As we all know, a dump of less-than-favorable information always happens on a Friday, and something of this magnitude — 71-year-old cancer survivor and war torture survivor John McCain’s health records — happened on the Friday of a holiday weekend — and the terms of review of them were curiously restricted. (Newsweek):

During his first presidential run, eight years ago, McCain disclosed hundreds of pages of records to reporters as he sought then to counter what aides called a “whisper campaign” questioning his mental fitness. In those records, medical personnel concluded that his years in prison, including solitary confinement, left him with no psychological wounds. Aides said McCain has had no mental evaluations in the past eight years.

This time, a small group of reporters reviewed 1,173 pages of medical documents that span 2000 to 2008 over several hours in a conference room at a resort just outside Phoenix and a few miles from the posh Mayo Clinic in Scottsdale, where McCain receives most of his medical care under a pseudonym — which reporters were asked not to disclose.

By the way, we never learned in February that McCain had yet another cancerous growth removed from his face:

McCain’s most recent exams show a range of health issues common in aging: He frequently has precancerous skin lesions removed, and in February had an early stage squamous cell carcinoma, an easily cured skin cancer, removed. He had benign colon growths called polyps taken out during a routine colonoscopy in March.

The cancer issue, while a relevant health issue to consider when electing someone to the highest office in the land, is not nearly as critical as the fact Sen. John McCain hasn’t had a mental evaluation in eight years. More below the fold.
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(There’s a Q of the day at the end.)

This 11-year-old child did not have to perish. She had diabetic ketoacidosis, which means that had she gone to a hospital, doctors could have saved her. For her to get in this condition, she had to have been exhibiting symptoms for quite a long time, but her parents chose to pray away clear signs of distress - nausea, vomiting, excessive thirst, loss of appetite and weakness. (AP):

The girl’s mother, Leilani Neumann, said that she and her family believe in the Bible and that healing comes from God, but that they do not belong to an organized religion or faith, are not fanatics and have nothing against doctors.

…”We just noticed a tiredness within the past two weeks,” she said Wednesday. “And then just the day before and that day (she died), it suddenly just went to a more serious situation. We stayed fast in prayer then. We believed that she would recover. We saw signs that to us, it looked like she was recovering.”

Her daughter — who hadn’t seen a doctor since she got some shots as a 3-year-old, according to Vergin — had no fever and there was warmth in her body, she said.

The girl’s father, Dale Neumann, a former police officer, said he started CPR “as soon as the breath of life left” his daughter’s body.

…”My sister-in-law, she’s very religious, she believes in faith instead of doctors …,” the girl’s aunt told a sheriff’s dispatcher Sunday afternoon in a call from California. “And she called my mother-in-law today … and she explained to us that she believes her daughter’s in a coma now and she’s relying on faith.”

Now the parents are entitled to their religious beliefs, even with tragic outcomes like this.

Q of the day:
What I don’t understand is that if they believe in a higher being, logic (I know, I know) follows that the deity enabled humans to create and discover cures for common diseases, and thus prayer, while helpful, can be assisted by modem medicine, no? Even in biblical times humans had folk remedies — some that worked, some that didn’t. How do some religious fundamentalists reach the conclusion that medicine in any form must be supplanted by prayer?

A completely random post…

I haven’t blogged about the bizarre case of pro wrestler Chris Benoit, who killed his family and hanged himself a few weeks ago, but details from the medical examiner’s report were just released and they are pretty mind-blowing.

This was a chemically-enhanced horrorshow that makes you wonder what on earth kind of home life this poor child of Benoit and his wife Nancy had.

* Chris Benoit’s body contained 10 times the normal level of testosterone, as well as amounts of the anti-anxiety drug Xanax and the painkiller hydrocodone.

* Nancy Benoit tested positive for Xanax, hydrocodone, the painkiller hydromorphone, and had a blood-alcohol level of 0.184 percent, over double the level at which Georgia law considers a driver intoxicated.

* Daniel, their young son, had Xanax in his system (the article suggests he was sedated before he was killed).

While there’s no proof that high levels of testosterone are definitely connected to violence and erratic behavior in this case, 10x the amount coursing through your blood stream is an insane imbalance. The authorities did find prescription anabolic steroids in the home as well.

It’s such a tragic senseless event.

What I can’t figure out is who looked the other way/got paid off –  the doctor involved in giving scripts for Benoit, Dr. Phil Astin, is charged with overprescription of performance enhancing drugs to other wrestlers as well. You have to think this is the tip of the iceberg.

The ignorance about HIV/AIDS in this story out of Silverhill, Alabama is astounding, enraging and sad.

A couple who checked into a recreational vehicle park with their 2-year-old foster son were told the boy couldn’t use the showers, pool or other common areas because he has the HIV virus.

Dick Glover said the owner of Wales West RV park near Silverhill demanded a doctor’s letter about the child’s condition before allowing him use of the swimming pool and showers.

“As if what he’s got is going to wash off,” Glover, 69, of Saraland told the Press-Register for a story Friday.

How long has information been out there that you cannot catch HIV though casual contact? The foster mom casually mentioned the two-year-old’s status to the admission clerk, and the information made its way to Wales West owner Ken Zadnichek, who apparently disregarded the obvious — the foster parents care for this child and neither of them were affected by daily contact with the boy. His response boggles the mind.

“We weren’t sure if somebody could get the virus if the child upchucked on them or from blood or what,” Zadnichek said Thursday. “We didn’t know what the risk was. That’s why we asked for something from their doctor or the county health department.”

Zadnichek also said he might require guests to fill out medical questionnaires in the future, in light of the Glovers’ complaints.

