Archive for January, 2009

How to make love

Saturday, January 17th, 2009

A translation may be helpful. Sexual health is the integration of your psychological, biological, and interpersonal sexual energies in a comfortable, meaningful, and satisfying way. In short, you feel confi dent and strong about yourself as a sexual man and know that others feel comfortable with you as well. Sex is a physiological, natural function, and sex is part of sexuality. Sexuality is a learned, psychosocial function. Sexuality is an integral part of every man’s personality and is expressed in all that we do. In the broadest sense, sexuality is the psychic energy that fi nds physical and emotional expression in the desire for contact, warmth, tenderness, eroticism, and love.

Th is energy is part of a man’s balanced self-confi dence and strength. Fact #3: Men Have a Wide Range of Sexual Concerns Every man (and woman) has concerns about what is sexually normal. Th ere is a wide range of concerns about what is normal physically (like penis size); how your sexual body functions (erections, ejaculation); what thoughts or fantasies are normal (e.g., being sexually aggressive, group sex, attracted to a coworker, sex with animals); how to make love.

Viagra Conclusion

Saturday, January 10th, 2009

The Viagra phenomenon, at its most basic level of analysis, has changed our understanding of sex in North America, and increasingly around the world as well. Normal sex now means sex on demand, sex for everyone, and sex for life (Loe, 2004). Although treatment of erectile dysfunction with Viagra has been shown to significantly improve quality of life parameters related to sexual dysfunction and mental health (Salonia et al., 2003), one argument among many others, is that the emergence of Viagra has only intensified our otherwise sexualized society in which sexual health and pleasure are endlessly promoted and appear to be the keys to life itself (Loe, 2004). Beyond these shifts in definitions however, the phenomenon has also impacted our broader ideas about health, aging, and masculinity. In 1993, the NIH Consensus Development Panel on Impotence reported that “appallingly little is known about the prevalence of erectile dysfunction in the United States and how this prevalence varies according to individual characteristics (age, race, ethnicity, socioeconomic status, and concomitant diseases and condition)”. Due to the plethora of interest and research on ED and ED-related matters that has occurred within the past ten years, most of which is largely due to the development of Viagra, the universe of knowledge regarding erectile dysfunction is increasing. As a result, researchers, and ultimately patients, have benefited from these events to some degree. At a deeper level of analysis, the case of Viagra exposes how the construction and dissemination of ‘facts’ can be undertaken by corporations, how diagnostic expansion can work in partnership with market expansion, and how medicalization can become synonymous with increased profits. This study, although focused specifically on Viagra, poses new, crucial questions about the intersection of science, treatment and capital.