When is Dysfunction not Dysfunction?
December 16th, 2008 by TiamatsVision
In my opinion, we’re all unique individuals with different levels of sexual desire. If one is genuinely happy being (what “society” and the MSM considers) “undersexed” or “oversexed”, how the hell can someone else have the gall to label it as a “dysfunction”? “Really, WTF is “normal”?!
“I’ve seen this story all over the blogs—according to ACOG, 44% of women suffer from sexual dysfunction, usually low desire. But only 12% said it bothered them. Which makes a reasonable person wonder if, in a world where we respected women’s opinion of themselves as we respect men’s opinion, we wouldn’t be showing that only 12% of women have sexual problems. In fact, it seems that the researchers themselves are open about how we frame the expectations put on women in terms of what men want.
In an editorial accompanying the published study, Dr. Ingrid Nygaard, a urogynecologist and professor at the University of Utah School of Medicine, told the story of a female patient “who, not bothered herself by her lack of interest but very bothered by her husband’s distress at her lack of interest, asked, “‘Why am I the abnormal one?’”
“What I see on a near daily basis are women of all ages who feel that because their sex drive is less than their partners’, they are inadequate and in the wrong,” Nygaard said in an interview.
It flips the other way, too. If you’re a woman whose sex drive outstrips her male partner, you are also made to feel like a freak. Having been in that position in my life, I can remember swinging between feeling hideously ugly and freakish, because we’re just so used to defining “normal” as male. Luckily, we’ve gotten past thinking of women with high sex drives as dysfunctional, probably under an onslaught of porn that portrays women as insatiable. But does that mean that there are lots of women out there who are happy with a lot less, but who are being classified as dysfunctional?”