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The idea for convening a roundtable on female sexual desire arrived, as do so many ideas, with the growing and increasingly conscious sense that a very real and hugely impactful experience was being shared by many but not being effectively discussed. I was seeing in my own practice and in my own life, the ramifications of new technologies in media and elective/vanity medicine and of the increasing presence of pornography, specifically cyber porn, and “softer-core” advertising images, but I wasn't seeing it addressed analytically except on an individual rather than societal level (i.e., the proliferation of “sex tips” for aging women; hormone replacement advice and the idea that flagging sexual desire was either an individual pathology or was one to be addressed by helping the individual to feel better about herself and to work on her relationship).
I was experiencing my culture as being less friendly and more critical of aging and “non-hot” women in many new forms: websites and blogs specifically created to judge and/or demean users based on their hotness quotient; in increasingly accessible, affordable hard-core online porn and in soft-core pornography in the form of “men's magazines,” such as GQ, Maxim, and Sports Illustrated, which rank and idolize gorgeous, young, preternaturally thin, photo-shopped women in bikinis; in a seemingly exponential bombardment by advertisers in the form of billboards and digitally enhanced, 12-foot-tall photographs of teenagers wearing thongs and lingerie, addressing us longingly from the windows of every Victoria's Secret across America; of the “unsightly cellulite” and “real-life” bodies of female celebrities caught by gotcha paparazzi and then displayed for public shaming in any one of the
hundreds of online sites or gossip rags; and in movies, TV shows, and comedic acts that highlighted, with the affability of a shared cultural joke, how terribly funny the aging desire of “cougars” and of “grannies” such as Betty White is. Thes