The Martlet

The medicalization of sex is not a term we hear of everyday — in fact, maybe you’ve never heard of it or thought about it at all.

Medicalization refers to the idea that areas of everyday life are falling into the medical realm of diagnosis and treatment. This does not only include sex or sexual dysfunction, but also depression, childbirth and alcoholism.

Thea Cacchioni, a UVic Women’s Studies professor, says that terms we’ve previously seen as non-medical are being described in medical terms. One of her main areas of research focuses on the medicalization of sex.

“The medicalization of sex is a phenomenon that really predates to the late 19th century with the rise of sexology — the science of sex — and the idea that sexuality could somehow be defined, categorized, measured and controlled through scientific medical means,” says Cacchioni. “It has a lot of effects on sexuality and gender.”

Cacchioni says that the medicalization of sex is an umbrella term, which refers to a diverse range of practices.

“It ranges from the contemporary search for the gay gene to the medicalization of women’s and men’s sexual problems — as promoted by the pharmaceutical industry since the popular rise of Viagra,” says Cacchioni.

The medicalization of sex also includes cosmetic and sexual enhancement surgeries such as vaginal tightening and rejuvenation.

“[Vagina cosmetic surgery] is a more recent phenomenon. It’s popular in the sex industry, which in turn is sort of fueling its popularity among women more generally; but, as actors in porn are having more of these surgeries, women are seeing porn and wanting to look a certain way,” says Cacchioni. “Basically, even outside of porn, I think it’s the last frontier of an area for women to feel insecure and concerned about.”

Cosmetic surgery won’t fix everything — in fact, it may not fix anything.

“There’s suddenly this lack of understanding that vulvas are very diverse and can be all shapes and sizes. Women are basically being lied to by the cosmetic surgery industry and encouraged that they will have a better sex life with these kinds of surgeries,” says Cacchioni. “The vaginal tightening and ‘rejuvenation’ surgeries are promising a better sex life and, in fact, are delivering a much worse sex life and leading to a lot of unnecessary infection and health risks.”

Cacchioni says that the more we try to create classifications of what is “normal” or “dysfunctional”, the more we end up trying to create bodies that all look the same — nothing new — and therefore, we limit diversity in terms of sexual expression and body appearance.

Cacchioni’s research is based on the “pink Viagra”, which she says has never been found. She says it’s a good example of people trying to define sexual normalcy.

“[The idea of a Viagra-like drug] was promoted to the illness category of female sexual dysfunction as a way of making sure there would be a captive market once the drug was created,” explains Cacchioni. “I testified in June 2010 at the FDA hearing for a drug called Flibanserine — which the media was heralding as the ‘pink Viagra’ and saying that it had, at last, been discovered.”

“Flibanserine was a failed anti-depressant drug, which they repackaged as a cure for what they called ‘hypoactive sexual desire disorder’,” she continues. “As a sociologist, I wasn’t there to talk about the very unsexy side effects such as vomiting, nausea and diarrhea, and I wasn’t there to talk about its low efficacy of upping your sexually satisfying events by 0.7 per cent per month. I was there to critique the notion of hyposexual desire in the first place.”

Cacchioni wonders how we would ever measure sexual desire in the first place, and notes that it is always changing based on historical moments, culture and geography.

She stresses that there are serious health risks to the medicalization of sex.

“A lot of people don’t know that the first year Viagra was created, over 230 people died directly from taking the drug. So anytime you put a drug into a wide population, you’re going to find out about more risks than the clinical trials initially showed,” she says.

There are also undoubtedly psychological risks with the medicalization of sex.

“In order to receive sex reassignment surgeries for transsexuals, they have to submit to the diagnosis of gender identity disorder, and there’s a lot of negativity in any kind of label that uses the word ‘disorder,’” says Cacchioni. “When homosexuality was considered a disease, it had a negative effect on people’s self-perceptions of sexuality — and the de-medicalization of homosexuality had a really positive effect. We see this in so many different instances.”