Ellen Laan and the World Research Network on the Sexuality of Women and Girls an untold story

The last time I saw Ellen Laan, my beloved friend and feminist comrade in sexology, it was May, 2019, and she was in my hometown of New York to participate in a WAS (World Association for Sexual Health) “Expert Consultation on Sexual Pleasure and Sexual Health.” We had been close friends for almost 30 years. It rained the night we met for dinner, as we talked and talked and drank margaritas. She was very busy with her Dutch clinical work, research, publications, advocacy, and new sexual wellness foundation, www.seksueelwelzijn.nl, and said she wouldn’t have taken time out except the subject of sexual pleasure was so important and she wanted to make sure whatever document emerged from this consultation was good for women. Good for women.That was Ellen.

In Ellen Laan’s memory and honor I want to present a historical story that has never been told before, certainly never been published, that sheds light on women who were doing research about and for women in international sexology decades ago. Ellen plays an important role in this story, and telling it allows me to focus away from my despair at losing her far too soon. I think both of us learned important and lasting lessons during these events. Ellen enters the story in 1990, but I have to go back a little before then to begin.

IASR in the 1980s

When the history is written of professional and academic sexology in the 20th century, the small but influential International Academy of Sex Research (IASR, known to one and all as “The Academy”) will appear frequently in chapters on the science, politics and culture of sex research. In this essay, I will focus on a few background pieces of the IASR story that antedate the World Research Network on the Sexuality of Women and Girls (WRNSWG)^info, my true subject.

IASR was founded in 1973. Its spiffy 2022 website lists 53 charter members, although when I attended my first meeting in 1979 almost none of the women on that list were to be seen. Anke Ehrhardt was the first female president (1982), I was the third (1993), and Ellen Laan was only the 8th (2012), after the organization had been around for 40 years! Currently, both the president and past president are women, so things have changed.

For many years only a handful of women were full IASR members, because election to full membership required first or solo authorship on several peer-reviewed papers, and that was a high bar. Moreover, there was a dearth of research about actual human women’s lived lives presented at the IASR meetings; the emphasis was largely on animal research, neural mechanisms, pharmacology, and hormones^info.

In 1986, at the IASR meeting in Amsterdam, I convened a breakfast meeting to discuss feminist issues. Ellen was not yet attending, but 14 colleagues, including 3 men, showed up for a lively conversation. There was a lot of noise in the hotel restaurant and everyone had to yell to be heard, but there was also a lot of excitement because we were doing something new. Political issues were largely invisible, even prohibited, in IASR because we knew how politics had destroyed the vibrant German tradition of sexology that existed before the Nazis destroyed it (Haeberle, 1981). As a group, we had intentionally kept the focus on science.

Having no idea who would come to the breakfast, I had no formal agenda, but after some discussion about female membership and topics on women that needed to be considered, we began to talk about regular meetings to facilitate change. We were IASR’s first special interest group, calling ourselves “FAIR,” or Feminist Aspects in Research, and we continued to meet annually for several years during breakfast or lunch at IASR conferences^info. Eventually our meal-time get-togethers were listed in the program (as were those of a gay and lesbian special interest group whose members also felt under-represented in the program). FAIR, later changed to the “Feminist Focus Group,” raised IASR’s awareness that topics about women, presentations (not posters) by women, and full members who were women were in short supply.

The founding of WRNSWG

Ellen Laan, who was almost 20 years younger than I, first attended IASR in 1990 in Sigtuna, Sweden, and the earliest presentation on her lengthy c.v. is the poster she presented at that meeting, “Do [sex orientation] preferences predict genital arousal?” I can’t say for sure that she attended the Feminist Focus group meeting, but my guess is that she did. (Where are those notes and photographs when you need them?) I know we got acquainted and made plans for her to visit NY when IASR next came to North America.

