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January 27 2003 In 2001, Viagra earned Pfizer a cool $US1.5 billion ($2.53 billion). Not surprisingly, the company would like to sell its little pill to women as well as men, and envious competitors are keen to develop their own Viagra-like products for women. But there's a problem. Women do not suffer the same physical problems with sex as men, and you cannot market a drug unless there is an accepted clinical need for it. So what's a company to do? Answer: invest in a condition called "female sexual dysfunction" (FSD) and persuade experts to claim a whopping 43 per cent of women suffer from it at some time. That, at least, was the charge levelled at the drugs industry earlier this month. In a bold attack that made headlines across the world, the British Medical Journal argued that the prevalence of female sexual problems was being exaggerated by researchers with financial links to the drug industry. Though by no means the first or only case of everyday biological life being medicalised, FSD was, said the journal, "the freshest, clearest example that we have of the corporate-sponsored creation of a disease". As someone who has researched female sexuality for more than two decades, I have just one quibble with this attack: it doesn't go far enough. The pharmaceutical industry is guilty not just of cynical, money- grabbing exaggeration; it has also misunderstood the basics of female sexuality. It is not women who need to change, or be made different through drugs, but the drug industry's own outdated notion of how couples should have sex. The arguments of those who claim female sexual dysfunction is real have a veneer of sophistication. Many, for instance, like to point to four distinct categories: lack of desire, lack of arousal, pain during intercourse and lack of orgasm. It's the lack of arousal variety of "dysfunction" that Pfizer thinks Viagra can solve. But in reality none of these categories is independent of the others. Anticipating pain will kill off desire. An arousal pill may be a costly waste of time if the root cause of that lack of arousal is not addressed. My own research, based on the testimonies of thousands of women, points to a lack or orgasm during coitus as a crucial and common underlying reason why many women become disenchanted and uninterested in sex. Most women don't orgasm regularly during coitus. But does that mean they need pills to help them? Not a bit of it. Merely making women more receptive to sex will not lead to more orgasms. What might is recognising the truth about the mechanics of female orgasm. To this end, the drug industry should pay more attention to masturbation. Most women, according to my research, can have orgasms easily during masturbation. So why not also during coitus? The answer is that during masturbation women choose to stimulate the clitoral or pubic area. Only rarely, in 2 per cent of cases, does it involve vaginal penetration. In other words, the stimulation women give themselves to reach orgasm is - unlike that used by men - radically different from the stimulation most women receive during coitus. So it is not at all surprising that the rate of orgasm during coitus is low. It has been accepted for at least two centuries that women can masturbate "clitorally" to orgasm. Yet even today the definition of what we call sex is focused on coitus as the time when both people should reach orgasm via the same type of stimulation. Even in supposedly sophisticated pornographic material, clitoral stimulation is used only as a warm-up and is never depicted all the way to orgasm. It is this limited definition of sex that is at fault, not women's bodies: sex should be composed not only of coitus but also of clitoral stimulation, by hand or mouth. So why isn't it? Freud proclaimed that at puberty girls should transfer their need for clitoral stimulation to the vagina; later psychiatrists went on to label lack of orgasm during coitus a disease or a dysfunction. For these and other reasons a version of sex took hold that put male orgasm before female orgasm, reflecting the subservient position of women in society as a whole. But if notions of sex in the past excluded clitoral stimulation out of a sort of prejudice against non- reproductive activity, it is time for people to move on. In these days of equality, sex is supposed to be an act that brings two people together. Drug companies that set out to "solve the problem of female orgasmic dysfunction" risk making matters worse if they neglect this and focus simply on female readiness to participate in sex. Putting money into supposed treatments that don't work could mean financing unhappiness and divorce, leaving women's feelings invisible or unexplained, and placing men on insecure ground. It risks fostering an atmosphere of fear and confusion in which love, including intense sexual intimacy and experimentation, needlessly becomes an area of conflict rather than pleasure. Women know how to have orgasms but do not feel free to express this during sex with men. It's not arousal pills we need, but a whole new kind of physical relations with each other. Shere Hite researches female sexuality. From New Scientist, www.newscientist.com. This story was found at: http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2003/01/26/1043533953109.html Forwarded for your information. The text and intent of the article have to stand on their own merits. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. section 107, this material is distributed without charge or profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving this type of information for non-profit research and educational purposes only. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ "Do not believe in anything simply because you have heard it. 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