Response to Puts and Dawood: Been There


Συγγραφέας: Elisabeth A Lloyd


Elisabeth A Lloyd: Response to Puts and Dawood: Been There (html, 36K)
I am very pleased to be invited to engage in a serious discussion of evidence and standards with Doctors David Puts and Khytam Dawood in the pages of this journal (Puts and Dawood, June, 2006). I thank Editor Nick Martin for first commissioning a review that turned out to be favorable and informative, and then deeming the subject important enough to warrant further discussion. I am especially pleased by his choice of commentators, because I hold Dr. Dawood in very high regard ever since I learned of the timely, well designed, and badly needed research she led on the heritability of female orgasm (Dawood et al. 2005). This study, unlike the Dunn et al. study that received so much publicity last year, admirably took women's sexuality seriously enough to investigate three contexts of female orgasm -- intercourse; other partner sex not involving intercourse, in which they explicitly asked about oral sex; and masturbation -- in contrast to the Dunn study's insensitive but typical two contexts of intercourse and masturbation, which ignores the situations under which so many women achieve orgasm during partnered sex. Alas, though, the piece by Puts and Dawood contains some serious errors.