Are we really living in a free-for-all,
anything goes, sexually liberated society?
There seems to be every kind of information
about sex in virtually every magazine.
We click on porn day and night. But is this brave
new world really that liberating for women?
For all the tremendous media interest in male sexual
dysfunction and the millions invested in pharmaceutical
treatments for it a remarkably unheralded epidemic is
not discussed at all outside a few doctors’ offices.
One-third of women report “hypoactive sexual desire”.
They show little interest in sex and little desire for
it, defining that as a problem for them.
An additional 30%, some the same women,
some different women, said that they don’t
regularly reach orgasm when they want to.
Is Female Sexual Pleasure Still an Illusion?
Discussion about the value of women’s sexuality and their erotic well-being continues to be marginalised. In today’s climate, new findings on female arousal and satisfaction aren’t being reported in mainstream media. When they are brought into public debate, the case has to be made all over again that these numbers and female sexual satisfaction matter at all.
The medicalising of female orgasm in Western culture has been one means of protecting our comfortable illusions about coitus. The illusion is that the male model of sex [foreplay, penetration, and male ejaculation] is good for women as well as for men.
The reality is that it generally fails to produce orgasm in women, and as a result, a series of women’s sexual complaints, such as hysteria, have emerged.
Fuck Me Till I Come
Doctors would carry out the genital massage of women to orgasm as one medical treatment for hysteria, a practice performed by practitioners under the paradigm that classified a women’s inability to have an orgasm during coitus as a disorder.
This belief that hysteria was a result of sexual deprivation and frustration continued unchanged until Freud, who considered childhood trauma the cause of hysteria.
In 1952, the American Psychiatric Association finally dropped the disorder from its taxonomy. However, at no time during the 2,500-year history of the disorder did practitioners question the androcentric model of sex. That happened only recently with the work of Alfred Kinsey.