43% of US Women Have “Sexual Dysfunction”

There’s a new study that’s just been released that is reporting the above fact: 43% of American women have some kind of sexual dysfunction (SD). Here’s a snippet of an article about the study:

In addition to asking the women standardized questions about their sexual health, the researchers used a Female Sexual Distress Scale to measure the women’s levels of personal distress related to their sex lives, such as feeling of unhappiness, anger, guilt, frustration, embarrassment, and worry.

Some level of SD was reported by 43 percent of respondents; 39 percent reported low levels of desire, 26 percent had arousal problems and 21 percent had problems with achieving orgasm. But only 12 percent reported distress related to any of these problems. “Sexual problems are common in women, but problems associated with personal distress, those which are truly bothersome and affect a woman’s quality of life, are much less frequent,” said study leader, Dr. Jan Shifren, an associate professor of obstetrics, gynecology and reproductive biology at Harvard Medical School and director of the Vincent Menopause Program at Massachusetts General Hospital, both in Boston, in a news release. “For a sexual concern to be considered a medical problem, it must be associated with distress, so it’s important to assess this in both research studies and patient care.”

With a percentage number that high, I want to know – dysfunctional compared to what? Compared to the rapid moan and groan of porn performers, the persistent cultural belief that orgasm from intercourse is ideal, or less concrete examples of the pressure that is exerted on women to conform to an ideal of sexual performance that is imagined?

With numbers that high, I think it’s essential that we question the very basis of the study. Desire, arousal, and orgasm problems don’t exist in a vacuum. They are relative to a woman’s own expectations, cultural expectations, and in comparison with her partners and peers (or at least in comparison with people’s self reporting, which might be different than their reality). Is the fact that some women take upwards of half on hour to reach orgasm a “problem”? Says who?

Granted, I have committed the sin of not reading the study before blogging about it (I think there’s a special place in hell for bloggers who do that), so this is a knee jerk reaction to an article about the study, not the study itself. Towards the end of the article there is some discussion of “it’s all relative” – and it’ll be interesting to see how the study compares to the media attention its getting (I’ll bet there’s a bit of a disconnect). That said, I can’t help but be furious about this kind of thing – the number 43% constitutes a norm as far I’m concerned. This doesn’t necessarily mean that folks should just chill out and not try to improve women’s sexual function and pleasure – after all, there are plenty of normative things that aren’t good (sexual assault, for one). But it does mean that it’s important to look at the underlying stuff. This probably can’t be fixed with a pill – and incidentally, the study was funded by “Boehringer Ingelheim Gmb H, a German company with an experimental medicine for pre-menopausal women with low sexual desire not caused by a medical condition or drug” (quoted directly from the end of the article, which you can read in full here).