Sexual Healing

Forget Viagra—Dr. Lori Brotto of UBC has a solution for sexually dissatisifed women that will work better than any prescription drug

By Danielle Egan

A CLINIC ACROSS FROM Vancouver General Hospital is a strange place to watch porn, but that’s what the doctor—in knee-high black stiletto boots, no less—orders. I’m here to put my genitals to the test with Dr. Lori Brotto, psychologist and head of the UBC Sexual Health Lab, which is tucked away on the sixth floor of the new Gordon and Leslie Diamond Health Care Centre. “Our erotic videos are by porn star Candida Royale,” says Dr. Brotto, a trim, no-nonsense woman.

“She’s the standard for sex researchers. We all use the same films to test female sexual arousal because they’re female-directed and have more of a story-building plot.”
Plot development isn’t a key concern at Brotto’s sex lab; the story here is that at least a third of women are unhappy with their sex lives. This news is a turn-on to pharmaceutical companies chasing the next magic “cure” and romancing scientists with big grants. But Brotto has developed a treatment model that eschews the chemical approach and has the burgeoning field of sex research abuzz.

Brotto currently has 23 sexual health studies underway at her small lab. Its hub is a surprisingly cozy spot called the “arousal room,” complete with white tealight candles. Brotto’s videos have been edited down to an 11-minute clip of the sort of scenes that you’d see in a typical hard-core film; this clip is used to assess a patient’s physiological response to sexual stimulation.

“Almost every woman we see, whether she has a sexual disorder or not, will genitally respond to this material,” says Brotto. “Even if she says she didn’t respond physically in post-test assessments. Our research shows that women can be clueless about what their own genitals are doing.”

Proof comes from a gizmo the size of a crayon that measures vaginal blood flow and pulse—it’s called a vaginal photoplethysmograph. Patients insert the device themselves in private, then sit back on a female-friendly recliner to watch the video. It starts with non-sexual material to establish baseline responses. In my case it’s a pineapple-farming documentary. The camera pans across a lush Hawaiian landscape, then segues to a close-up of a pineapple. I wonder not just whether my genitals will react to such an image, but also whether I want strangers to know the answer.

I haven’t got much time to fret before a naked man appears on the screen, wedging himself up against a woman’s butt cheeks. Sex of various sorts follows, all of it taking place on a bearskin rug with a crackling fireplace in the background. The set triggers my brain’s cheese-o-metre, while an IBM computer in the adjacent, florescent-lit room tracks my “vaginal pulse amplitude.”

These data amount to a kind of genital lie detector test for women who say porn doesn’t turn them on. For those diagnosed with a sexual disorder, or convinced that their equipment is faulty (perhaps due to nerve-damaging cancer surgeries), or generally unhappy with their sex lives, passing this test, so to speak, can be a relief. But the fact that even women who say they rarely get turned on have significant physiological responses to porn raises the fascinating question of what’s going on in their heads.

“A woman might not report sexual stimulation, but her genitals almost always react automatically to sexual stimuli,” says Brotto when, 20 minutes later, having filled out a post-test questionnaire, I return to her office. “It shows there’s a desynchrony between the mind and the body.”

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