Dressed in a conservative spring green suit and low-heeled pumps, the Mid-South's answer to the Playboy Advisor looked more like a Sunday school teacher as she settled into her office chair recently to talk about her speciality -- women's sexual health.
"Forty-three percent of women have a sexual concern," Dr. Candace Brown began. Low sexual desire tops the list, followed by problems with arousal, orgasm and painful intercourse.
There is also a new challenge for a growing number of Mid-South couples -- the Internet. For some, the issue is the easy access to online pornography. For others, the Web's freewheeling chat rooms or the virtual reality and interactive games are raising questions about infidelity in the 21st century.
"A lot of women will see this (activity) as infidelity. But what really is infidelity? How do you define it?" she asked. "The question is showing up frequently in my practice."
In an era when a TV show about mate-swapping in the suburbs becomes a summer hit, drugs to combat erectile
dysfunction are hawked like soda and mall bookstores include rows of sexual how-to manuals, sex for many remains an unhappy mystery.
Brown said women will often seek treatment because, even though they aren't interested in sex, they want to maintain an intimate relationship. Added Shadish, "Sex is such a powerful force. It has the potential to add so much to people's lives."
The therapists said diagnosing and treating any sexual problem requires weighing physical and psychological factors, as well as relationship issues.More than a decade after Viagra won federal approval for treatment of male impotence, women lack a comparable drug. Brown is involved in research she hopes will change that, although she said a minority of women would likely be candidates for hormone or drug treatment.
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