Abstract Book of the 9th International Conference on Social Sciences in the 21st Century
Year: 2025
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Lasting Longer Matters. Premature Ejaculation as A Product of Hegemonic (Sexual) Masculinity
Rosa Toriello
ABSTRACT:
To date, Premature Ejaculation is the most prevalent sexual disturbance in the male. However, with Sexual Health’s recent pro-sex reframing, is its clinical problematization still legitimate when pleasure is nevertheless attained beyond fixed norms and temporalities?
Starting from this question, this paper will dispute the process of detraditionalization that Sexual Health research is deemed to have undergone, subsequently discussing how to implement needed, meaningful changes. In doing this, I will engage in a Critical Discourse Analysis contemplating sources on Sexuality, Masculinity and Premature Ejaculation, mainly drawing from Anthropology and Andrology. Gender will be an epistemic tool to investigate the interplay between these fields.
Drawing on Foucauld’s thought, I argue that Sexology and Andrology entail and (re)produce a specific, constructed social order: hence, sexual practices and pleasure are neither natural nor given, but accordingly learned and absorbed. As the recent identification of the two additional subtypes of subjective and variable PE suggests, the enactment of hegemonic (sexual) masculinity lies at the core of several men’s health issues: failing to perform it inevitably leads to problematization and medicalization.
Andrology’s detraditionalization presupposes the adoption queer epistemic and clinical approaches. In practice, the development of additional non-mainstream Behavioural Therapies could drive patients to seek and feel pleasure in alternative ways. Moreover, pharmacological research should assess the efficacy of usually criminalized, neglected substances which could be potentially safer than more widespread SSRIs (including Dapoxetine) or the capitalistically profitable Viagra.
Keywords: Gender, Masculinities, Medical Anthropology, Sexual Health, Sexuality, Social Culture, Social Psychology, Sociomedical sciences