You knew it was only a matter of time before Fred Phelps weighed in on Surgeon General nominee Dr. James Holsinger, who wrote an  infamous 1991 anti-gay paper, “Pathophysiology of Male Homosexuality,” (PDF), that claimed that “gay sex” was dangerous to public health. Among other things, Holsinger wrote:

the logical complementarity of the human sexes has been so recognized in our culture that it has entered our vocabulary in the form of naming various pipe fittings either the male fitting or the female fitting depending upon which one interlocks within the other. When the complementarity of the sexes is breached, injuries and diseases may occur as noted above.”

The Rotting Cryptkeeper tells us that “By all accounts, there is no man living more qualified to be surgeon general than Dr. Holsinger.” He warns, however, that the nomination is damned because the filthy fags (and fag enablers) will make sure it doesn’t come to pass. Watch — it’s a classic:

[About 2:10 into it:] “Sodomites defile the land…America is now an irreversibly defiled land. Even so, America is now ripe for God to spew out as a nation –  which is an elegant metaphor — foul-smelling vomit, describing a nauseating, disgusting, stinking, nasty end to a once great nation.

Sodomites now dominate all of America at every level of society and government; wherever you find a critical, vitally important decision making or policy making position in government or society, you will find a slimy, smirking, smarmy fag or fag enabler even either directly making the decision or absolutely controlling the outcome of it. The current example of this Satanic phenomenon is the pending confirmation of Dr. James Holsinger to be Surgeon General of the United States.

…The decision makers of his confirmation in the Senate are fags and fag enablers, including Senators Ted Kennedy…Hillary Clinton, Chris Dodd and Barack Obama. Four fag sympathizers and promoters. Dr. Holsinger will be sacrificed on the altar of fag lust.

Hat tip, Jeremy.

All I’m going to say on this article in the NY Times—with its picture of “inappropriately” dressed female doctors, many of whom seem to be dressed in the oh-so-scary V-neck shirt—-is this:

Not that nurses actually dress this way, of course, but the cultural contextualizing of the abstract idea of a sexy female medical worker certainly does vary according to pay scale and professional authority.

Rebecca Traister has more.

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Did you know that doing a Flickr search for the word “douchebag” is incredibly educational?

Dear Bill O’Reilly,

Thank you for the useful medical information on your October 11th edition of “The Radio Factor”. I was unaware that pregnancy is completely safe and never, ever puts a woman’s life in danger, until I heard your expert opinion:

Since 1973, there have been 40 million legal abortions in the U.S.A., and it’s the law of the land, and it may not be the law of the land, unfettered, much longer because the Supreme Court’s hearing a whole bunch of stuff. South Dakota, as you know, has voted to outlaw abortions unless the mother’s life is in danger, which is never the case, because you can always have a C-section and do those kinds of things.

And in case we didn’t catch that the first time, you drove home the point:

Forty-five percent of Americans, according to a new CNN poll — 45 percent say all abortions should be outlawed unless the mother’s going to die — or catastrophic health consequences, which again, is never the case — never.

If I hadn’t listened to your program, I would have still been under the impression that diseases like preeclampsia and conditions like ectopic pregnancy actually existed. After all, all those doctors and clinics and government reports and scientific articles about these life-threatening illnesses are out there documenting the existence of these conditions, but I’m going to bet that it’s all a big conspiracy conducted by feminists to accomplish the twin goals of slutting it up and making Bill O’Reilly look stupid.

Now that I think about it, how could pregnancy be dangerous? You’d think it was a biological process happening inside a human organ, when everyone knows that women grow babies inside stainless steel basins tucked neatly inside their girl parts, which is mostly done to make the whole thing easier on men. Hell, sucking on a lollipop is probably more dangerous, due to the choking factor. (Which is much different than the O’Reilly Factor, which can make someone choke on their own vomit without even coming within 10 feet of it.)

I look forward to future installments of “The Radio Factor” that involve your ob-gyn expertise. Perhaps you can explain that menstruation is also a hoax put over on men by women, just so we can take a monthly break from the nightly falafel rubdown.

Your Number One Fan,
Amanda

Jessica has more.

A friend sent me this link yesterday to yet another story promising male birth control that’s been promised for years and has yet to come. (Interestingly, none of thes articles seem to ever mention RISUG*, which is something that’s already growing in popularity in many places.) The abundance of these articles always puzzles me, since the likelihood of any male birth control pill hitting the market any time soon doesn’t seem to justify their frequency. But reading this article clued me into one possible factor—articles about a male birth control pill are a prime opportunity for a writer to lazily advance stereotypes about men and construct masculinity as inherently anti-woman. Articles about male birth control are dominated by the idea that men cannot be bothered enough about their sexual partner’s health and the prevention of pregnancy to actually take measures to help her out, even though half a million American men a year get vasectomies, which strikes me as solid evidence that men aren’t so monolithically opposed to the concept of taking responsibility as they’re supposed to be. But screw the facts, there’s an opportunity to write about how bitches ain’t shit afoot!

Trope number one of using the hope of male birth control to convince women that it’s useless to ask men to care about them—imply to your readers that men are only too happy to let you do the dirty work they themselves are too good for.

Forty-year-old Scott Hardin says he’s glad that men may soon have a new choice when it comes to birth control. But, he adds, he would not even consider taking a male hormonal contraceptive. Hardin is like many men who are pleased to hear they may have a new option but are wary of taking any type of hormones.

“I would rather rely on a solution that doesn’t involving medicating myself and the problems women have had with hormone therapy doesn’t make me anxious to want to sign on to taking a hormone-type therapy,� says Hardin, who is single and a college administrator.