The next year, 1991, the 10th World Congress sponsored by WAS was held in Amsterdam. Ellen spoke on “Subjective sexual experience and psychophysiological studies of sexual response” on a psychophysiology panel organized by Gayle Beck. In my plenary talk called “Feminism Matters” (Tiefer, 1992), I pointed to the aspects of women’s sexuality that sexology overemphasizes (universals, biology) well as those it ignores (context, meaning), and insisted that “feminism matters to sexology because sexuality is a prime location of women’s oppression in the world, and women’s status cannot change if ideas and practices about sexuality remain the same” (p.3). Shades of seksueelwelzijn.nl 25 years later! Shades of Ellen’s 2021 paper on pleasure discussed in this volume! Shades of plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose!

Ellen, Gayle and I weren’t happy with either the quality or the quantity of research on women at this World Congress. It was the same old story we had been dealing with at IASR. We looked in vain for papers with new methods and concepts to understand women’s sexual lives. Maybe, we said, we should stop complaining and do something about it. Maybe we should create a network to link up people interested in new sex research on women. Perhaps that would generate new collaborations and stimulate more studies. Two months later, at the IASR meeting in Barrie, Ontario, we discussed the idea of a new network during the Feminist Focus meeting. We had successfully petitioned IASR for two symposia on women’s issues (one on research methods and one on the role of the uterus) to be given the following year in Prague in 1992, but this small victory only whetted our appetite.

Following the Barrie meeting, Ellen came to New York for the promised visit and in my living room we began to implement the plan. Without any expectations of support or staff, based simply on friendship and courageous determination, we wrote a cover letter describing the new WRNSWG network and devised a 2-page questionnaire to get it off the ground. Here are the questions from that initial questionnaire, which was mailed to all IASR members:

1) Name, Address, Phone, Fax. [Email did not exist yet!]

2) What areas of research on the sexuality of women

and girls are you involved in?

3) What do you see as aspects of the sexuality of

women and girls about which more research is

needed?

4 What do you see as the purpose(s) of a World

Research Network on the Sexuality of Women

and Girls?

5) In what ways would you like to participate/be

involved in the Network?

6) Please list the names and complete addresses of

any researchers who would be interested in joining the Network.

7) What sexology conferences do you plan to attend

during the 1991-92 year? Would you be willing to

convene a meeting of researchers at any of these

meetings to discuss the Network?

Responses came in quickly, and the results were mailed out in our first newsletter on October 3, 1991. It consisted largely of contact information and lists of research interests of the 26 “charter members of WRNSWG”^info. They came from the US (17), UK (2), The Netherlands (4), Sweden (1), and Canada (2).4 Their areas of research interest included familiar ones like hormones, menopause, desire and child sexual abuse sequelae, and less familiar ones like neurological diseases, female paraphilias, role of the uterus, painful bladder disease, extragenital pleasure, flirtation, sexual assertiveness and condom use, attitudes towards prostitution, and lesbians’ fantasies. Most (19) indicated that they wanted to be actively involved in WRNSWG and we proposed that colleagues attending other sexology conferences in North America and Europe should distribute flyers and start the work: collaborate, network, plan, strategize.

A couple of years of newsletters and then our own conference

WRNSWG continued through 1992 and 1993 to produce annual Spring newsletters with updated and expanding mailing lists: 1992 had 58 names, 1993 had 55. Women were becoming more visible on the programs of sex research meetings. In those years, our only ways to stay in touch were through correspondence, faxes^info and phone calls along with in-person meetings at conferences. It is astonishing to recall how limited professional communications were before smartphones, Zoom, Skype, What’sApp and e-mail and what professional organizations and groups were like before websites, webinars, podcasts and social media. Thanks to Covid-19, we now routinely have conversations, planning meetings and even conferences on our phones and computers. None of this was imaginable in the 1990s, when we were grateful to have Xerox machines and not be duplicating letters with carbon paper and mimeograph machines as we had done in the 1970s.

