Day 151: Book Excerpt: Women, Sex, Power and Pleasure

Concern over women’s interest in sex—or lack of it—has been a hot topic in the hallowed halls of medicine and the media over the past 15 years. According to medical experts, 26 to 43 percent of American women complain of having a decreased or absent sex drive. This is true for women of all ages, although the percentage may be even higher in postmenopausal women. True to form, the American public has looked to the medical establishment for answers. All medicine has managed to come up with thus far is a billable diagnosis: hypoactive sexual desire disorder (HSDD). This is described by the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders as a lack of interest in sex, which is what women and their partners already knew they were struggling with. No discovery or medical breakthrough here. And although in my own practice I sometimes prescribe certain hormones for patients whose libidos have completely hit the skids or for those who used to be orgasmic but now rarely or never are, only a very small percentage of the women I care for fit the criteria for pharmaceutical intervention as a fix.
Books in the how-to-have-better-sex genre mimic international cookbooks in their diversity and flavor. The overly enthusiastic, misinformed (and sometimes cruel) “you can do it!” coaching approach, the “light the candles and wear sexy lingerie” prescription, and the “your brain is your biggest sex organ” theory do little to help women flip their switches to wanting sex more often and prioritizing it over the long run. They also fail to recommend ways to manage the frequently absurd and humorous interventions by Murphy’s Law that seem to govern life and undo our best-laid plans for fabulous, romantic, sizzling sex with our partners.
I think about this all the time. This is not because I am a sex fiend, whore, promulgator of pornography, pervert, or weirdo. I think about it because it’s a complex problem that I try to solve for myself and on behalf of the women (and men) I care for in my sex counseling practice. This is meaningful stuff that, if left untended, can break our hearts, leave us feeling stranded and unloved, and perhaps destroy long-term relationships.
When I feel at a loss for an explanation as to why sexual energy is nowhere to be found in my own life, I go back to my belief that pleasure begets pleasure and that in order to increase my pleasure quotient I need to feel powerful. I begin there and work the equation forward: emotional wellness equals powerful living equals increased interest and access to all pleasures, including sex. Then I ask myself just how sturdy and powerful I’m feeling. If the answer is “not very,” then I need to figure out why. When I apply this to the women I see for sexuality counseling, I start by asking the same questions: How is your emotional health? How empowered do you feel to get what you really want? How much pleasure are you able to surround yourself with and what might be interfering with that? If their emotional health is weak or an aspect of it has always been anemic, then this is probably why their interest in sex is absent. In this state it’s nearly impossible to grab and keep hold of pleasure, breaking the stride of the pleasure-begets-pleasure formula.
Women who struggle with having consistent interest in sex or finding sex pleasurable when they do have it can gain insight into why this is so by seriously considering how powerful they feel as people and how willing they are to prioritize their emotional health. The answers to these two questions are inextricably linked to six markers of emotional well-being that I feel are critical for good mental health: self-confidence and self-esteem, health-seeking behaviors, spiritual satisfaction, creativity, resilience, and compassion. The strength of these markers will determine your feelings of empowerment and capacity to prioritize and safeguard pleasure. When these are sturdy and unyielding, your appetite for all pleasure will be robust and your ability to prioritize it will be securely woven into the fabric of your psyche. In contrast, when these markers have been ignored or tipped over for long periods of time, or were never upright in the first place, none of life’s pleasures—including sex—may ever exist in their real-life forms.
Women face all sorts of demands in the course of a single day. Responsibilities pile up throughout the weeks, months, and years and become weighty yokes around our necks. Sometimes, the effort it takes to pull them off can feel like more work than continuing to lug them around. Every time we try to shorten our to-do lists, something else seems to take the place of the things we were able to unload. Before we know it, we’re right back where we started and life continues as one big, blurry, snarled mess of obligations and tasks. And, lest we believe we can sneak away and get a real break from it all, our technological devices, designed to help us save time, end up seducing us right back to our to-do lists. Based on my professional and personal experience, living life the way so many of us do is a real harbinger of death to our libidos and a surefire way to distract and estrange us from maintaining our emotional wellness.
My sex counseling and midwifery practices are replete with women who tell me that if they never have sex again they wouldn’t care or even notice. These are women who also say they love their mates, want to stay with them forever, and cannot imagine life without them. Yet somehow, the idea of making love with them often—or at all—leaves them flat and filled with a sense of dread. Hard to fathom that both feelings can coexist, and yet women tell me all the time that they do.
When I scratch the surface of their complaints, the picture that starts to emerge is of a life filled with everything but pleasure. Without fail, one if not all of the six markers of emotional well-being are off-kilter. Maybe they lack confidence, hate their bodies, or do nothing to support a healthy lifestyle. Perhaps they’ve lost their faith and optimism because of the recent death of someone they loved or health problems of their own. Or, maybe they’ve lost their creative edge and can’t find meaning in their work anymore, which threatens their identity. And, there’s always the possibility that they’re unable to recover from a mistake—theirs or someone else’s—which can mean they’ve lost compassion for themselves or someone else. Usually, at least one if not all of these factors are present, and if they are, sexuality will be absent no matter how much they love and are attracted to their partners.
Let’s look more closely at the six markers of emotional well-being. If we understand these well, we’ll see just how important they are to our sense of enjoyment in life, love, and sex.

