James withdrew from childcare and household chores and activities, in part due to exhaustion following his 14-h work days and in part to “punish” Denise for withholding sex from him. She resented him for expecting that she would be the sole caretaker for their children, and lost attraction for him as he increasingly retreated to online gaming late at night after the twins were asleep.

… In essentialist views of sexuality, sexual desire is considered an innate and universal part of human biology.

… In support, many current medical classification systems would align with James’ reaction and label Denise and James’ situation as a result of something awry in Denise.

… even if a clinician acknowledges that interpersonal factors within James and Denise’s relationship contribute to their discrepancies in desire, only an individual—i.e., Denise—can receive the diagnosis, and so only something within Denise would be labeled as dysfunctional.

It is therefore perhaps no surprise that those with a vested interest in the DSM-5 criteria for sexual dysfunctions sometimes have strong ties to the pharmaceutical industry or that this industry has invested millions of dollars into making sure that lay-people like James see “the female Viagra” as the most logical (and purchasable) solution to their sexual problems

For example, in the case of James and Denise, writing off low sexual desire as a problem within Denise’s body positions the problem as out of James’ control, disconnecting it from his own behaviors. He can therefore continue to presume that Denise will be the sole caretaker of their children and he can play video games as he pleases, all with no expectations for him to attend to the couple’s sexual issues or their divisions of labor.

… many women who report low sexual desire describe considerably similar interpersonal problems with their men partners

Accordingly, in this paper, we focus on one group: women partnered with men, though others may look elsewhere. Women partnered with men are heterogeneous themselves, with differing relations to oppression and privilege that shape the gender norms they experience, and how those norms shape their lives

… sexual desire is multifaceted and can reflect not only desire for orgasm or bodily pleasure, but desire for closeness, power, relaxation, etc. (Chadwick et al., 2017a, 2017b; Goldhammer & McCabe, 2011; Mark et al., 2014; Raisanen et al., 2018; van Anders, 2012, 2013; van Anders et al., 2011).

… Taken together, these different perspectives on what sexual desire actually is suggest that there is no one definition of sexual desire.

… That sexual desire is conceptualized and measured in different ways certainly has implications for our theorizing about low desire in women partnered with men but, for now, we refer to desire broadly as the desire to engage in sexual activity.

Accordingly, when a woman experiences lower desire than a man partner, her desire is often labeled low. In the converse situation, however, men are still the referent: in the case of a man reporting lower desire than a woman partner, the woman’s desire is labeled too high (e.g., they are labeled insatiable or “sluts” in negative ways)

This view of low desire as a problem ignores that it is common for people’s sexual desire to ebb and flow (Ridley et al., 2006) and that many life phases involve, or even are characterized by, low desire (Dawson & Chivers, 2014).

>> Demisexual and asexual are briefly mentioned here. <<

We make it a problem…

… using terms like “incidence of low desire” or “risk of low desire” make clear that low desire is seen as a disease-like state or at least an unwanted condition.