A Mission Of Her Own

I love the title of your book "What Your Mother Never Told You About S-e-x." What do you wish your mother had told you?
I wish that she had told me that sex is natural and pleasurable, an important part of the human experience, and that I deserve pleasure. That's not what I was told. I wasn't told much at all, but the things that I was told tended to be on the negative side: don't get pregnant, don't get a disease. It wasn't really about the pleasurable side of sex, which is really important. It's an important part of the human experience.

We're surrounded by sexual imagery, and yet many women believe their sex lives aren't satisfying. Why is that?
The media presents an unrealistic view of what sex should be. I had patients coming to me after they watched "Sex and the City." They said, "I thought I was having great sex until I watched Samantha." I tell them that Samantha is a fictional character! In your fantasies, you can have the same kind of orgasm, but life is just not like that. People start thinking that everyone else is having better sex and then they're not happy with the sex that they are having.

What's your biggest frustration with women's health care today?
Female bodily functions have become diseases. Menstrual periods have become a problem: they're messy, they're unnecessary, they're disgusting. You can take pills to get rid of them! Well, menstrual periods are natural. Some people do have severe problems and those need to be treated, but most women are not suffering from their menstrual periods. We're taking natural female bodily functions and female anatomy and making it abnormal so we can do surgery and give women medication they don't need. Why are we making being a woman a disease?

Is this why women hate their bodies?
We are dissecting women into many little parts, and each part needs to be surgically or medically altered so that you can become the perfect woman. A lot of that comes from the media. We're constantly told that you need to do this diet, you need to take this medication. It's the constant pressure to be perfect. Is anybody really perfect? We need women to speak up and say, "Enough already." I think that's going to be the title of my next book.

What would you like to tell young women doctors?
You don't have to work so hard to prove your worthiness to others. I spent so many years trying to prove that I be-longed because I came into Ob-Gyn at a time when there were few women. That affected me mentally and emotionally. Rather than just enjoying the fact that I had accomplished what all these other people told me I would never accomplish, I felt that I had to work harder than anybody else to prove that I belonged. You don't have to do that. You should work hard because you love it. You should enjoy every moment of it. And then the rewards will come.

© 2007