Sexology and the Pharmaceutical Industry: The Threat of Co-optation

Journal of Sex Research,  August, 2000  by Leonore Tiefer

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Sexuopharmaceutical research treats people's sexuality the way ankle orthopedists treat dancers--completely ignoring how social and cultural processes shape experience and behavior. Now, no one argues that ankle orthopedists need to know much about social and cultural elements of dance to do useful research and intervention. But ankle experts don't describe their interventions as helping with "dance dysfunctions" or "disorders of dancing." And the doctors' role is further reduced because there are plenty of dance coaches and trainers to consult if one is interested in learning about or how to dance. But, sex is a different kettle of fish. There are few resources outside the medical model for people to easily consult. In treating sexual dysfunctions as asocial matters of physiology and bodily function, sexuopharmacological research promotes genital function as the centerpiece of sexuality and ignores everything else, disguising the larger contexts of social power (Gagnon & Parker, 1995).

Ignores connections of sex to politics. Feminists are not alone in connecting the reduction of sexuality to genital function to gender politics (Tiefer, 1994). Schmidt (1993) suggests that

   Gazing at the diligence with which urologists, andrologists, surgeons and
   physiologists pursue the dream of the `perfect penis' against the backcloth
   of the social upheavals and the profound changes in gender relations and
   sexual conduct of the last 20 years, one could conclude that the struggle
   is not about restoring one man's potency, but a desperate effort to
   re-establish western male potency in general. In fact it looks like a magic
   rite symbolically guaranteeing the phallus's immunity from danger in the
   face of a (slightly) changing power balance of the sexes. (p. 264)

Gender politics are invisible in sexuopharmaceutical research, but other political issues are equally neglected. Medical-model sex research such as that funded by the pharmaceutical industry mystifies sexuality with the technical (or pseudo-technical) language of "erectile apparatus" and "therapeutic management strategies" (Rivas & Chancellor, 1997, p. 429). Multisyllabic expertise intimidates and exploits people who lack sex education in a political climate where legislative politics has reduced public sex education to abstinence education.

The current American culture combines limited sex education with constant in-your-face sexual sensationalism, stories of sexual violence and disease, and threats to safe and legal abortion. Thus, it should be no surprise that every study shows widespread public sexual ignorance and uncertainty. People are tongue-tied when it comes to reflecting on their own sexual motives or understanding the multitude of options for sexual decision making. Science and health media advise people with sexual dissatisfactions to consult medical experts, and in this way, the pharmaceutical industry benefits from the current politics of sexual ignorance and medicalization.