Viagra

Discussions around sex and sexuality can sometimes be dignified by being medicalized or being couched in the terms of education. But sometimes that very frankness makes these discussions culturally unacceptable, even alongside completely normalized images of sexualized bodies, themes of promiscuity, and genres of “romance” that serve as thin excuses to repeat a hackneyed story about sexual conquest.

Hear ye! Hear ye! There's a Douchebag for everything. Everything, including beer. But, sometimes it takes a regal event, say, The Royal Wedding, for Douches-in-waiting to make their mark and declare their oh-so royally Douche-baggy ways. Her Royal Highness would not be so proud.

Leonore Tiefer is Clinical Associate Professor of Psychiatry at the New York University School of Medicine and the Albert Einstein College of Medicine with an international reputation as a lecturer, author, activist and theorist in the field of sexuality. She has written widely about the medicalization of female sexuality and heads up the New View Campaign, which is a grassroots network challenging the distorted and oversimplified understanding of sexuality promoted by the pharmaceutical industry as a means to profit. In this interview she talks about her work and the race to produce a 'female Viagra.'