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Point of View with Barb
Sumner Burstyn - September 8 2003
Medical lightbulbs can't switch off relationship
woes
I have a confession. When Viagra first came out, I gave it a go.
Purely in the interests of research, you understand.
It was an unnerving experience. The blood accelerating through
my veins to a single destination. Once there, it was as though I
had a massive migraine down below. There was a distressing intensity
that gave me a new respect for the forces that men must grapple
with regularly.
It was like being inside that old anti-male joke: if I could be
a man for a day, I'd stay home and wait for it to go away. But seriously,
if that was male sexual desire then no wonder men are from Mars.
But, of course, it's not. While Viagra's success may have been
based on a simplified answer to impotence, the if-you-build-it-they'll-come
theory, sexual relationships turn out to be more complex.
Dr Abraham Morgentaler, a urologist at Harvard Medical School,
says in his book The Viagra Myth that the drug has left a trail
of broken relationships and shattered expectations. He estimates
that sales of Viagra are down by 50 per cent and says many of his
patients have come to realise that achieving a great erection does
not solve their relationship problems. In fact, it has often made
them worse.
Another light-bulb moment in the history of medical science. Sadly
it isn't illuminating enough to halt the race to replace the lost
sales of Viagra.
Now female sexuality is about to receive a makeover. Ten pharmaceutical
companies are thought to be racing to create a feminine Viagra bonanza.
But, for now, the way is being paved by herbal supplements. First
out of the gates is Avlimil.
US print and television advertisements claim that 50 million women
suffer from sexual dysfunction. "Reclaim Your Sensuality", their
ads shriek. "They have Viagra. Now we have Avlimil."
While men were duped (although realistically, they didn't take
a lot of convincing) into believing that erectile function was the
basis of relationship success, the new products are attempting to
be a little more sophisticated. They claim to address the whole
issue of female sexual dysfunction.
Packaged like contraceptives pills and, like the Pill, designed
to be taken every day, it's as though the implication of a daily
dosage designed to keep you sexually available has passed the makers
by.
It is as if they're intent on reinventing the sexual dynamic in
relationships, reducing it to a series of treatable external impediments
to the holy grail of orgasm.
Avlimil's website states that things such as stress, depression,
childbirth, medications and hormonal fluctuations all effect sexual
arousal. Reading their blurb is like listening to your former husband's
point of view. It makes sense only if you close one eye and half
your mind in an attempt to understand the left-brain logic of it.
None of these things creates sexual dysfunction. Instead, a reduction
in sexual desire following childbirth, a bout of depression or the
hormonal fluctuations of maturing are not symptoms - they're signposts
to the complexity of each of us.
We are not purely sexual and we do not exist to satisfy sexual
desire, ours or theirs.
And that's the crux of this issue. As the advertising inevitably
increases, so will the expectations of our sexual response. As we
compare ourselves against a pharmaceutically defined norm, so will
men.
In many ways this move towards creating the entirely sexually
available woman is the logical step that began with the contraceptive
pill.
Aside from the huge gains women experienced by being able to control
conception, there was, and is, a downside to the Pill that is rarely
talked about: the subtle attitude change that men had to women when
their sexual availability opened up. This new pill will take that
underlying attitude and ratchet it up more than a few notches.
Controlled by medication, desire becomes a commodity, something
you buy not something you own. By entering the realm of women's
sexual response and defining it by diagnosis and dosage, the chemists
are plunging into privacy and changing what it means to think and
feel, the very position of sex in a relationship altered by advertising.
This is not medical science; it's a cruel vaudeville, a bastardisation
of the promise of medicine to resolve the world's ills.
In reality, 20 per cent of women are thought to suffer from medically
treatable sexual dysfunction. The rest of us, the ones the marketing
is aimed at, are no more dysfunctional than my neutered cat. Sexual
desire ebbs and flows, sometimes it's seasonal, sometimes lack of
desire is the mind's way of inducing rest from the melee.
And sometimes it's simply an inner voice telling you that enough
is enough.
While the makers of Viagra say their female sexual dysfunction
drug is still a couple of years away, let's hope for a new kind
of sexual revolution. One where we see ourselves holistically, as
sensual not sexual, as creatures capable of rare intimacy, the type
of closeness that overrides the shallow pharmaceutical definition
of desire.
ENDS
© Barbara Sumner Burstyn, 2003
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Barbara Sumner
Burstyn.
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