Today, phallocentrism is perpetuated by a flourishing medical construction that focuses exclusively on penile erections as the essence of men's sexual function and satisfaction. This article describes how this medicalization is promoted by urologists, medical industries, mass media, and various entrepreneurs. Many men and women provide a ready audience for this construction because of masculine ideology and gender socialization. While there may be some advantages to this construction, there are major disadvantages to men in terms of the inevitable failure of (...) the promised perfectible erection and the perpetuation of a falsely universalized and biologized vision of sexual experience. Any sexual interests of women in other than phallocentric sexual scripting are denied. (shrink)

Disease-mongering in the case of sexual problems has some special elements. These include that discussions of sex provoke embarrassment and reveal a lack of knowledge on the part of both clinician and patient, the aggressiveness of Big Pharma in the face of the huge profitability of sexual products; and the socially constructed nature of sexual satisfaction. These special elements engender concern for the prospects for patient empowerment and the convergence of patient-clinician power in the consulting room. Consequently, political action to (...) raise public and professional awareness about the realities of commercialisation and conflict of interest, and to resist further medicalisation may be as warranted for concerned scholars as academic analyses, at least at the present time. (shrink)