At her group therapy sessions for women despairing of low sexual desire, Lori Brotto likes to pass around a plastic tub of raisins. The women, usually six to a group, sit around two pushed-together beige tables in a fluorescently lighted conference room at the British Columbia Center for Sexual Medicine in Vancouver. A little potted tree is jammed randomly in one corner. Ragged holes scar one wall where a painting used to hang. The décor doesn’t speak of sensuality. That is the job of the raisin.
Brotto asks each woman to take a single raisin from the small tub. A slender, elegant 34-year-old psychologist, a mother of two with a third child on the way, she began her career studying the libidos of rats. She is now one of the world’s leading specialists in what is known as hypoactive sexual desire disorder in women. She is in charge of defining the condition’s criteria for the next Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, commonly called the D.S.M, which the American Psychiatric Association is preparing to publish in 2012 or 2013. The book is the bible of psychiatric diseases, from autism to sleepwalking, relied on by researchers and clinicians throughout the United States and Canada. Studies suggest that around 30 percent of young and middle-aged women go through extended periods of feeling dim desire — or of feeling no wish for sex whatsoever. “Black raisins,” Brotto said, laughing at her own arbitrary preference as she described her methods. “I don’t like brown raisins or green raisins or cooked raisins.”
snip
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/29/magazine/29sex-t.html?em
Printer-friendly format
Email this thread to a friend
Bookmark this thread
(1000+ posts)
Send PM |
Profile |
Ignore
