Italians (should) do it better? Medicalisation and the disempowering of intimacy

Abstract

Recent years have witnessed new processes of visibilisation of adult heterosexual men's sexuality in the public arena in Italy, culminating in discussions on sexual scandals. The authors explore here one of these processes: the current mediatisation of a medicalised male sexuality, which appears as a more socially legitimate and scientifically grounded new discourse on masculinity. By analysing recent social campaigns on male sexual health, it will be shown how, far from opening spaces for a de-naturalisation of male sexuality and masculinity, this form of visibility through medicalisation actually works by re-naturalising male sexuality, and thereby restoring virility, through reference to highly gendered respectability and predatory sexual scripts and the disempowering of intimacy as a new sexual script promoting a situational and more symmetric understanding of gender.

Keywords:

• medicalisation
• sexual health
• heterosexuality
• masculinity
• sexual scripts
• virilism

Notes

Notes

1. We refer here to the ideology of virility as a specific configuration of masculinism which has been described regarding Italy; see for instance Spackman (1996).

2. Survey on Italians’ Sexuality (ISI), carried out in 2006 on a sample of 3058 Italian residents aged between 18 and 69, representative of the general national population. The survey was accompanied by 120 semi-structured biographical interviews with women and men of the same age. The results of the research were published in Barbagli, Dalla Zuanna, and Garelli (2010).

3. The issue of consumption deserves more critical studies in Italy, while all we have is research financed by pharmaceutical companies on basic data regarding attitudes and consumption styles. A first attempt to explore Viagra and other similar drug consumers’ attitudes can be found in the journalistic book by Mianiti (2009).

4. Data available on the Italian Pfizer website: http://www.pfizer.it/cont/comunicati-stampa/0812/2300/compleanno-per-la-pillola-blu-.asp.

5. ‘Sexuality: A voyage around the couple’ (‘Sessualità: viaggio intorno alla coppia’), carried out by Astraricerche and financed by Eli Lilly, and ‘The Italians and sexuality’ (‘Gli italiani e la sessualità’), carried out by GPF and sponsored by Pfizer (Mianiti 2009).

6. The Viagra phenomenon has triggered, in Italy too, an expansion of a parallel market of parapharmaceutical products adopting a direct-to-consumer marketing strategy.

7. A recent document from the Ministry of Health explicitly endorses the introduction of the andrologist into public family clinics, which in Italy were a victory for the feminist movement (Law no. 405/1975) and have previously included, as medical experts, only gynaecologists and obstetricians (Bevere et al. 2012).

8. Pfizer's marketing campaigns have always insisted on the ‘naturalness’ of the pharmaceutical effect, avoiding the stigmatisation and ridiculisation of an ‘abnormal’ ongoing hard-on (Loe 2004).

9. The use of Italics in the quotation is our emphasis.

10. The double-standard as therapeutic device is outspokenly recommended by one of the physicians interviewed by Mianiti (2009).

11. ‘Recent statistics demonstrate that about 5 million people suffer from sexuality-connected problems. The most frequent of these among men are erectile and ejaculatory dysfunction’ (Bevere et al. 2012, 24). The incidence of premature ejaculation is estimated at 20%, i.e. more than four million males.