The Medicalization of Women's Sexual Pain

Abstract

The medicalization of women's sexual problems under the overall rubric of female sexual dysfunction (FSD) has been thoroughly critiqued by feminist scholars, health practitioners, and sex therapists. However, there has been much less commentary on the medicalization of women's sexual pain-currently, a subset of an official FSD diagnosis. This article critically examines interdisciplinary understandings and ways of addressing sexual pain. It analyzes these frameworks in relation to feminist theories on medicalization, heteronormativity, and the reciprocal relationship between these two processes. We argue that many women who experience sexual pain have been eager for medicalization as a path to minimizing pain during sexual activity and reinstating normative heterosexual practices and identities. These goals have been lobbied for by patient advocacy groups and noted by professionals in the field. Although there are some clear benefits to this case for medicalization, there are also theoretical, personal, and political costs. Guided by a growing body of feminist theoretical and qualitative, empirical research on this topic, as well as the first author's personal experience of sexual pain, this article highlights some alternatives to medicalization and makes suggestions for change.

“Was It Good for You?”: Recasting Catholic Sexual Ethics in Light of Women’s Sexual Pain Disorders

“…All of this is informed by an attunement to women’s naming of their own lived experiences of sexual pain, which requires a delicate tightrope walk. On the one hand, medical terms that assist women’s reporting on sexual pain are necessary, especially given that women in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries who reported their sexual pain were labeled as having psychosomatic symptoms revealing a supposed hysteria (Farrell and Cacchioni , 329). On the other hand, an exclusive reliance on medical or even psychological factors can have the effect of rendering a woman’s sexual pain merely as her individual problem that simply needs to be “fixed”, which typically presupposes the heteronormative standard of being able to engage in intercourse with a male partner.…”

“…On the other hand, an exclusive reliance on medical or even psychological factors can have the effect of rendering a woman’s sexual pain merely as her individual problem that simply needs to be “fixed”, which typically presupposes the heteronormative standard of being able to engage in intercourse with a male partner. This approach excludes attention to the larger social and religious expectations about womanhood that may exacerbate women’s physical and emotional distress (Farrell and Cacchioni , 328–331).…”

“…Women in these studies frequently perceived their pain as excluding them from all forms of sex they considered legitimate or “real,” which often led to powerful experiences of guilt, failure, and inadequacy in relation to being a “real woman” or a “good partner” in a heterosexual relationship. (Farrell and Cacchioni , 331)…”

“…This focus on sensations of pleasure however they occur and whenever they stop is meant to retrain women (and men) to enter into sexual activity from a place of openness and creativity rather than one of pressure to conform to a predetermined script centered around intercourse (Bergeron, et al , 151; Cotter ; Farrell and Cacchioni , 332–333). This shift is key for moving toward a motivation of pleasure and desire, and it is central if women wish to incorporate intercourse into their sexual life again.…”

Navigating the field : an examination of rhetorical spaces in the Journal of sex research.

“…The willing victim mythology The concept of medicalization, defined as the process by which non-medical issues are reconceptualized as medical problems, has often been used by scholars in a variety of fields to criticize how medicine, as a social institution, exercises social control (Conrad, 1992). The specific topics presented in the special issue include the implications of defining women's sexual pain as a form of female sexual dysfunction (Farrell & Cacchioni, 2012), how notions of "healthy sex" have been incorporated into anti-aging discourse (Marshall, 2012), and how discourse on the vaccination for HPV has pathologized nascent sexual relationships as a threat to future sexual health (Polzer and Knabe, 2012). Together, these articles provide an overview of research on contemporary practices and consequences of medicalization, but the special issue is also notable for including rhetorical analysis as an analytic strategy and because the editors' and contributors' primary purpose for publishing articles on the medicalization of society was to encourage sexologists to renegotiate their disciplinary boundaries in an effort to complicate and challenge the medicalization of sexuality.…”