici$m and the Victim Mentality

Why are pro-porn people so opposed to any questioning of their perspective? Furthermore, why do they adopt a victim mentality about it, as though they're oppressed sex radicals whose scandalous enjoyment of porn marks them for scorn and derision? Their attitude toward porn might have been a serious point of contention in the late 70s and early 80s, when the feminist sex wars raged over issues like dildo use, bondage, and porn. Then, pro-sex activists were ostracized by their fellow feminists.

However, here in 2010, with pornography as plentiful and readily available as it is, with so many people watching porn with such frequency, how are those viewers in any way victims of anti-porn scorn? How are pro-porn supporters members of a marginalized minority?

They're not. But Violet Blue doesn't let that stop her from portraying herself and her fellow porn lovers as downtrodden sexual freedom fighters. She tweeted about their negative treatment in this column in the Boston Herald, for example.

Of course, anyone who follows online snits knows that Violet Blue doesn't take criticism well. Beyond a touchy ego, though, what's with the victim mentality and inability to accept even valid, constructive criticism?

Well, pro-porn activists start with an acceptable premise, rightly asserting that sexuality is still repressed in our culture. Sure, we can access idealized, airbrushed, fetishized image of sex presented in porn. But women's sexuality, particularly a liberated and honest sexuality, is curiously absent from scene. Honestly, I don't know exactly what that would look like. I don't think anyone does.

The sexuality we do see expressed throughout our culture and particularly in porn is still predominantly phallocentric. It's the "Samantha syndrome," where being a sexually liberated woman means acting like a man. Because only men are free to express themselves sexually--and a narrow, masculine sexuality, at that--that's the only model we have for what a sexually liberated woman might look like. I guess pro-porn folks believe that protecting this fictional "sexual freedom" is more important than trying to imagine new sexual options.

For example, they could support sexual freedom by pressuring the porn industry to feature more diverse performers. They could try to get porn producers to treat performers more humanely by offering better pay, benefits, and working conditions. They could try to discourage the production of Max Hardcore-type gross-out porn. But instead, they aim their vitriol at academic organizations like Stop Porn Culture. Because pro-porn folks so value "sexual freedom," they interpret anti-porn activists, not the huge porn industry that now largely defines what is sexually attractive in our culture, as oppressive.

Why don't they consider the many other ways sexual freedom is being threatened, like

• abstinence-only sex ed. policies
• rampant photoshopping that creates unrealistic images of the (usually) female body wherever we look
• how sexual difference, like sexual orientation or polyamory or consensual BDSM, is still constructed as deviance?

These are all oppressions, all ways that sexuality suffers. But if porn looks enough like "sexual freedom," if the porn industry keeps repeating that porn is sexual freedom, then opposition will continue to be interpreted as an attack on sexual freedom. It's as if pro-porn forces can't distinguish between sexual behaviors and identities, many of which remain marginalized and stigmatized, and sexual media, which have little to do with sex and more to do with money. Yet pro-porn folks conflate these two, as if porn itself were a marginalized sexual identity.

Or maybe it is all about money. Perhaps "oppressed" pro-porn advocates protest so loudly because rising anti-porn sentiment would eat into their profits. In a clear example of pro-porn's symbiosis with the porn industry, one of the winners of Blue's "Our Porn, Ourselves" video contest is herself a porn star. Blue, too, has an economic incentive to generate interest in porn and inspire people to defend it. Writing a book on porn and having porn sites advertising on one's homepage likely encourage a more zealous defense. I'm not sure anti-porn academics have any such financial incentive, as anti-porn forces (especially feminist ones) do not have a wealthy and powerful political lobby or millions of willing consumers, unlike the porn industry.

If you're riding the coat tales of a $10 billion business, I suppose you might want to cultivate the appearance of oppression. It certainly makes for better press. After all, who would listen to the pro-porn argument if they prefaced it by acknowledging the prevalence of porn and the strength of the industry? And Violet Blue craves coverage. I guess shouting oppression garners attention while obscuring that unconditional, uncritical support for porn, rather than being sexually liberated, is merely anti-intellectual and money-grubbing.

Perhaps pro-porn folks have even more in common with Tea Partiers and Sarah Palin than I'd thought.

(Thanks, Kristie, for the dialogue that evolved into this post!)

Geez Spot

Lately, the media has given the g-spot the Bigfoot treatment, with crackpots coming out of the woodwork to discuss the likelihood of its existence. If you’ve looked at the British “study” that sparked this latest round of media attention, you’d notice that the “research” involved no physiological study at all. The research was merely a survey--and not a particularly well-crafted one at that. The questions, the lead researcher admits, might be problematic.

In that case, shouldn’t the researchers--and members of the media--frame the conclusions as, well, inconclusive?

As if women’s sexuality weren't schizophrenic enough in our culture, we have another pseudo-scientific study to muddy those waters. Regardless of how one interprets the results, the study seems designed to make women feel bad about their sexuality. Women who do have g-spots are now told that, like the Tooth Fairy, this source of pleasure may not actually exist. Women who don’t experience pleasure from their g-spots now have no reason, in theory, to explore themselves in that way or to encourage their partners to do so. Guys who have fumbled for but never found it are off the hook now.

One discouraging response I’ve seen in the media to this study was on The View, when Barbara Walters said that women should be relieved by this research because now the g-spot is “one less thing to worry about”:

Wouldn't it be more of a relief to be fulfilled sexually, whether that involved g-spot stimulation, or being bound in leather restraints, or dressing in a chipmunk outfit? Wouldn't it be more of a relief to speak honestly and intelligently about sex, rather than tittering like embarrassed schoolboys when the subject comes up (pun intended)? Wouldn't it be more of a relief to have a media that focused on facts, rather than faux science? Or perhaps those are simply the things that would be a relief to me. Except for the chipmunk suit thing... no offense to the furries.

In our culture that simultaneously demands the sexualization of women while tacitly condemning most healthy and informed expressions of their sexuality, it’s not surprising that women feel pressure to conform to a certain (unachievable) sexual ideal. However, I’m not sure that having a g-spot—or finding it, or enjoying it, or even believing in it—is an integral part of that ideal.

Misleading "research" and the misguided media attention it engenders should not be part of the ongoing conversation/shouting match about sexuality.