Taking hormones is women’s work, in other words. Imagine if he’d said something similiar about housework, “I would rather rely on a solution where the house gets cleaned by me snapping my fingers, instead of dealing with problems like loss of time and boredom that women have with housework.” You get the idea. What I find funny about this is the subtle reinforcing of the erroneous idea that all women who take the pill suffer from massive side effects (but of course they just have to suffer it, being women). My friend sent me this article because he noticed that the main ingredient in male hormonal methods in the testing stage is testosterone, so we were cracking jokes about how convenient it is that the male birth control pill will actually rev up your sex drive. Not all side effects are bad, you know. There’s a ton of possibilities for how to take articles like this, but the author picked the “I can’t take hormones like a woman” opening that conveyed that men can’t be bothered to give a shit about something important to women. However, the problem with this particular line of attack on these articles is that despite the overwhelming belief that men simply don’t care about birth control, the drug companies are in fact spending a lot of money on research, which implies that they think there’s a real demand. How to get out of this sticky situation and stay on the “bitches ain’t shit” message?

At this point, the author has no other solution but to suggest that men have to take birth control because women are such deceptive, untrustworthy creatures. Yes, it’s mean, but what other choice does the author have—to write something crazy like men might actually care about women and having healthy relationship? Don’t be hasty now.

Brown, who is married and has three children, hopes his kids will one day be able to benefit from the new technology. His would like his son, who is now 17, to one day have the option of taking a male birth control pill. Brown believes many men will see “their pill� as a good idea and will want to use it.

“It is time for men to have some control. I think it would empower men and deter some women out there from their nefarious plans,� says Brown. “Some women are out there to use men to get pregnant. This could deter women from doing this. An athlete or a singer is someone who could be a target and they could put a stop to that.�

Because poor, suffering men have had no method whatsoever to protect themselves from the herds of semen-sucking succubi.

Oddly enough, I read a book some time ago on the history of birth control that had some interesting posters and fliers in it that anti-choice groups of the 60s would pass out to men suggesting to them to look through their women’s things to make sure they weren’t secretly taking the pill. The story’s changed a little now, and the urban legend is of hordes of women who are secretly not taking the pill. In terms of functionality, the latter is probably a better urban legend for promoting misogyny because it implies that men are the prize and that inferior women are desperate to grab at them, where the old one was a little too revealing of the way that pregnancy is more of a problem for the ones who can get pregnant than the ones who can’t.

This article and ones like it that promote the notion that real men don’t care about women and that women are desperate and grabby for male attention, so men should be strenous in their efforts to hate on women make me once again think about Austin’s post from Sunday, with this succient observation:

Violent, brutal behavior becomes a fetishized replacement for normal, healthy sexual interactions between men and women. For fascists, violence exists for its own sake and is a necessary component of male life. Only women and the weak eschew the glory of violent, decisive action on behalf of the national interests.

When you see articles, TV shows, movies, etc. promoting the idea that caring about women is a sign of weakness in men, it’s time to wonder what greater purpose could such a thing serve and are men actually benefitting or are they being alienated from their own interests to serve a violent state?

On the subject of alliances or warfare, Chris Clarke has a neat poem up.

*The fact that RISUG isn’t even on the radar in America tells you way more about the interests of drug companies than the relationship of men with birth control. It’s inexpensive, lasts 10 years, and effective. Inexpensive is why you won’t be seeing it here any time soon.

Men, can you read this without holding your johnson? (No, that’s not the Q of the day — that’s at the end).

First penis transplant reversed after two weeks. It was a successful operation from a medical standpoint. The organ was donated by the parents of their 22-year-old son, who was declared brain dead. However the patient — and his wife — requested that it be removed two weeks after the operation because of the psychological impact of this unusual transplant on them.

Both the man and his wife had requested the surgery. He had been unable to have intercourse or urinate properly since the accident that occurred 8 months before the surgery was performed.

Ten days after the operation, which had been approved by the hospital’s medical ethical committee, the recipient had been able to urinate. There had been no signs of the 10-centimeter (4-inch) organ being rejected by the recipient’s body. But Hu said more cases and longer observation are needed to determine whether sexual sensation and function can be restored.

“The patient finally decided to give up the treatment because of the wife’s psychological rejection, as well as the swollen shape of the transplanted penis� Hu added.

For discussion’s sake, an honest question — is this more or less psychologically traumatic than the world’s first face transplant, which made headlines because of all the ethical issues raised by that operation? In either instance, why?

Related:
* This is the real extreme makeover

Ezra wrote a post awhile ago I’ve been meaning to link and address but couldn’t find the hook to do it. Well, now I’ve got it. The post was on how the Federal Reserve is monkeying with the interest rates in such a way as to keep wages down while increasing worker productivity, which is to say to forcibly reduce your wages compared to the amount of work you do. Unsurprisingly, the result of this is that wages stay stagnant or go down in real dollars while corporate profits soar. The excuse the Fed uses to force people to work harder for less money is that this is about slowing inflation. Ezra is skeptical that this is a good idea.

The Fed’s abject terror of wage growth is a rather unhelpful hangover from the stagflation era. But, in the same way that economists kept trying to deal with the problems of yesteryear then, they’re missing the relevant economic issues now. This society is in no danger of paying its workers too much, or seeing their salaries increase too rapidly. Quite the opposite, in fact. We’re facing down unheralded inequality, and the Federal Reserve can’t pull its head out of 1978 for long enough to realize the middle class is evaporating, profits are amassing in a grotesquely disproportionate fashion, and America’s workers — particularly in a labor market this tight — need a serious raise that isn’t cut apart by rate hikes.

