Well, now you know, it's f'n capitalism. But, seriously.

How Capitalism Created Sexual Dysfunction

In the beginning was sex. And sex begat skill, and skill (or its absence) begat judgement, and judgement begat insecurity, and insecurity begat doctors’ visits, which begat treatments, which have flourished into a multibillion-dollar industry, so that sex between men and women is today almost inconceiv*able without the shadow of disorder, dysfunction, the “little blue pill” or myriad other medical interventions designed to bring sex back to some longed-for beginning again: a state of confirmed healthfulness, the illusion of normal.

Sex has been missing from the health care debate. A shame, because sexual health and disputes over its meaning reveal most nakedly the problem at the core of a medical system that requires profit, huge profit, hence sickness, or people who can come to believe they are sick or deformed or lacking and therefore in need of a pill, a procedure or device. Case in point: female sexual dysfunction (FSD), said now to afflict great numbers of women—43 percent according to some, 70 percent according to others, an “epidemic” in the heterosexual bedroom according to Oprah. Ca-ching!

...A terrific documentary by Liz Canner, Orgasm Inc., addresses those questions in terms of corporate medicine and the creation of need via pseudo-feminist incitements to full sexual mastery, as expressed by Dr. Laura Berman and other shills for the drug industry. Female sexual dysfunction, it turns out, was wholly created by drug companies hoping to make even bigger money off women than they have off men in the comparatively smaller market for erectile dysfunction drugs. That’s capitalism; that’s its nature. The more obstinate question is why so many people are willing to be its slaves, and whether a resistant politics can grow up to say not just “We want in” to health care but “We want out” of the profit system and, on the sex front, out of a medical model that elevates a doctor over “playing doctor” or a more sensual ease with oneself and others.

“So many times I don’t think sex is a matter of health,” Dr. Leonore Tiefer told me the other day. She is a sex therapist and founder of the New View Campaign to challenge the medical*ization of sex. “I think it’s more like dancing or cooking. Yes, you do it with your body. You dance with your body too. That doesn’t mean there’s a department of dance in the medical school. You don’t go to the doctor to learn to dance. And in dancing school the waltz class is no more normal than the samba class.” You might not be a good dancer by some scale of values. You might not get the steps right, or do steps at all. But even in wheelchairs people learn to move to the music.