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0. Aims and contextAim: to illustrate social and value-laden dimensions of concepts like "health" and "dysfunction."Aim: to explore issues about mind, body, and selfhood through idea of sexual desire and interpretation.Context: discussion about sexual dysfunction. John Bancroft: "women are .. more susceptible to social constraints on sexual expression."A talk in philosophy of sex and love, social philosophy, and epistemology.Discussion of work by sex researcher Emily Nagoski, journalists Daniel Bergner and Amanda Hess, sexologists Meredith Chivers, Rosemary Basson, John Bancroft, psychologists Martha Meana, Leonore Tiefer, philosophers William Wilkerson, Esa Díaz-León, Brian Earp, legal theorist Elizabeth Emens. Some potentially disturbing topics, including sexual assault. 1. Background: some recent research on female sexualityWhat do we mean by "female"?Search for "female Viagra" and complexities. Typically not a blood flow problem. Recent empirical research (Basson, Nagoski):Women experience "desire non-concordance," more than men: where physical response and subjective response do not align.Women experience desire that is more "responsive" and less "spontaneous": responsive desire emerges in response to sexual activity.Even "high" or "low" sex drive has complex causes: e. g., strong brake, or weak accelerator?Traditional model: desire -> arousal -> sexual activity -> orgasm.Relative to this model, women's sexuality is lesser, but this inappropriately privileges male sexuality.Bergner: we are socialized into false beliefs about women's preference for love, closeness, intimacy.2. Non-concordance: the basic debate Examples from Bergner: physiological arousal measured while women looked at images and scenes. Hess: "Straight women claimed to respond to straight sex more than they really did; lesbian women claimed to respond to straight sex far less than they really did; nobody admitted a response to the bonobo sex." Implication? The body tells you a truth about sex obscured by social factors. Nagoski: we should not treat the body as a source of truth.Idea of "lubrication error #2." Example of bored woman sitting on a horizontal pole. Example of guy watching violence. Example involving rape and evolution. Nagoski: "women's genitals were just reacting automatically to a sexually relevant cue.. which has only a passing acquaintance with what a woman 'really' likes or wants. Readers of [Bergner's book] didn't get that less though. They got Lubrication Error #2. Not enjoying; just expecting. Nagoski: Sinister side, Fifty Shades of Grey. "Feel this. See how much your body likes this, Anastasia."Nagoski: wrong to think women are "in denial." Instead, pursue subjective response. Shows need for different activities and/or external lubrication etc. 3. Philosophical aspects of non-concordance: mind, body, and the self. Chivers: there might be reasons women experience more non-concordance. Penis is typically visible and unsubtle; boys grow up with a positive "feedback loop" which encourages association of physical and mental response.Adolescent girls taught to be gatekeepers rather than people experiencing pleasure.I argue: treating the body as a source of truth is wrong, but it is wrong to ignore it as well.Example of Victorian women and vibrators.Example of LGBTQ+ people in homophobic contexts. Being in denial is a real possibility.Sometimes your physiology might be worth listening to, and sometimes it might be giving you something you want to distance yourself from, but there's no simple answer to this.Responding to information from mind and body raises social, value-laden questions. Interesting relation to relation of mind and body in theories of autonomy and identification (e. g. Frankfurt, Arpaly). 4. Wilkerson and desire as interpretation Wilkerson: sexual desires and feelings are not given and obvious, they require interpretation.When we interpret, we decide what has significance and what doesn't, we make choices about how we think some things are related to other things, and we assign meaning to experiences and emotions, to understand what we think they signify. If our orientations were obvious and clear, then it would be impossible to be in denial or mistaken about them, and yet people often are. Wilkerson: concludes orientations are, in a sense, a matter of choice.Esa Díaz-León: but there is a difference between saying that desires can be interpreted in a number of ways and saying that there is no underlying reality about them. Some interpretations might be off the table.Interesting question: what does non-concordance tell us about this? Are underlying desires a source of truth after all?Even allowing for Díaz-León's critique, interpretation suggests a mechanism through which value-laden choices come into play. Subjective arousal is partly about how we see ourselves. This is especially important given use of this research in pharmaceutical contexts -- as we'll see next.5. Responsive desire: Eagerness, enjoying, and the search for the "female Viagra"Idea of Viagra narrative for men and the shaping of dysfunctionTeifer: making Viagra a successful drug "required that what the penis should do needed to become more and more important and demanding."Bergner: market of women in long-term relationships who miss the feeling of lust for their partners.Lust wanes for women in committed monogamous relationships much faster than for men. Wanted but waning lust seems a prime candidate for a dysfunction or parallel to Viagra. But is it? Responsive versus spontaneous desire, especially for women. Nagoski: eagerness versus enjoying. Why prioritize eagerness?Nagoski: the craving associated with losing your attachment object is not a good thing.Is lack of lust a problem to be solved?6. Social dimensions of sexual dysfunction Known way to increase lust: new partner(s). Alternatives to monogamous coupledom: polyamorous, ethically non-monogamous, "monogamish."Earp et al.: given the effects of divorce, we might be morally obligated to take love drugs.Earp et al.: Non-monogamy as challenging to social stability, children's well-being, and the good life. Analogously, morally obligated to take desire drugs if they reinforce monogamy?Emens: ethical non-monogamy as structured by values of radical honesty, self-ownership, etc. Emens: social resistance to ethical non-monogamy from "paradox of prevalence."Bancroft: because of repressive effects of social constraints on sexuality, pharmaceutical research must be approached with care. Bergner, in the New York Times: "Over the last decade, as companies chased after an effective chemical, there was fretting within the drug industry: what if, in trials, a medicine proved too effective? More than one adviser to the industry told me that companies worried about the prospect that their study results would be too strong, that the F.D.A. would reject an application out of concern that a chemical would lead to female excesses, crazed binges of infidelity, societal splintering. 'You want your effects to be good but not too good,' Andrew Goldstein, who is conducting the study in Washington, told me. 'There was a lot of discussion about it by the experts in the room,' he said, recalling his involvement with the development of Flibanserin, 'the need to show that you’re not turning women into nymphomaniacs.' He was still a bit stunned by the entrenched mores that lay within what he’d heard. 'There’s a bias against -- a fear of creating the sexually aggressive woman.'

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