Our 1993 newsletter excitedly announced our first WRNSWG conference. It would be held immediately before the 1994 IASR conference in Edinburgh, Scotland. Ellen Laan would deal with registrations, Sarah Blaffer Hrdy and I would organize the program, and Cindy Graham, who was in Edinburgh at the time, would arrange housing, food and meeting space. The topic would be “Towards a Redefinition of Female Sexuality” and we would focus on “issues of research methodology and feminist politics as well as new research areas such as menstruation, new research subjects such as refugee women, and new historical studies of women’s sexuality.” This ambitious announcement indicated our hope that WRNSWG would take a more multidisciplinary perspective on the sexuality of women and girls than was common in sexology.

Martha McClintock from the University of Chicago accepted our invitation to be the keynote speaker for our first conference. Her menstrual synchrony work from the 1970s was well known and her continuing research into pheromones appealed to the WRNSWG members who focused on sexuality and women’s biology. Arranging the remainder of the program, however, was more difficult than expected, as we only received a few submissions. After McClintock had to cancel because of a family conflict, we decided to postpone our first WRNSWG conference by a year, which would give us more time to make a program. We asked members to suggest speakers who might educate and stimulate us with “new methods, concepts and approaches” to studying the sexuality of women and girls. Few sexologists knew much about the new women’s studies or the qualitative research methods that were just beginning to be accepted in disciplines like psychology. We were eager to talk about the possibilities of “feminist research methods” in sexology. Ellen was giving lectures such as “Seksuele opwinding bij vrouwen: Constructivisme in het laboratorium.” The growing interest in social construction, how to define it and how to research it, was often in our conversation.

Those were our dual agendas, as revealed in Ellen’s and my correspondence: to expand sex research and to influence sexology. The newsletters began to reflect these issues: One reproduced a table from a qualitative methods text (Marshall and Rossman, 1989) that classified various research strategies (e.g., case study, field study, ethnography, quasi-experiment, participant observation, in-depth interviewing) and the types of research question they could address (e.g., What are the salient themes in participants’ meaning structures?, How do beliefs and attitudes interact to shape behavior?, How are patterns linked with one another?). Another page in that newsletter reproduced a figure from another qualitative research methods text (Miles and Huberman, 1994) illustrating how to link qualitative and quantitative data. Ellen and I, along with the others in our growing group, wanted to be part of the new feminist scholarship.

Our WRNSWG conferences

Our first conference (Provincetown, 1995), one and a half days of intense conversation, was a triumph, not least because it actually occurred, but also because our careful conference design plans didn’t materialize and we had to improvise. Ten participants in addition to Ellen and me showed up at the Provincetown Inn on Cape Cod in Massachusetts two days before IASR began^info. The first evening began with a panel on “History and problems of methodology and language in research on the sexuality of women and girls,” and we had a spirited discussion about theory and history. We marveled over how sexology had emerged from a German climate that included radical work on family planning but then failed to maintain an interest in women’s reproductive politics.

With time remaining, we veered into a new, casual and spontaneous direction, with each participant responding to the question, “What is the most significant thing you have learned about sexuality in the past 10 years and how did you learn it?” The question had not been circulated before and people responded informally - some briefly, some at length. We spoke in English, which was not the native language for half the attendees, so sometimes searching for the right words was a challenge, but having plenty of time to think and speak offered a contrast to the usual pressured international conference situation, and the ideas put forward were revealing and provocative.

Our group shared stories of learning about sexuality from reading and conducting research, conferences, personal life, and media. Ellen’s comment revealed her decades-long preoccupation, “Sex differences are so persistent. There must be differences that are more than just social, but we have a dichotomy of methods to study biology and social construction. How do we gather meaningful information?” Margret Hauch said that treatment of sex offenders could not be like sex therapy of couples. Diane Morrisette observed how little information is disseminated to the public by sexologists. Carmen Lange brought up the importance of the body. She said, “Having a baby taught me that the split between sex and reproduction is not so complete. Moms have sexuality with their kids which makes husbands jealous.” The whole evening of discussion was felt to be very successful, and Ellen and I decided that we would continue with this structure the next day, abandoning the formal design of topic discussions.