Overall a great post and I understand that Ezra’s urge is to be generous and assume that the Fed under BushCo means well. But I have to say that I don’t think the stalling of wages and the growing gap between the rich and the rest of us is a nasty side effect of the policy. I think increasing that gap is the plan. In other words, the redistribution of wealth upwards and the accompanying spread of poverty is a feature, not a bug.

Republican policies are so consistent with trying to redistribute wealth from the working class to the rich that it’s at the point that it’s no use pretending it’s not deliberate. For instance, on Bush’s watch, the oil companies have used their oligopoly to raise and raise gasoline prices without having a bit of fear of the federal government interfering. All the oil companies continue to post record profits under this system, and your average American is spending more money that could go to savings on gasoline.

In other words, the BushCo policies have been aimed at channeling money from working people to the rich through the control of gasoline prices. At this point, they might as well give Exxon the right to directly draft your checking account. Call it the corporate whore welfare tax.

The Social Security privatization scheme was about taking money from working people and giving it directly to the rich in the form of inflating their stock prices so they could cash out with double their wealth while the rest of us lose our retirement savings.

And now Ken Blackwell has come up with another brilliant scheme to take our money and give it to the already rich—he’s proposing making health insurance mandatory for all citizens of Ohio. This isn’t automatically insuring all citizens, of course. This is actually forcing people who already don’t have money to pay health insurance to pay for it, even if it means (as it almost certainly will) that to pay the insurance company, many people will have to go hungry.

Republican gubernatorial candidate Ken Blackwell unveiled a proposal Thursday that would require the approximately 1.3 million Ohioans without health coverage to enroll in an insurance plan and pay for a portion of the premiums themselves.

Modeled after a program in Massachusetts, Blackwell’s “Buckeye Health Plan” would match uninsured people with private insurance plans.

The cost of the coverage would be split among the individual, his or her employer, and in some cases the federal government.

Blackwell said that by forcing individuals to contribute, they will “have some skin in the game” and possibly take better care of themselves.

That’s right, Blackwell is saying that people don’t have health insurance due to being lazy and not caring about themselves. Many of us would just love to die of cancer, I guess.

Scrape away the victim-blaming and what you have here is an unvarnished tax on the poor that will be handed directly to the rich. When I didn’t have health coverage, it was because I was unemployed and, surprise surprise, that means I also wasn’t able to empty the bank account of money I needed for food to buy some rich insurance company CEO a new car. Let it never be said that the Republicans support the right of people to keep what’s theirs. They are perfectly happy to tax you at gunpoint and give it to someone else, as long as the person being taxed will be impoverished by it and the person getting the extra cash bonanza has so much money he could light his cigarettes with $100 bills.

The full proposal is available at Blackwell’s website. There’s some stuff in there to make it less blatantly odious, but it’s still a dreadful idea. Since I doubt very much that Blackwell is going to win, I’m thinking that he’s been saddled to float this idea of mandating that people write big checks to insurance companies every month whether they can afford it or not.

This is the f*cking living end. Now the bible beating medical professionals of the Christian Medical and Dental Association (CMDA) is on the warpath over an article published in the American Academy of Family Physicians (AAFP) journal American Family Physician, on “Primary Care for Lesbians and Bisexual Women.”

The author suggests that doctors’ hesitancy to ask questions about women’s sexual orientation and lesbian and bisexual patients’ hesitancy to disclose such information can pose potential barriers to optimal healthcare. She says physicians can improve primary care for these patients by acknowledging this and “working to create a therapeutic physician-patient relationship.”

…”I think the concern about the article is the fact that, first of all, it seeks to normalize and seeks to glorify and promote a homosexual lifestyle,” [CMDA Executive Director Dr. David] Stevens observes. He says the article does this while “at the same time admitting some of the significant healthcare problems that occur because of that lifestyle.”

How about the main problem is that lesbian and bisexual women are reluctant to seek out medical care because they are afraid of being judged or proselytized to by holy rolling doctors? The CMDA devotes a whole page on its views of homosexuality on its web site, including statements like:

* Homosexual behavior can be changed. There is valid evidence that many individuals who desired to abstain from homosexual acts have been able to do so.

* Some homosexual acts are physically harmful because they disregard normal human anatomy and function. These acts are associated with increased risks of tissue injury, organ malfunction, and infectious diseases. These and other factors result in a significantly shortened life expectancy.

After reading that, why pray tell would a woman want to play Russian roulette and have to guess as to whether they are going to get a fundie gynecologist? Does she have to worry that when the doctor goes to look in her hoo-hah and has to say there’s no chance of being pregnant — because no pee-pees are involved — that she’s going to get a hellfire lecture?
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This is absolutely fascinating.

Along the northern border between Botswana and Namibia, in a region of Africa that is raging with AIDS, a small tribe of some 3,000 souls is living virtually free of HIV infection.

But the secret of the Ju/’hoansi (pronounced ZHUN-twasi) people is not based on a mysterious immunity, modern medicine, simple isolation or missionary strictures against sex.

It stems, rather, from an idea derived from the ancient hunter-gatherer lifestyle of their recent past. It’s the concept that men and women are equal, says University of Toronto anthropologist Richard Lee, who has studied the tribe since 1963……

A growing and well-accepted body a research over recent years has suggested that women’s subservience in many African societies has played a crucial role in the spread of the disease.

Simply put, many African women are given no choice about their sexual partners, can’t reject philandering husbands and have no power to insist that condoms be used, says pioneering Toronto AIDS doctor Philip Berger, who worked with African AIDS patients for seven months last year.

Lee says the high status of women in the Ju/’hoansi tribe gives them significant autonomy in choosing their sexual and marriage partners.

“In the other societies around the region, the young men will say, `Oh no, a girl has to obey me if I want to have sex with her, and if I don’t want to use a condom, that’s it,’” says Lee.

