Continuing a project to create understanding and awareness within the asexual community and the community of women with female sexual dysfuntion, I now have a guest post up on Feminists with FSD answering K’s questions about asexuality and the problems the asexual community faces due to the wording of the HSDD diagnosis, and my thoughts on how we might address them without hurting anyone who would seek treatment for HSDD or the wider community of women with FSD.

Requisite background info:
This discussion is predominantly focused on women largely because it grew out of the Great Flibanserin Debacle of June 2010, which concerned a drug that was being developed for women with HSDD, and was popularly (though misleadingly) called a “female viagra.” I won’t recap the entire discussion for you all as I trust that if you missed it and you really want to know what happened, you can use your google-fu to find out. But it resulted in exposing an undercurrent within the asexual community which I hadn’t really been aware of before, of patronizing hostility towards people who have or support HSDD as a diagnosis and on a broader level, of being dismissive towards anyone with sexual dysfunction. In the interest of rectifying this, I offered my blog as a place to host a guest post to K so that we might spread some awareness and understanding to the asexual community, and with the help of some other asexuals (thanks again, guys!), we came up with some interview questions for her. The resulting interview is here, and I highly recommend that you read that first! We also had some discussion in the comments that I think was very important to have, so be sure to check those out too.

We’re not really talking about Flibanserin anymore, but I do mention some of the concerns that I saw feminists raising about the legitimacy of treating what they prefer to call sexual “problems” with a drug as well as the legitimacy of the diagnosis itself. I realize that not all my readers may be familiar with this context, so for more background info I’d suggest you check out the rest of K’s posts, as she has several excellent posts that address these issues.

Comments to this post are disabled; please direct all comments to K’s blog so that we may have a more streamlined discussion.

And now… it’s time for me to get off the computer and go vote! Bye!