~~Women, Sex, Power and Pleasure -by- Evelyn Resh

Day 135: Book Excerpt: Sex Cells

The market for sex cells incorporates both financial compensation and the language of donation, a combination that appears oxymoronic at first glance. The reason that paid donation sounds so incongruous is the longstanding assumption that gifts and commodities are not only completely distinct from one another, but are also very different kinds of things. Arjun Appadurai traced this assumption among social scientists to the different legacies of Marcel Mauss and Karl Marx, providing the following summary.

Gifts, and the spirit of reciprocity, sociability, and spontaneity in which they are typically exchanged, usually are starkly opposed to the profit-oriented, self-centered, and calculated spirit that fires the circulation of commodities. Further, where gifts link things to persons and embed the flow of things in the flow of social relations, commodities are held to represent the drive—largely free of moral or cultural constraints—of goods for one another, a drive mediated by money and not by sociality.

In an echo of Zelizer’s argument, Appadurai considers this dichotomy to be an oversimplified depiction of economic life, and he has encouraged scholars to trace the social life of things. In particular, he underscores the possibility that the same thing can sometimes be both a gift and a commodity, albeit at different points in its trajectory. Lesley Sharp pushes this point further, drawing on research in organ donation to contend that multiple understandings of the same bodily good might be operating at the same time, especially in medical settings. For the deceased’s kin, a donated organ is a part of the family that lives on; for the recipient, it is a lifesaving gift; for the doctors, it is a valuable commodity that should not be “wasted” on an undeserving recipient. Sharp concludes, “The language of gift exchange may obscure capitalist forms of commodification. In other words, two models of commodification might be at work simultaneously, one more akin to Mauss’s understanding of the symbolically charged gift and reciprocity, the other to Marx’s notion of commodities as goods produced under the alienating conditions of capitalism.”

The question is whether these various understandings matter for the people whose bodies are being commodified. What happens when paid donation is considered to be more of a gift or more of a job? Shifting the focus from determining which things are actually gifts or actually commodities to comparing the use of gift rhetoric and commodity rhetoric makes possible an analysis of whether commodified exchange can be experienced in different ways.
The first possibility is that framing donation as a gift or a job makes no difference whatsoever. It is merely language that “obscures,” to use Sharp’s word, what is really going on. This is a common theoretical vision of bodily commodification, one that also appears in Nancy Scheper-Hughes’ definition of it as “encompassing all capitalized economic relations between humans in which human bodies are the token of economic exchanges that are often masked by something else – love, altruism, pleasure, kindness.” These scholars echo the view of Titmuss and others that the monetary exchange is fundamental, that commodification is inherently objectifying and alienating, and calling it something else does nothing to change the experience of being paid for bodily goods.

The second possibility is that these gendered frames do have consequences. Given that gift exchange is traditionally associated with affective ties and reciprocity while commodified exchange is marked by contractual relations that conclude when payment is rendered, it is possible that even just the use of gift language evokes a sense of sociability, a sense of connection between donor and recipient that is more durable and lasting than would be expected given the monetary exchange. This is especially plausible in a market for genetic material, as eggs and sperm are purchased in the hopes of conceiving children. Our culture’s emphasis on biogenetic ties in defining kinship may mean that donors are considered more as family than as strangers.

However, forging such connections may result in the expectation that donors and recipients demonstrate care and concern for one another, a form of emotional work. Arlie Hochschild originally formulated the concept of “emotional labor” in her study comparing female flight attendants, who had to exhibit empathy for the customer’s every concern, with male debt collectors, who had to manufacture anger with debtors over the phone. Subsequent studies have revealed that these sorts of gendered expectations for emotional work appear in many kinds of employment, and they are based in large part on the cultural norms of nurturing femininity and distant masculinity discussed in the previous section.

More recent research on emotional labor suggests that it may be experienced as more than just coercive and alienating. In a study of nursing home workers, Steven Lopez finds that meaningful interactions can result from “organizational attempts to create hospitable conditions for the development of caring relationships between service providers and recipients.” This raises the possibility that instilling an emotional connection between gamete donor and recipient may forestall feelings of alienation, in that both parties are offered an alternative narrative to the stigmatized story of handing over cash for body parts.

Since the dominant assumption has been that bodily commodification is inherently and uniformly degrading, there has been relatively little empirical research on the experiences of those who participate in such markets, including the market for sex cells. There is a rich tradition of sociological and anthropological research on reproduction, some of which includes discussions of commodification, but most of it centers on pregnancy, abortion, and birth, so there is little known about men’s experiences in this realm. In general, there has been less concern about the commodification of men’s bodies.

~~Sex Cells- The Medical Market For Eggs And Sperm -by- Rene Almeling