Women Coping with a Partner’s Sexual Avoidance

Abstract

Causes and cures for sexual dysfunctions have preoccupied both charlatans and scientists for centuries. When in 1970 gynecologist William Masters studied normal men and women’s sexual responses in a lab setting, he also evolved brief (14 days) behavioral sex therapy, trained professionals, and recorded the technique in a bestseller. It was a true advancement in an arena where previously there was little knowledge or hope for improvement for problems of long duration. At the time, the symptom lack of sexual desire, sexual avoidance, or hypoactive sexual desire (HSD) was not defined, classified, or included. It was perhaps a decade later, after terms like frigidity and inhibited sexual desire were discarded as pejorative, that the 1987 DSM-III-R coded HSD applicable to both sexes. A separate code, female sexual arousal, was continued in the 1994 DSM-IV without a male component, although there are literally hundreds of males who present for treatment with this symptom.