How Did Erectile Dysfunction Become “Natural”? A Review of the Critical Social Scientific Literature on Medical Treatment for Male Sexual Dysfunction

This article reviews the multidisciplinary social science literature assessing the social consequences of medical treatment for male sexual dysfunction. This literature applies medicalization theory and social constructionist approaches to gender to assert that Euro-American cultural ideals of masculinity and sexuality, as well as ageism and ableism, determine which sexual changes and experiences get defined as "dysfunction" and shape the marketing and use of medical treatments for those changes. These medical responses assuage the suffering of men who become unable to meet cultural ideals for sexuality but in the process make reductive norms for male sexuality seem biologically natural. In addition, the critical social science research suggests that an economic logic underlies the process of redefining diversity and change in men's sexual function as medical pathology. However, comparative qualitative data on men's and their sexual partners' experiences of sexuality and aging across world regions suggest that people do not universally accept the narrow ideals of male sexuality embedded in medical discourse regarding men's sexual dysfunction. The diversity in people's sexual desires across the life course and their responses to sexual function change highlight the cultural nature of medical definitions of sexual dysfunction.