Letters in Response to the 11.29.09 Issue Women Who Want to Want Daniel Bergner's article poignantly expresses both the deep distress felt by women at the loss of their libido as well as the complexity of treating the condition. Women's sexual problems must be assessed by integrating the emotional, physical and psychosocial perspectives in order for us to be successful in treating them. Most often, as Bergner's article states, recommended treatment protocols are unilateral; the false assumption is that one "magic bullet" should alleviate the problem. Only with an integrated approach to diagnosing and treating women with sexual dysfunction will more have a better chance at achieving what they are looking for - a full and satisfying sex life. BAT SHEVA MARCUS Clinical Director, Medical Center for Female Sexuality Purchase, N.Y. As a sexual-treatment therapist for more than 30 years (and an author of "Still Sexy After All These Years? The Nine Unspoken Truths About Women's Desire Beyond 50"), I found the direction of Brotto's work on the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders definitions of women's sexual desire very disheartening. What troubles me is that the accepted approach to diagnosis in this arena is to start from the point of view of women who define themselves as dysfunctional. But we must recognize that women have little to go on other than popular media's exaggerated view of female sexuality when making that judgment of themselves. Without first doing the long-term research needed to understand the full range of women's experiences of sexual desire, we simply do not have an accurate baseline from which to judge dysfunction. I had been working in the field of human sexuality for decades when I reached menopause myself. At that point, I did not know, beyond myth and hearsay, what normal changes occur in women's sexuality as they age past menopause. In an attempt to address this lack of information, my co-author and I interviewed more than 500 women from ages 50 to 95 across the United States from 2003-5. The most profound insight we gained was how little women know about how other women function sexually. Repeatedly we were asked, "What is normal?" Sexuality is such a complex, dynamic aspect of a woman's experience that the range of "normal" may be far broader than any of us realizes. After Cheney In James Traub's article (Nov. 29), he writes, "Empire-building is not encouraged in the Obama administration." What, then, are readers to make of the administration's "bright idea" of having Vice President Biden administer the oath of American citizenship on July 4 to immigrant soldiers under a giant American flag hanging from the ceiling of Al Faw Palace in formerly sovereign Iraq? It is fitting that war and occupation have turned Iraq into a cradle of American nationhood, as American empire- and nation-building have been intimately linked since the founding of the republic. But it remains to be seen whether nation-building - the necessary legitimizing corollary to empire-building in our post-Wilsonian world - will result in effective sovereignty for Iraq (and Afghanistan) and security for the United States. SEAN POLLOCK Assistant Professor Department of History Wright State University Dayton, Ohio Hand-Me-Down Humor The headline for Ed Zuckerman's profile asks whether it matters that audiences don't always get the joke. I found the answer in the mid-1970s when my company needed to get the attention of its sales force to tell customers about a product improvement. "Let's make it funny," my boss said. We'll get Bob and Ray to get the word out to the troops. After their morning radio show in New York City, Bob Elliott and Ray Goulding flew to Rochester to listen to marketing executives describe the significance of the product enhancement. A week later they were back, doing a 10-minute sketch that was one of the most hilarious performances I had ever witnessed. Through my joyful tears I saw that no one else had even a smile. As the pair left for the airport, Bob Elliott's eyes twinkled like Christmas lights. Does it matter that audiences don't always get the joke? Evidently not to Bob and Ray, who seemed happier to spoof the suits than to get paid for a completed job. On Language Regarding "Against Camel Case," by Caleb Crain in the On Language column (Nov. 29), I would like to point out that the name "Mylesna gCopaleen" is not solely "indulged as a prerogative of the human being, with all his individual strangeness"; it is also the grammatically correct way of writing the name in the Irish language. Translated into English, the name is Myles of the Copaleens. Just as the "s" on the end of Copaleens in English is not part of the proper noun but is an essential part of the grammatical correctness of the word, so do, too, the same rules apply to the "g." In the Irish language, grammar rules frequently require that the spelling of names be changed. While I agree with Crain on the fact that the rules of capitalization should not be randomly flouted for cute brand names, in this case, his example may be taken to project English grammar and punctuation rules on a language in which they do not apply in the same ways.