“With the Ju/’hoansi, their high status in the community gives women plenty of leverage in sexual negotiations.”

Read the whole thing. Women’s high status isn’t the only factor—the tribe is isolated, and that helps, but other equally isolated tribes have been devastated—but it’s definitely a significant factor. This shouldn’t be a huge surprise. Sex educators in the U.S. (real ones, not the abstinence-only pretenders) say that teaching girls negotiation skills is an important part of their job. Since women are not considered equal in the U.S., a lot of women find themselves in situations where they feel like they can’t insist on a condom or can’t say no to sex.

For what it’s worth, this is why I really loathe the Plan B opponents because let’s be frank, that’s what they’re counting on. When the birth control pill came out, it was regarded by a lot of people as a sneaky way for women to weasel out of the can’t demand a condom/can’t say no conundrum. As you can imagine, I find that to be pretty repulsive, the idea that men are entitled to force pregnancy on women against our wills, but as a practical matter, I have no doubt that there was and is a huge demand for contraceptions that women can use without their male partners knowing. As I mentioned in the douche ad round-up, that demand is what this ad is alluding to:

The text is small, but this is what it reads:

Zonitors are greaseless, stainless, snow-white vaginal suppositories—each sealed in a separate glass vial—so easy to slip it into your purse and carry it away from home.

Zonite is like Lysol, so you can see why women hoped that it would be a spermicide, and it’s clear from all the talk in these ads about germ-killing that is exactly what they hoped the audience was thinking. Peeling back the layers, I’m inclined to think that this ad is telling the audience that this is a spermicidal product you can use that can be easily hidden from your husband. Plan B is the modern equivalent; the fear is obviously that women who can’t say no or can’t insist on barrier methods can then sneak off and take a pill post-coitus. It’s a shame that this is still an issue in the 21st century, but the writing is on the wall with this one.

Back to the African example. There’s some research going on for some kind of vaginal film or suppository that will work like this Zonite ad implies it works; you can put it in and your male partner will never know and it will offer some protection against HIV. Ideally, of course, this would be a world where women were respected enough across the board, here and in Africa, that the need for sneaky disease protection or contraception wouldn’t be necessary, but such measures are helpful stopgap measures. In the long run, of course, the best methods will be the ones that can be used with full male cooperation but, as the example of the Ju/’hoansi tribe shows, that will require massive social change so that women’s equality goes without question.

I couldn’t believe what I was reading when Keith Boykin emailed me about this. There is a desperate need to educate minorities about HIV/AIDS, but why on earth would the music industry’s non-profit arm LIFEBeat — which is supposed to combat ignorance and homophobia surrounding HIV/AIDS with education — sponsor an event featuring two artists who sing about killing gays and lesbians?

LIFEbeat’s sixth Hearts & Voices Concert Series

benefit concert is a landmark event because it is bringing reggae artists together for the first time to face the issues surrounding HIV/AIDS next week, on July 18. This is a wonderful opportunity to reach an audience that needs a positive message, yet LIFEbeat is KNOWINGLY participating in the promotion of homophobic performers.

Beenie Man calls for hanging lesbians with a long piece of rope in his lyrics, and TOK encourages the burning and killing of gay men. From TOK’s “Chi Chi Man”:

From dem a par inna chi chi man car
Blaze di fire mek we bun dem!!!! (Bun dem!!!!)
From dem a drink inna chi chi man bar
Blaze di fire mek we dun dem!!!! (Dun dem!!!!)

The folks at LIFEBeat have lost their minds.

This is how bad it is. Keith emailed LIFEBeat’s executive director John Canelli to see whether some how, some way the organization just missed the boat and was unaware of what it was promoting. You won’t believe the answer…

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Linda Klepacki is on the move, trying to convince people not to get their daughters innoculated against an often fatal, always awful disease. She works for Focus on Family and her reasons for opposing the vaccine are that women shouldn’t be fucking if they don’t want to die.

In case there was a shred of doubt that the Christian Wingnutteria are neo-Victorians, this campaign to preserve cervical cancer should wipe it away. I can’t help but think of this doctor’s description of a patient who was dying of it:

Her face was ashen and her body cadaveric, and when I picked her up, she stared at me with hollow, dull eyes as her bones rubbed against my arms. Her mother told me that she’d brought her daughter back on a plane from New York City, where she’d been a ballerina. I had never seen an adult patient so thin, so emaciated.

Thin, probably with pallor, hollow-eyed, weak—if you tossed in gently coughing up blood you’d be describing the way that consumptive women in Victorian times were generally described. The romantic image of the consumptive is pretty well-documented—generally speaking, it was the disease you’d inflict on a character to make a martyr of them. Sort of the Victorian version of inflicting a serial killer on teenagers who have sex, if you will—sure, they’re a sinner but our horror comes from feeling like the punishment way outstrips the crime. (I love this Wikipedia entry which notes that the “consumptive nihilist” was an actual character type in Russian literature.)

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A new Carnival of Feminists is up at Bitch Lab. Tons of great reading material, but one post that fits well into some of the Pandagonian obsessions is this one by Rivka about the co-option of progressive language, in this case the co-option of the word “choice� by conservatives in an effort to prevent the HPV vaccine for inoculating enough people to make HPV a thing of the past. Anti-choicers, weirdly enough, are beginning to love the idea of “choice� if the choice you can make is to deny someone basic health care.

“I’ve talked to some who have said, ‘This is going to sabotage our abstinence message,’ ” said Gene Rudd, associate executive director of the Christian Medical and Dental Associations. But Rudd said most people change their minds once they learn more, adding that he would probably want his children immunized. Rudd, however, draws the line at making the vaccine mandatory.

