Funny Ideas About Sex?

By Robyn Salisbury

It’s hard to be sure but it seems like New Zealanders
have some funny ideas about sex.

Instead of successfully realising our inbuilt potential for pleasurable, life enhancing experiences, sex for many people has become imbued with negative connotations. Pressure to perform and measure up, destructive behaviour that abuses oneself or others, something just a bit seedy to be joked about or avoided.

So many people seem to have lost touch with the natural, real, healthy aspects of their sexuality or maybe they’ve never discovered them. After all, unless they go to sex therapy most people will never have been taught about sex beyond the mechanics of how pregnancy occurs.

Probably the misunderstandings are no different here than in many other countries but that shouldn’t reassure people that as a nation we’re okay as we are because so many things tell me that we’re not.

Do my ways of knowing about this meet the criteria for good science? The current model advocated for psychologists is evidence based practice. We should not say or do anything without some solid research outcomes to back it up.

Unfortunately the only major research that occurs in the field of human sexuality is funded by pharmaceutical companies or contraceptive manufacturers who of course have a vested interest in the outcomes. This shapes the parameters being studied and omits so many questions that are of vital interest to society and to individual, couple and family wellbeing.

Of course a psychologist who works every week with sexual problems will also not be objective. However an insider’s view, practice based evidence, allows the identification of important issues that may otherwise not be addressed. I don’t believe it’s an exaggeration to say that addressing these problems is essential to the wellbeing of our society.

Considerable media interest in testosterone treatments for ‘sexual desire disorder’ is now following closely on the heels of the still burgeoning advertisements for drug treatments for ‘erectile dysfunction’. I place both terms in inverted commas because they’re medical diagnostic categories containing an assumption of illness that often seems incorrect to me. One example of this is when lack of sexual desire is simply a sign that the sex had not been desirable.

We know that internationally millions of prescriptions have been written out for Viagra and no doubt high numbers for the competing drugs that have followed. Less than 50% of the Viagra prescriptions have been refilled even once, suggesting that the drug did not fulfill many people’s expectation. This has given rise to the wise observation that while you can put an erection into a relationship, you cannot put a relationship into an erection. Thousands of New Zealanders appear not to know that.

Of those who are ongoing users of erectile drugs, some will find the drug is effectively correcting a medical problem of lack of blood flow to the penis as it is designed to do and others will be using it inappropriately. Lack of an erection can serve the same warning purpose that canaries served in the coal mines. If the canary dropped dead it was time for the miners to get some fresh air!

Unresponsive penises may be giving warning signs about a lack of intimacy, technique problems, inappropriate expectations or interpersonal problems needing to be addressed. Artificial respiration for the ‘canary’ will surely create a bigger problem in the long run by ignoring those problems.

Now, building on the perception that sexual problems are medical problems, comes testosterone treatment. Again there will be a small percentage of people for whom these drugs may effectively correct a medical problem but so many more will perceive this as another opportunity or pressure to perform rather than realise it’s another step further away from developing the enormously important capacity for intimacy.

It isn’t just the numbers buying into the medicalisation of sexuality that is of concern, it’s the ongoing evidence that there are still lots of people choosing life destructive rather than life affirming ways of expressing their sexuality. Perhaps this is because some aren’t aware they have a choice or are afraid to exercise that choice.

A current client who is successfully addressing his sexual addiction recently told me that he’d phoned nine years ago to make an appointment, then cancelled because he was too ashamed to talk about what he’d been doing. That’s very understandable but such a waste to have unnecessarily continued terribly harmful behaviour for all that time. New Zealanders need to know it is possible to get effective help now for any sexual problem.

What will happen I wonder if everyone who reads this column and sees some truth in it, raises the topic of healthy sex in a down to earth Kiwi way to two other people and encourages them to do the same. Could we generate a widespread understanding of the importance of intimacy for creating deeply fulfilling sex? Imagine the national benefits of starting an epidemic of healthy relating.

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Robyn Salisbury is a Clinical Psychologist and Director of Sex Therapy New Zealand, a referral network. Ph 0800 739843 (0800 sex therapy) www.sextherapy.co.nz

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