We were supposed to have a poster session the next morning, followed by three pairs of simultaneous group discussions, but this busy conference design was absurdly over-ambitious for only 12 people. Eight people had brought posters, however, and so the next day began with presenters showing their data on Canadian women’s sexual paraphilias, Asian undergraduate women’s sexual lives in Vancouver, German adolescents girls’ experiences with nonconsensual sex, the impact of exercise on sympathetic arousal of women’s genitalia, new methods of sampling sexual experiences using pagers, the history of women in German sexology, and two papers on Dutch women’s responses to erotic films, one on pelvic floor measures and dysfunction (Janneke van der Velde) and Ellen’s on sexual orientation. The variety in measures was impressive and the focus on women and girls was exactly what we had wanted to achieve. We sat as a group to discuss all the posters which led us to talk more personally about how we chose or were directed to use particular research topics and methods. We explored our views about whether we selected research projects because they were interesting and novel or because they could benefit women’s lives, something that was deeply important to several researchers—notably, of course, Ellen.

We all enjoyed another informal discussion on the question, “Before I die, what one question do I want answered about the sexuality of women and girls?” Blanca Ortiz, “Is it possible to transform a person’s early socialization to facilitate the development of her sexual life?” Julia Heiman, “How do people acquire the religious feelings that affect sexual practices?” Paul Federoff, “What fixates a person’s lovemap?” Cynthia Hedricks, “We need to ask women what sex means to them.” Margret Hauch, “Has German sex research changed now that there are more women in it?” And, again, Ellen, “Will we ever learn the basis of the differences between men and women?”

At the end, reflecting on what had transpired, we all realized how much we had enjoyed having long, informal, thoughtful discussions rather than the typically minuscule conference Q&A periods that focused on facts and research details. Everyone wanted to continue meeting, and Ellen and Janneke volunteered to organize a 1 1/2 day WRNSWG for 1996 to be held before the IASR meeting in Rotterdam. We urged each other to try to convene WRNSWG meetings at other sexology conferences as a way to spotlight the importance of research by and about women. On a large piece of paper taped to the wall, Ellen recorded the names of 28 Nordic, German, Swiss, Dutch, Icelandic, Canadian, American, social science, feminist, psychology, psychiatry, AIDS, and sex offender-focused groups attended at least once by participants.

This decentralized model, what I called “No One Owns WRNSWG,” was novel and daunting. Academic researchers, for all their skills and resources, were not used to taking initiative in this way. I felt more safe because feminist process urged bottom-up organizing. I had joined one particular insurgent American feminist professional organization, the Association for Women in Psychology (AWP), the same year (1979) I was elected to membership in IASR. In AWP, anyone who wanted to could join, initiate a caucus, give a presentation, or volunteer for a central role. There were no elections and as little central function as possible. Consequently I had more experience as a feminist activist than did Ellen and it was a central part of my identity. This difference between us became more significant at the end of WRNSWG, when Ellen’s upward professional career trajectory and my commitment to outsider advocacy took us in different directions.

It took a lot of work to organize this first WRNSWG conference because everything is harder the first time. Ellen and I often mentioned in our correspondence being anxious because we had no idea who or how many would come, let along the logistics of international organizing. We expected far more than 12 and yet the strength of the meeting, the lengthy and relaxed discussions, would not have occurred with a large crowd. There might be no obvious professional advantage to participating in this WRNSWG experiment, but Ellen and I felt proud to have taken the risks and made the effort to create something new. In the current terminology, we were “empowered” by the experience.

Subsequent WRNSWG conferences took place in Amsterdam (1996), Valencia (1997), New Orleans (1997), and New York City (1999). The get-together of 8 people at the Valencia WAS Congress was organized by Conny Schreuders-Bais, a Dutch medical sexologist, and represented the only “satellite” meeting of the type Ellen and I had originally envisioned as a model not only to grow WRNSWG but to disseminate its values and goals. Ellen and I organized the other three gatherings in proximity to IASR conferences.