“Parents should have the choice. There are those who would say, ‘We can provide a better, healthier alternative than the vaccine, and that is to teach abstinence,’ ” Rudd said.

As Rivka says, this is a fallacious use of the progressive term “choice�. Not vaccinating young women against a disease is not a “choice� in the sense that choices progressives support are choices. To make it clear, mandatory vaccinations will not affect your religious choices or your sexual choices. Obtaining the vaccine is not a requirement to have sex if you don’t want to. Being vaccinated does not deprive you of your religious freedom, especially since there are religious exemptions for Christian wackjobs. The only thing the vaccine could prevent is you obtaining the disease or you passing it along to someone else. As Rivka points out, not making vaccines mandatory is a way to keep poor people from getting them. So much for “choice� if the poor are deprived the choice of preventing cervical cancer. This is nothing like the choice debates about private choices that don’t affect others, such as the abortion debate or the contraception debate. This is about the general welfare.

Far be it for me to be a little cynical about this newfound love of “choiceâ€? on the right, a love of “choiceâ€? that is centered around choosing to deprive minors of medical care. Like Rivka notes, the weird affection the wingnutteria has for HPV is the primary motivation for efforts to keep the virus alive in the population. A lot of anti-choice propaganda relies heavily on the prevalence of the virus to make their arguments, with some anti-condom arguments relying solely on this disease to make the erroneous argument that condoms don’t work. It’s already hard to be anti-choice, with the vast majority of facts against you. It probably does seem a little unfair that a vaccination will rob them of their last hope for a disease to scare the pants off kids with. But even if they can keep the virus flourishing by minimizing the number of people who get vaccinated, that doesn’t mean they can keep fetishizing it as “proofâ€? condoms don’t work—apparently they do in fact work pretty damn well against HPV transmission. Oh well, it’s not like lying as a last resort was ever off the drawing table for the anti-choice brigade.

Another update: Ezra’s addressed some of my concerns on the issue after I emailed him. My inclination is that I think the stress between “clinical” and “situational” depression comes from people trying to hammer out insurance issues. A lot of depression is reactive, but severe, and treatable with medication and therapy. However, insurance companies balk at treating mental health issues that they can pretend are just “the blues” or whatever. So it’s to the benefit of patients to focus on the organic causes of depression and try to ignore the environmental causes.

However, another ugly trend that stems from this is prescribing drugs without therapy for patients who need both or even need the therapy a lot more than the drugs.

I try and
Laugh about it
Hiding the tears in my eyes
‘cause boys don’t cry

—The Cure

Sticking with the “all about men Pandagon” theme of late, I found this op-ed through the Mad Melancholic Feminist on the theme of “men are the real weaker sex”. Most of it isn’t brand spanking new news—most people are aware that women have a longer average lifespan than men and that there’s many factors going into why. Like Jill, I can’t help but think if this article were about women instead of men, it would be bandied about as evidence that women don’t belong in the public sphere. As it is, the author is subtly sexist all the same, suggesting that this issue needs to be a huge priority, even though a lot of the factors that feed the problem are out of our hands and a lot of other factors have social causes, like the higher murder and auto accident rate amongst men. But on the whole, I think it’s important to sound a wake-up call about men’s health, if only because men on average are a lot less likely to go to the doctor on a regular basis than women.

One thing about this article bugged me, though.

While depression is said to be twice as frequent in women as in men, I’m convinced that the diagnosis is just made more frequently in women, who show a greater willingness to discuss their symptoms and to ask for help when in distress. Once, at a dinner party, I asked a group of men whether they believed men were depressed as often as women, but were simply conditioned to be silent in the face of discomfort, sadness or fear. “Of course!” replied one man. “Why do you think we die sooner?”

I’m of two minds on this. While I firmly believe that social conditioning about how to handle emotions predisposes women to get better quicker if they become depressed, I’m not sure that men really do suffer from it in the first place as much as women. It’s a numbers thing—depression is, more often than not, caused by having problems. And women have most of the problems that men have that could cause depression—losing jobs, grief, divorce, feeling aimless, whatever. But women have added risk factors for it, since women are by and large more likely to be raped and the victims of domestic violence, both of which, suffice it to say, are highly correlated to mental health issues. To boot, sufferers of domestic violence are likely to go to great lengths to conceal their problems as well. Of course, men are more likely to go to prison, but I doubt that comes close to equaling it out.

That said, it’s not about making things equal, it’s about trying to minimize the number of people suffering health problems. And men do have a couple of factors that surely contribute to unnecessarily high stress levels. The biggest one is the one alluded to in the story and of course the song lyrics I put up above—the bottling up factor. As someone who’s only recently come around to being a little bit freer about accepting and dealing with negative feelings, I can relate somewhat to the pressure that builds on you if you’ve been conditioned to avoid certain stress-relieving activities like crying or talking about your feelings because those activities seem feminine and “weak”. And stress definitely contributes to certain physical problems, like high blood pressure.

The social stigma against crying is obvious enough, but I’ll leave you with this story from Rachel about how it’s both hard for people raising boys and yet still necessary to avoid teaching that men don’t cry. By the way, doesn’t it seem a little weird that the sex that is supposed to avoid mascara isn’t the sex that can just burst into tears?

The other big factor that I see is that men on average have a lot less people in their lives to confide in than women—in fact, both men and women seem, in my experience, likely to run to a woman when they need consolation or sympathy or even a sounding board. I remember my dad wryly remarking when I was younger that most men are pretty dependent on their wives for this while women often have female friends and relatives to turn to when they need sympathy. The good news is I think that this stereotype is fading faster than the “boys don’t cry” one. That people get married later in life is probably a factor, but my experience tells me that more men of my generation have close friends they can confide in than of the previous generations. Just one more way that actually breaking down the patriarchy and giving people more options than just the nuclear family is good for both sexes.

