There is a significant volume of research evidence documenting the sexual problems experienced by women survivors of childhood sexual abuse (CSA). Accordingly, existing treatment paradigms for sexual problems in this population tend to equate the absence of symptoms with adequate sexual functionality, implying that CSA survivors can aspire to sexual functionality at best. However, this false dichotomy reinforces a medicalized, genital-focused view of women's sexuality, and provides no information about what connotes a positive sexual experience for CSA survivors. The current mixed-methods study is centered on the research question, “how do women survivors of CSA experience 'good sex'?” Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 15 women who self-identified as CSA survivors and self-reported having experienced good sex. Participants were also asked to complete standardized quantitative measures of women's sexual functioning, sexual satisfaction, and sexual self-schema. Using interpretative phenomenological analysis (IPA), four themes emerged from the qualitative portion of the study. The women expressed a clear definition of good sex (theme one), identified factors that contributed to their experience of good sex (theme two), conceptualized good sex within a developmental context (theme three), and discussed similarities in the experience of good sex between survivors and non-survivors, though noted that the pathways to this experience were different for survivors (theme four). Participants' scores on the quantitative portion of the study varied widely from each other and were inconsistent across individual scores of sexual functioning and sexual satisfaction. These findings demonstrate that women survivors of CSA can and do experience good sex, and this experience of good sex may not be captured accurately by constructs of sexual functioning, sexual satisfaction, and sexual self-schema as depicted in commonly-used questionnaires. Implications for health practitioners, clinicians and researchers are discussed. / Graduate

For decades, sexual expression in older adulthood was a taboo topic in the public discourse and ignored in the empirical literature. As a result of several significant sociocultural changes and medical developments as well as an increasingly older population, however, perspectives are shifting and acceptance and interest in the sexual lives of older adults is growing. The purpose of this dissertation was to investigate sexual well-being in older adulthood and explore its diversity. Study 1 involved a systematic review of the literature on factors associated with the maintenance and cessation of sexual activity in adults 60 years of age and older. Data were extracted from a total of 57 studies and each was assessed for methodological quality. Surprisingly, only four factors (i.e., partner’s interest in sexual activity, past frequency of sexual activity, presence of erectile dysfunction, and partner-related illness) were consistently related, in more than one study, to whether or not older adults were sexually active. Significant variability in study results highlighted methodological caveats of the body of literature, but also the heterogeneity of older adults’ sexuality. Study 2 built upon the findings and recommendations of Study 1 and further examined diversity in sexual well-being. Sexual function and satisfaction, the absence of sexuality-related distress, breadth of sexual experience, and overall frequency of sexual activity were considered as indicators of sexual well-being. The Dual Control Model of Sexual Response (DCM) was used as the theoretical framework in this study of women 50 years of age and older. The DCM posits that sexual response depends on the relative activation of sexual excitatory and sexual inhibitory processes, two separate and independent systems. Study 2 results indicated that, independently, women’s propensities for sexual excitation and sexual inhibition were significantly associated with the majority of the indicators of sexual well-being and the directions of associations were consistent with the tenets of the DCM. The only association that proved not statistically significant was the relationship between sexual excitation and sexual distress. When examined together, sexual excitation and sexual inhibition factors significantly predicted sexual function, satisfaction, and frequency. Sexual distress was predicted more strongly by sexual inhibition factors and sexual breadth by sexual excitation factors. Partner physical and mental health and participant mental health were further identified as moderating variables of these associations. The results of Study 2 expand current knowledge regarding the DCM and its relevance to older women; sexual excitation and sexual inhibition appear to have heuristic value to better understand the variability in sexual activity and well-being in women aged 50 years and older. The results of this dissertation have important implications for the study of sexuality and ageing, perhaps most prominently in terms of highlighting the inter-individual variation in older adulthood and the conclusion that generalizations about “older adults” as a group may not be appropriate.

The purpose of this study was to evaluate the relationship between women's sexual desire and their reported level of sexual satisfaction. This study evaluated biological, psychological, and social factors of desire that might influence satisfaction. The sample for this study consisted of 77 Caucasian individuals, 45 women and 32 men, in their first marriage, who had been married on average 2 years. Results indicated that sexual desire was positively and significantly correlated with sexual satisfaction and that psychological and social factors most strongly explain women's sexual satisfaction. Further, women's perceptions of their own sexual desire, psychological and social, were more strongly associated with sexual satisfaction than their husband's perception of their desire, biological, psychological, or social.

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<p>My dissertation is a Black feminist inquiry into how Black women writers employ soul food imagery to equally assert their characters’ Blackness and sexual agency in post-Black Arts texts. These include Gayl Jones’ <em>Eva’s Man </em>(1976), Ntozake Shange’s <em>Sassafrass, Cypress & Indigo</em> (1982), Gloria Naylor’s <em>Bailey’s Café</em> (1992), and TT Bridgeman’s <em>Pound Cake for Sweet Pea </em>(2004). These novelists tell complex stories of Black women’s grappling with respectability, trauma, and erotic and sexual agency. In each novel, these Black women share a common reliance upon soul food that is often underexamined in critical scholarship. I argue that soul food is essential to how Black women cope with the duality of pleasure and pain by helping them assert liberated senses-of-self amidst sexism and its attendant emotional and physical violence. I also conceptualize this coping as a vibrational reprieve. </p>

As participants, we agreed that women's silenced voices need to be heard, more specific to this participatory action research, the voices of women with new babies. Through wellness pastoral care, we co-laboured in finding ways of standing up to prescribed religious and cultural ideas regarding womaness and motherhood. Pastoral care in partnership with feminist theology and mutuality in community opened a safe place to renegotiate our own preferred ways of seeing our bodies, selves, sexuality, and womaness. The pastoral care, counselling, and mutuality experienced as a research group became the prevalent characteristic of our wellness that we wished to extend beyond the group and into families, churches, community cohorts, and the planet. This research is one platform on which the participating women shared hurts, found a place to be heard, and having come to know our Self more deeply, offer this Self as a gift to the reader. / Practical Theology / M.Th.

As participants, we agreed that women's silenced voices need to be heard, more specific to this participatory action research, the voices of women with new babies. Through wellness pastoral care, we co-laboured in finding ways of standing up to prescribed religious and cultural ideas regarding womaness and motherhood. Pastoral care in partnership with feminist theology and mutuality in community opened a safe place to renegotiate our own preferred ways of seeing our bodies, selves, sexuality, and womaness. The pastoral care, counselling, and mutuality experienced as a research group became the prevalent characteristic of our wellness that we wished to extend beyond the group and into families, churches, community cohorts, and the planet. This research is one platform on which the participating women shared hurts, found a place to be heard, and having come to know our Self more deeply, offer this Self as a gift to the reader. / Philosophy, Practical and Systematic Theology / M.Th.