Apparently "About 43% of women and 31% of men in the U.S. between ages 18 and 60 meet criteria for sexual dysfunctions, according to a 1999 report on the sexual behavior of more than 3,000 U.S. adults".To plop "anxiety about sexual performance" in the same conceptual space as cancer is ludicrous. Now, I think it would be interesting to have an open debate about whether it would be ethical to let people use biotechnology to try to enhance aspects of their sex lives they find unsatisfactory, for no greater reason than their not being satisfied. But please let's not pretend that doing so would simply be a matter of treating recently-discovered diseases. To pretend that is simply to willfully obscure the argument by twisting language, the sort of thing George Orwell so rightly railed against.
This report was a research study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association that classified sexual dysfunction as reporting any one of the following during the last 12 months:(1) lacking desire for sex; (2) arousal difficulties (ie, erection problems in men, lubrication difficulties in women); (3) inability achieving climax or ejaculation; (4) anxiety about sexual performance; (5) climaxing or ejaculating too rapidly; (6) physical pain during intercourse; and (7) not finding sex pleasurableAlmost all of which fall within the normal range of a year's worth of regular sexual experiences, which probably explains why a third to almost half of people surveyed experienced at least one - but hardly a marker of a serious medical problem in itself.
This is, by the way, part of the reason I was skeptical of the porn nation guy and his alleged "sex addiction."
1 comment:
To plop "anxiety about sexual performance" in the same conceptual space as cancer is ludicrous.
You're overreacting. Given today's medical technology, health is about more than just being outside some statistical norm (and being outside a norm is itself not sufficient to establish illness).
Sexual dysfunction causes many people considerable suffering, and this suffering can be relieved by treatment. That's sufficient to put sexual dysfunction in the same conceptual category.
You might as well object that it's ludicrous to put a cut finger and abdominal stab wounds in the same conceptual category. They are in the same category, but they differ in severity.
You might object that the specifics of diagnostic criteria are incorrect, but you'd have to offer considerably more specific argument; you do not appear to have any specific expertise in the matter.
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