Leonore Tiefer

In 1972, while working at Colorado State University (CSU) in Fort Collins, Tiefer co-founded the local National Organization for Women (NOW) chapter and the CSU Commission on the Status of Women (CSUCSW).[6] The CSUCSW invited Gloria Steinem and Ms. Magazine editors to speak at the university on the “myths of feminism” in 1973,[7] and later that same year, Tiefer helped form the CSU Faculty Women's Caucus.[8] 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.”[9]

After returning to New York City in 1977, Tiefer became active in the anti-rape movement, which had begun in the 1970s with speakouts, publications, and community organizing by groups such as New York Women Against Rape.[10] The movement largely focused on "…law enforcement behavior and legal changes, hospital practices and counseling, self-defense and community education.”[11] 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 1980-1982. Tiefer also joined the Psychiatry Department at Downstate Medical Center (DMC) in 1977 and became part of the Rape Crisis Elective for Medical Students. This service has now evolved into a program out of the DMC Emergency Medicine Department.[12]

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.[13][14] This focus on norms continued with her work on Female Sexual Dysfunction nomenclature.

Tiefer co-founded the World Research Network on the Sexuality of Women & Girls (WRNSWG) in 1991.[15] She edited its newsletter from 1991-1999, 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).[16] Other notable feminists involved with WRNSWG include Dutch sexologist Ellen Laan.

Tiefer started the New View Campaign in 2000 as an educational project to create a new model of women's sexual health.[17] 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.”[3] The campaign began with a collaboratively written and vetted manifesto that has been translated in 8 languages and published in many sexology textbooks.[18] In 2001, Tiefer co-edited a feminist sexology collection, A New View of Women's Sexual Problems,[19] which grew out of the campaign. She also co-authored and self-published a classroom and workshop teaching manual in 2003, which is available on the New View Campaign website.[20] 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 successful intergenerational campaign used tactics both old and new: manifestos, scholarly publications, classroom curricula, op-eds, protests, testimony, lobbying, conferences, art shows, websites, Facebook, Twitter, online petitions, listservs, and interactive blogs.

For years, the New View Campaign challenged FDA approval of Intrinsa (2004) and Flibanserin (2010, 2015) for women's hypoactive sexual desire and female sexual dysfunction. With petition work, mainstream interviews and debates, public actions, and presentations at FDA hearings, Tiefer and the New View Campaign challenged the highly deceptive pharmaceutical public relations campaigns in 2004, 2010, and 2015 that pressured the FDA to approve Flibanserin.[21] This effort spanned twelve years, from 2003 to 2015.

In 2008, the New View Campaign expanded its work to examine female genital cosmetic surgery, a growing aspect of the medicalization of women's sexual lives. At the same time, Tiefer expanded her activism from focusing exclusively on the medicalization of sex to a larger perspective on overtreatment and overdiagnosis. In doing so, she co-organized the successful conference “Selling Sickness: People Before Profits,” in 2013 in Washington, D.C.[22]

In October, 2016, Tiefer concluded the New View Campaign with a final Capstone Conference in Bloomington, Indiana, the home of the Kinsey Institute for Research in Sex, Gender, and Reproduction. A video about the conference was uploaded in 2017.[23]