Leonore Tiefer

Leonore Tiefer (born February 5, 1944) is an American educator, researcher, therapist, and activist specializing in sexuality, and is a public critic of disease mongering as it applies to sexual life and problems.

Early years Leonore Tiefer was born in New York city and brought up in the Bronx, a borough of New York. Her instrument was the piano. She was so versatile that she also excelled at the clarinet and the cello and her performances as the only woman with Simon Bellison's Clarinet Ensemble were much praised. Her father, Abraham David Tiefer, of Austro-Hungarian Ashkenazi heritage, worked for the Board of Health.

Responding to the challenge of the feminist movement, she left Colorado and returned to her home state of New York, where her career in New York City sexology included positions at Downstate Medical Center (1977-1983), Beth Israel Medical Center (1983-1988), and Montefiore Medical Center (1988-1996). Fifteen years after her Ph.D. she returned to graduate school to respecialize as a clinical psychologist with a focus on human sexuality. She completed an American Psychological Association (APA)-approved postdoctoral respecialization in clinical psychology at New York University in 1988 with a focus on sex and gender problems.

Tiefer has held professional offices within both sexological and feminist organizations. She later wrote the history of that group from 1969 to 2009. The CSUCSW invited Gloria Steinem and Ms. Magazine editors to speak at the university on the “myths of feminism” in 1973, and later that same year, Tiefer helped form the CSU Faculty Women's Caucus. The following year, Tiefer taught an experimental course called “Human Sexuality,” the first on that topic at the university, which was taught from a "non-sexist point of view." The movement largely focused on "…law enforcement behavior and legal changes, hospital practices and counseling, self-defense and community education."

The New York City Mayor's Task Force on Rape was established in 1973, and opened four borough-wide rape crisis centers in 1977 (the group later changed its name to the New York City Advisory Task Force on Rape in 1980). Tiefer joined the group in 1977, and was co-chair from 1980 to 1982. Tiefer also joined the Psychiatry Department at Downstate Medical Center (DMC) in 1977 and co-founded the Rape Crisis Elective for Medical Students. This service has now evolved into a program out of the DMC Emergency Medicine Department.

Activism on DSM Diagnoses As part of her activities as National Coordinator of the Association for Women in Psychology (1983-1986), Tiefer co-organized a demonstration at the 1985 meeting of the American Psychiatric Association to protest the addition of "anti-feminist" diagnoses such as "paraphilic rape disorder" and “self-defeating personality disorder” to the DSM-III-R. This focus on norms continued with her work on Female Sexual Dysfunction nomenclature.

Activism on sex research and women Tiefer co-founded the World Research Network on the Sexuality of Women & Girls (WRNSWG) in 1991. She edited its newsletter from 1991 to 1999, and organized 4 of the 5 WRNSWG conferences, which were timed to precede the annual International Academy of Sex Research meetings in Provincetown (1995), Amsterdam (1996), Baton Rouge (1997), and New York City (1999). Other notable feminists involved with WRNSWG include Dutch sexologist Ellen Laan.

Since 1999, Tiefer has condemned the push for "Pink Viagra" by pharmaceutical companies. In doing so, she uniquely paired activism with research and scholarship to create the New View Campaign, which organized against the harmful medicalization of women's sexuality, including female sexual dysfunction, and female genital cosmetic surgery. According to the campaign's website, "Our goal was to expose the deceptions and consequences of industry involvement in sex research, professional sex education, and sexual treatments, and to generate conceptual and practical alternatives to the prevailing medical model of sexuality." Besides that, Erwin Haeberle put her summary of the founding of the New View Campaign (2000) into his "sexarchive".

In 2001, Tiefer co-edited a feminist sexology collection, A New View of Women's Sexual Problems, which grew out of the campaign. Her 2003 teaching manual is available on the New View Campaign website. The New View Campaign has held 5 scholar-activist conferences, testified before the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), provided fact sheets and briefings for media, and generated articles and chapters that are influencing the way students and professionals are taught about human sexuality. Tiefer used her experience as a clinical psychologist, sexologist, and feminist activist to critique, resist, and transform medical models of sexual health and dysfunction. Her intergenerational campaign used a range of tactics, including scholarly publications, lobbying, and social media. This effort spanned twelve years, from 2003 to 2015. It began in 2008 with a street demonstration followed in 2009 by an arts and crafts exhibit and political event in Brooklyn, NY called "Vulvagraphics:An Intervention in Honor Of Female Genital Diversity". In 2010, New View organized a conference in Las Vegas called "Framing the Vulva" which included activism titled “Talking back to Cosmetic Genital Surgeons”. In 2011, the New View Campaign organized a series of activist events called "Vulvanomics" with an online-petition, and a one-day “Flash Activism” event of community-based photography of FGCS surgeon's offices. The 2011 also featured a 10-minute satirical video called Dr. Vajayjay's! Privatize Those Privates!

Other activities In conjunction with her anti-medicalization scholarship and activism, Tiefer was interviewed by The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Nation and other newspapers and magazines. She has appeared on numerous networks, such as the CBC

Tiefer is also a public speaker, having been invited to keynote conferences nationally and internationally, such as one in Ljubljana. She has given provocative grand rounds in psychiatry, urology, and obstetrics & gynecology at medical centers, universities, and public audiences. Tiefer also has a private practice in Manhattan which she began in 1996. Her book Sex is Not a Natural Act and Other Essays (1995), reviewed favorably by critics, is now in its 2nd edition (2004). Her book reviews have appeared in numerous publications, and her coauthored op-eds have been published in the Los Angeles Times, among others.

Popular writings Beginning with a 1976 essay in Redbook, Tiefer has dabbled in popular news and magazine writing. Most notably, she wrote a weekly column in the New York Daily News from 1980 to 1981, some sections of which are reprinted in the first edition of her book Sex is Not a Natural Act and Other Essays.

Tiefer authored monthly sex advice columns in Playgirl Advisor (1976-1977) and Playgirl (1977). Her writing also appeared in Prime Time Magazine (1981), and she was profiled in Ms. Magazine in 1999. In 1994, Tiefer and Carol Tavris wrote a humorous column for the New York Times Book Review that was reprinted in the L.A. Times.

Awards and memberships She received the Alfred C. Kinsey Award (1994), the Distinguished Lifetime Scientific Achievement Award from the Society for the Scientific Study of Sexuality (2004) and the Lifetime Career Award from the Association for Women in Psychology (2004). She also served as vice chair of the board of directors of the National Coalition Against Censorship and on the steering committee of the Shelter for Homeless Men at the Community Church of New York - Unitarian-Universalist.

Legacy The "Leonore Tiefer Collection, 1948-Present", consisting of over 900 monographs as well as other materials is held in the Archives of Indiana University, Bloomington and The Kinsey Institute for Research in Sex, Gender and Reproduction.