The 1996 event in Amsterdam drew 11 attendees, five came to New Orleans in 1997, and nine attended in New York City in 1999. In each case the format was a first session when each participant described his or her work, research, and interests in WRNSWG. There were also research posters each time and discussions focussing on the sexuality of women and girls. The mailing list continued to grow (peaking at 75 in 1997), and we began to use new technologies. In 1994, Ellen sent me a lovely letter asking if I had yet heard about that new thing, “email,” which could be really useful to us. By 1996, it was. And yet Ellen and I gradually realized, regretfully, that the model we had created to stimulate more thinking about the sexuality of women and girls was unsustainable as the sexology world around us shifted.

The end of WRNSWG

Ellen was increasingly productive in more ways than one (baby Leah Nora had been born in 1996, Britt would arrive in January of 2000) and we were both writing and speakng all over the place. Organizing meetings and writing newsletters took time we didn’t have, and the small meetings, while stimulating, were disappointing results of huge effort. And yet I would argue that WRNSWG came to an end in 1999 because of larger developments, specifically the incursion of the pharmaceutical industry into sexology (Tiefer, 2000). This had been under the radar for two decades, only emerging into public view in 1998. In the 1980s Pfizer had begun investigating whether sildenafil could help with hypertension and angina, when, unexpectedly, researchers found it might instead have beneficial effects on erectile function^info. In the 1990s the company recruited sexologists with skills in psychometric measurement, such as Ray Rosen, to help develop clinical trial measures for sexual function and subjective satisfaction.

In 1992, the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) held its first, and to date its only government-sponsored consensus development conference on a sexual topic (NIH, 1992). Titled “Impotence,” and organized by urologists who at the time (though not publicly known) were working on sildenafil, it advanced the legitimacy of drug development for sexual problems. I spoke on “Partner Issues,” waving the flag for women, though now I see that I was primarily there as window-dressing. Viagra was patented in 1996, approved by the FDA for the treatment of erectile dysfunction in March, 1998, and the rest, as they say, is history.

As the success of the drug seemed probable, and a new sexuopharmaceutical industry seemed inevitable, Pfizer began reaching out to involve more sexologists in its pharmaceutical business culture. An early step was the industry-organized “Cape Cod Conference” of 1997 (Moynihan, 2003), where the focus expanded from discussing men’s erectile function to include women’s sexual function as well. Ellen was invited to speak at that conference (Laan and Everaerd, 1997), and afterwards told me, as did other women in attendance, that they had taken every opportunity to argue that pills were not what women needed to have better sex lives. I was not invited because, Ray Rosen told me, my anti-medicalization point of view was clear and would not be helpful (Tiefer, 1996).

One big pharma-funded meeting in 1997 led to another and another, and by the time the Boston urologist Irwin Goldstein organized the 1999 “Female Sexual Function Forum” (Ellen was too pregnant to attend, but had participated in preparatory meetings in 1998) it was clear that WRNSWG’s grassroots, informal, network approach to studying the sexuality of women and girls was no longer viable. Unlike mine, Ellen’s feminist politics and her collegial style were non-confrontational, and she never stopped believing that she could make a difference for women by working on the inside of clinical trials, nomenclature, meta-analyses, guidelines development, and new organizations. Moreover, she was still building her career and international recognition while I had already achieved a level of security from which I could publicly challenge the medicalization steamroller. Our purpose, to work for women, remained unchanged from when we had co-founded WRNSWG. But, for the most part, despite our common goals and our uninterrupted loving friendship, we swam in different waters after 2000.

Feminist colleagues, politics and friendship

In the years following the final WRNSWG meeting, Ellen and I met at numerous sexology conferences, visited back and forth across the Atlantic, stayed involved in each other’s lives, and even collaborated a few times. I valued her expertise and counsel and wanted her to engage in the kind of public advocacy I began in 2000 with the New View Campaign (http://www.newviewcampaign.org). She was always interested, but always busy. In 2005 I organized a Montreal conference to criticize the medical model, “Women and the New Sexual Politics: Profits vs. Pleasures”^info right across town from where Ellen was advancing a similar complex view of women’s sexual problems at WAS (Laan, 2005). That year we met for dinner between our two conferences. On another memorable occasion I was able to recruit Ellen to co-author an op-ed in a major American newspaper criticizing the misleading tactics taken by the company promoting FDA approval of flibanserin, a former antidepressant that had been repurposed as a desire drug for women (Laan and Tiefer, 2014).

