ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on women's sexuality in terms of individual capacity and expression, as occurs within the biomedical framework, not only ignores the relationship context but also ignores the larger political framework, with the subsequent danger of mistaking something socially constructed and then internalized for some transhistorical essence. Designating sexuality a matter of "health" has important ramifications in terms of appropriate authorities, institutional control, language and imagery, methods for study, and, most important, people's views of its place in their own lives. Feminists are attracted to a health model for sexuality in large part because they want the "legitimacy" and "moral neutrality" for their claims about women's rights and needs offered by what purports to be reliance on the "objective" facts of biological "nature." There are hidden assumptions accompanying the health model that make it deeply worrisome when applied to women's sexuality: the four medical model assumptions of norms and deviance, universality, individualism, and biological reductionism.