Update: I’m not trying to discount the existence of non-situational depression. I would advise, however, not to flip out and tell me I don’t understand. I lived in a fog for years after I was raped; I’m quite aware how clinical depression feels. It’s not a black and white issue—some people have a tendency towards depression and situations provoke it, some have it no matter what, and some people suffer trauma that causes depression.

By all means, get you clinical depression treated. No one is taking that away from you. But I would point out that dismissing the existence of situational depression on the erroneous theory that if we acknowledge it, somehow that makes clinical depression not real is exactly the problem I’m pointing to—people bottle up their feelings because their depression isn’t “clinical”, and their reward is physical effects of the stress of that.

This story was upsetting enough to begin with. A woman who was suffering from depression was admitted to a Boston area hospital for self destructive impulses and she was forcibly strip-searched even though it was obviously retraumatizing her because of previous sexual assaults that she’d endured. But then I saw this telling statement:

“Go ahead and rape me; everybody else has,” Sampson said she cried out as the guards unbuckled her pants and removed them. “They left me there with my underwear showing and my johnny up to my chest . . . I was crying, and [the nurse] said, `That’s what you get for not listening to me.’ “

That’s how people speak to children, not 50-year-old women. (Emphasis mine.) I doubt it’s really wise to say that to a child, either, but still that’s where you’d hear the phrase. This just goes to show that people in general have a long way to go on the subject of how to treat people with mental illnesses. For one thing, depression or self-destructive tendencies are no reason to thing the sufferer is stupid and has to be manhandled like she was a wild animal. Or a toddler who can’t listen to reason. (Fixing this because it was worded badly.) Or even undressed by others as if she were a toddler who can’t listen to reason.

I mean, I’m sure there were other weird things going on, power issues and all that. But this sort of scolding inclines me to believe that the nurse didn’t even consider the possibility that her patient might be able to speak her mind and have something to say worth listening to. Depression doesn’t attack your cognitive functions or your ability to express yourself clearly but this article makes me wonder how few people really grasp that.

Now I’m not saying that some depressive episodes aren’t so severe that restraint and forcible searching for weapons might not be necessary. But from the details in this article, it appears that the nurse was extremely impatient and wasn’t willing to discuss alternate ways to conduct the search with the patient. It’s probably a matter of understaffing, actually. Not enough nurses means that the nurses on duty probably are stressed and won’t take the time to really talk to patients, instead resorting to this “wild animal alert” restraining behavior right away.

Okay, I’ve been trying to hold my tongue/keyboard on this, but the feminist discussion about birth control pills that you can use to skip periods is making me bananas. The problem isn’t discussing one’s feelings about it or anything like that, but I have a big, fat problem with the kneejerk assumption that “natural” is more valuable that “unnatural”. Every time someone praises menstruation as something that makes them feel like a woman or whatever, I wonder if they’re working for Tampax or something. If you think that it’s scary to use hormones to stop periods, then don’t take any brand of the pill, use a Nuvaring, slap a patch on, get a shot, get a hormone implant, or anything like that to stop ovulation because even if the hormones you’re using result in monthly bleeding that is reminiscent of your period, it’s not actually a period. Periods are what happens when you ovulate and the egg’s not fertilized and has to be sloughed off. The pill prevents ovulation, and so you don’t get periods. They built a few days of bleeding into the pill structure to protect women who took it from criticism that it’s “unnatural”. If you buy into the idea that it’s somehow better to bleed than to not, you’re buying into a mythology of the sanctity of feminine “naturalness” that exists predominantly to oppress women.

“Natural” is a bunk concept. People invoke it when they can’t make a substantial argument about the rightness of their case. (At this point, it would do well for me to note that while I’ve griped about this before, it’s on my mind because I’m reading Unspeak by Steven Poole and he has a really kickass section on how people resort to the vague terms “natural” and “unnatural” to cover up the fact that they haven’t built a substantial case for their opinions.) Anti-choicers argue against contraception because it’s “unnatural” because otherwise they’d be put in the unteneable position of having to admit outright that they disapprove of contraception because it’s been such a useful tool to liberating women. Homophobes call homosexuality “unnatural” because they can’t concoct a real argument against it. Unfortunately, even our side falls into the trap of arguing for sexual liberation under the guise of nature, when it’s probably more honest to argue that sexual liberation is good because pleasure improves the quality of life and stifling it for no good reason is sadistic.

“Natural” isn’t an argument for shit. Invoking it should be verboten because it leads to hazy, confusing arguments like Rachel’s argument against birth control pills that stop bleeding altogether at Alas, a Blog.

But my biggest concern about these methods is that the way they are advertised. The advertising makes it seem as if our normal bodily processes are somehow bad, flawed, or deviant. Can you imagine a pill being invented that would stop men from ejaculating—they could still have the orgasm, but not the “nuisance� of semen, “which is really unnecessary unless you are trying to impregnate a woman.�

(more…)

I’ll admit, the flare-up over this WaPo article chastising women for not acting like we’re in a constant state of pregnancy is causing me to bang my head against the wall. I noted, strongly I thought, yesterday that the article is very misleading and doesn’t describe the report at all. You can read the report here. There are two main things that are very important to keep in mind during all this:

• The CDC did not suggest that the only reason to keep women healthy is for our duty to produce good soliders for the Fatherland.
• However, the WaPo article basically did say that.