As I continue to observe the evolution of women’s sexuality amidst ever-changing cultural pressures, the story of WRNSWG offers a few lessons. I wish I knew what lessons Ellen would suggest from her perspective.

First, it’s always a good time to do something. There was no point in merely hoping that time would solve the problems of too few women and too few women-centered research topics in sexology. By getting together to talk and strategize first in FAIR and then in WRNSWG we made women the drivers of our sexology story, not merely the passengers.

Second, the benefits of activism are often incidental rather than intentional. It’s difficult to know how far we succeeded with our goal to advance research, networking and visibility for women’s sexual topics. Possibly some young researchers were inspired and probably some beneficial contacts were made at our meetings. It’s more certain that Ellen and I acquired skills and self-confidence that we used in our later activities. The WRNSWG network idea and mailing list, for example, were incorporated into the New View Campaign. I was able to organize New View conferences in part because I had learned how to years earlier in WRNSWG. Likewise, I have no doubt that Ellen acquired confidence and the seeds for www.seksueelwelzijn.nl during the WRNSWG years.

Finally, it is important to never underestimate the role of friendship, of deep emotional connection, in women’s lives and careers. It’s not about agreeing on the way you cross every t and dot every i in your feminist politics - it’s about having the feminist commitment and trusting that there are many ways to skin a cat. And it’s about expressing genuine caring as often and in as many ways as possible. After all, it’s not every colleague who names her firstborn after you. Writing this, of course, makes the grief tears come, so I will stop here.

References

Haeberle, E. J. (1981) Swastika, pink triangle and yellow star: The destruction of sexology and the persecution of homosexuals in Nazi Germany. Journal of Sex Research, 17(3): 270-287.

Laan, E., & Everaerd, W. (1997, May). Physiological measures of vaginal vasocongestion. In Heiman, J. (Symposium chair), Female Sexual Function: Clinical Assessment. Presented at the ‘Cape Cod Consensus Conference: Sexual Function Assessment in Clinical Trials’, Hyannis, MA.

Laan, E. (2005, July). Women’s sexual problems: Disease or circumstance? Plenary Symposium on Female Sexual Dysfunction: An integrative approach, World Congress of Sexology, Montreal, Canada

Laan, E. and Tiefer, L. (2014). The sham drug idea of the year: ‘pink Viagra’ [Editorial]. Los Angeles Times, November 14, http://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-laan-tiefer-pink-viagra-20141114-story.html#navtype=outfit

Marshall, C. and Rossman, GB (1989) Designing Qualitative Research. Newbury Park, CA: Sage Publications.

Miles, MB and Huberman, AM (1994) Qualitative Data Analysis, 2nd ed. Newbury Park, CA: Sage Publications.

Moynihan, R, (2003) The making of a disease: female sexual dysfunction, British Medical Journal, 2003 Jan 4; 326(7379): 45–47. 

doi: 10.1136/bmj.326.7379.45

NIH (1992). https://consensus.nih.gov/1992/1992impotence091html.htm

Tiefer L. (1991) A Brief History of the Association for Women in Psychology: 1969–1991. Psychology of Women Quarterly. 15(4):635-649. doi:10.1111/j.1471-6402.1991.tb00436.x

Tiefer, L. (1992) Feminism matters in sexology. In Bezemer, W., Cohen-Kettenis, P., Slob, K. (eds.) Sex Matters: Proceedings of the Xth World Congress of Sexlogy, Amsterdam, 18-22 June, 1991. Elsevier Science Publishers. ISBN-13: 978-0-444-89551-6, ISBN: 0-444-89551-5

Tiefer, L. (2000) Sexology and the pharmaceutical industry: The threat of co-optation, The Journal of Sex Research, 37:3, 273 -283, DOI: 10.1080/00224490009552048

Tiefer, L. (1996) The medicalization of sexuality: Conceptual, normative, and professional issues. Annual Review of Sex Research, 7, 252-282.