BY Monica Shores
November 18, 2008
2,934 views
4 Comments

British doctors are now planning to screen their male patients for menopause (called “andropause” in men), which renders its victims “tired, depressed and lacking in libido.” The medical professionals seem more concerned with increased susceptibility to diabetes than to not enough sex, but that component still got me thinking. I’ve heard men actually look forward to old age because they believe they’ll finally get a break from a lifelong obsession with getting laid. (Although there are plenty of stereotypical “dirty” old men for whom andropause has done nothing.)

Anyway, right on the heels of that news was this piece in the Washington Post claiming nearly half of women have sexual problems but most of them don’t even have the good sense to be bothered by it. Coincidentally, this study was commissioned by a company that makes a drug for female sexual dysfunction.

So here’s what I’m wondering: should something even be considered a “sexual problem” if the owner of said problem doesn’t really care? I’m reminded of this book, which was not very good but still raised an entirely valid question as to why, in a couple, the individual with the low libido is considered to be the one with the problem. The highly-sexed person isn’t expected to take drugs or read self-help tomes—but who’s to say that one condition is inherently more desirable or healthy than the other?

Look, I appreciate what modern medicine has accomplished, such as delivering many of us from smallpox and polio, but when it comes to sex and medicine—yikes. It’s not that I don’t want people with sexual issues to feel healthy and happy. It’s just that the medical establishment has wrongful pathologized so many aspects of healthy sexuality—attraction to members of the opposite sex, masturbation, the evidence that women actually enjoy orgasms—that I don’t really trust it to decide what constitutes a sexual problem. (Read this! It’s wonderful.) It makes me sad to think of otherwise happy women and men suddenly being made to feel like they have a medical condition when they might just not be as sex-crazed as some. (And may even be less stressed out and more peaceful because of it.)

What do you all think?

[Photo by astromysicism]