Commentary: Driving Into a Pond

The strong responses to my comment about female sexuality, in both the Roundtable discussion and in its responses, surprised me! But I will attempt to respond simply.

It is my view that the language we use to define female sexuality needs to be examined and perhaps changed. In medicine, as in psychology, the terms we use to define a condition also plot the directions we take in solving the pathology. Sexual dysfunction in women is different from sexual dysfunction in men. The term sex “drive” seems a masculine one to me: To start it up, put the pedal to the metal; to straighten it out, restart it; supercharge it; aim it; rev it up; and park it—all ways in which we can understand the term “drive,” and, as an extension, sex drive.

In my view, women's sexuality could use another term. Our sexual experience as seen, for example, in orgasm is complex, multifactorial, and less driven by identifiable physiologic pathways. Psychology plays a much greater role in achieving orgasm in women. The complexity, depth, and multifactorial aspects of female sexuality led me to construct the pond metaphor. The pond concept is both illustrative that female sexuality is perhaps suboptimally defined as sex drive and is also a large, mysterious, wet, and ever-changing image, one that either wants company and allows access or disallows it. The pond can be a very powerful one! It doesn't have to be the passive thing people seem to have taken my metaphor to mean.

Masculine appropriation of the language of sex can be damaging to the process of elucidating female sexuality and to the process of ameliorating problems, whether medically, pharmaceutically, psychologically, or through social change.

My point featured in the Roundtable, perhaps poorly understood, or poorly stated, is very simple: Ultimately, we will never fully understand and address women's sexuality if we define women's sexuality in masculine terms.