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Melissa Feldmann Secrest: Welcome, everyone! On behalf of the editorial board of Psychoanalytic Perspectives, our Editors Steven Kuchuck and Deborah Pines, Associate Editor Shelly Itzkowitz, our journal readers, and me, I'd like to thank you all for making yourselves available to participate in our roundtable, “The Changing Landscape of Female Desire: The Growing Chasm Between ‘Hotness’ and Sexual Obsolescence in a Digitized, Surgicized, and Pornographized World.” We are gathered here today to discuss this changing landscape because we are each connected by our professional and personal interest in women's sexuality, and because we have each spent much time, energy, and resources writing, researching, and thinking about the complexities of female desire. Many of us work with women every day in managing their feelings about it, and many of us must live it. We hear and read so much about the underlying psychological, relational, and medical problems affecting female desire, but not so much about sociocultural phenomena such as ageism and the growing popularity of plastic surgery, or the advent of extreme forms of digital imagery. Consideration of such factors is often laced with glib mention of how women must simply learn to love themselves and feel confident. Easier said than done!
In our roundtable today we will be talking about the effects on women's desire of living in an image-driven, highly sexualized culture—one that seems to fetishize young, beauty-honed women for whom body hair, pores, wrinkles, and fat cells apparently do not exist and in which hyperbole, jokes, and shaming references to female desire are everywhere. In an aging, weight-accruing, and increasingly financially divided population, expectations around the attainment and maintenance of such an ideal abound and continue to heighten. Breast augmentation, liposuction, and genital “beautification” through labiaplasty. Botox injections, Brazilian waxing, hair weaves, and a multitude of other less-in