So it’s not like there’s a real disagreement here. Ezra is right that the CDC article is actually something that fits into the progressive agenda nicely, even though of course if it were scientifically sound and against us, you have to bend to evidence. It’s not just that the report lays the blame on society for not getting poor women in front of a doctor more often that fits our agenda, either. The report firmly states that it’s in a woman’s best interests to plan her pregnancies to fit her life goals.

All that said, the fury in the feminist blogosphere is completely understandable. There is no reason to feel like this is a great opportunity to condescendingly tell the little womb-bearers that we shouldn’t be offended when someone dehumanizes us. The WaPo article was smugly misogynist when it recommended that women’s behavior be constrained and that all women should view themselves primarily as incubators. Telling women to suck it up and lay at home pretending we’re pregnant while men go out for drinks or even sushi lest we damage the only thing that really matters about us isn’t “sensible” advice. It’s cruel and it fits into a long tradition of using theoretical pregnancies as an excuse to discriminate against women officially and to subtly undermine our self-esteem. For instance, while it probably sailed right by a lot of the audience of the WaPo article, the never-clean-a-catbox suggestion was echoing nasty stereotypes about women who have pet cats, particularly how owning cats is held against single women as a symbol that they’re insufficiently dedicated to their mission to get with husband and child ASAP.

And for those who are fixing to smugly say that feminists should have read the report before getting angry, think about what you’re saying. It’s sad that we’ve come to a point where even a medical article has to be assumed to be 90% propaganda, 10% information. Instead of clucking and condescending, get mad! The WaPo won’t do their damn jobs right.

(more…)

Jacob Sullum at Townhall today found a shiny, new way of abusing the American tendency to conflate a thin waistline with a healthy body–defending soda machines in the schools because there’s no evidence that taking them out makes kids thinner. The few possibly relevant points that he makes that are buried in the article–such as the availability of diet sodas might encourage some kids to cut down on sugar consumption and that a lot of supposed juice drinks are just as heavy with sugar as sodas–are lost in a pile of shady reasoning and knee jerk libertarian sloganizing. In the latter category, we have this:

Now that Chelsea is all grown up and living on her own, Bill and Hillary Clinton have turned their attention to raising other people’s children. The senator is determined to protect them from video games, while the former president is saving them from soda.

Say what you will about video games, but Bill Clinton’s campaign is not “raising anyone’s children for them” by any stretch of the imagination. The campaign is to control what’s going into the schools and unless something’s drastically changed about children’s education, parents aren’t actually in the schools during school hours and therefore don’t have a whole lot of control over their kids. And if they want to keep their kids from drinking sodas, they’d probably appreciate the school’s cooperation.*

What are Clinton’s motivations in seeking to get the soda machines out of schools? Well, Sullum quotes him.

Clinton called the deal “a bold step forward in the struggle to help 35-million young people lead healthier lives,” saying “this one policy can add years and years and years to the lives of a very large number of young people.”

The rest of the article is pitting the head of CSPI against a spokesman for the beverage companies with lots of ellipses involved to make the entire thing more confusing. Sullum paints the rest of the article as a fight to make kids lose weight but there’s nothing in the quote from Bill Clinton he heads the article off with to indicate that making fat kids thin now is actually the primary goal of the campaign, though I don’t doubt it’s a secondary goal. Sullum is missing out completely on something I think that’s probably primary and his concluding paragraphs indicate that he’s quite possibly being a bit daft on purpose.

By delivering free diet soft drinks to the homes of 53 teenagers (a method Jacobson certainly would not approve) and encouraging them to “Think Before You Drink,” the researchers achieved a dramatic 82 percent reduction in consumption of sugar-sweetened beverages. Even so, there was no significant overall difference in weight change between this group and a control group of 50 teenagers who did not receive diet drinks or counseling. A statistically significant effect was apparent only among the fattest kids, who lost a small amount of weight.

Quick question to this audience here: When you were a teenager, did you weigh more or less than you do now? And did you eat more or less than you do now? That’s what I thought. If short term diet studies indicate very little to no weight loss for adults, diet studies on teenagers, who have different metabolisms, are even more worthless.  This probably goes double for a industry-funded study, like this one was.

Sullum is being shady about the motivations behind targeting school age populations for programs to reduce the intake of refined sugar.  Anyone who’s been or even known a parent knows that the purpose of monitoring a kid’s nutrition is not to fix damage done by a lifetime of poor eating habits but instead to instill good habits in the kid that will prevent disease in the long run, especially diabetes.  He’s trying to conflate the vanity-laden reasons adults try to diet with the nutrition-based reason to get kids into good habits early to make his argument.

And even if fruit juices have as many refined sugar calories in them as sodas do, I’m still not buying the argument that they are exactly the same.  Fruit juices don’t have habit-forming drugs in them, and as I’m a woefully juiced up caffeine addict, I can tell you right now that sodas most definitely do.  And I got into the habit of shotgunning caffeine in high school, where a lot of people pick up their drug addictions like smoking and shotgunning sodas.  I’ve never seen somebody drink one fruit juice after another like I can do with diet sodas–luckily for me, it’s diet sodas but for a lot of people, the habit is with the regular ones.  And while you might be able to quarrel with the causal relationship of obesity and other health problems, I don’t think you can quarrel much with the causal relationship between high sugar intake and adult onset diabetes.
*None of this means I necessarily agree that this is the school’s job, just that he’s making a shady argument.

By Mike Tidmus

Papa Ratzi and crew are realizing, way late in the game, that the abstinence-only response to the spread of HIV/AIDS is an abject failure. A document is being prepared that may allow those “with grave diseases” to use condoms, officials declaring rubbers the “lesser evil.” I want to see how they square this with the fact that the church will appear to be saying that the spread of some STDs is A-OK under this reversal of church doctrine. (AP):

“Soon the Vatican will issue a document about the use of condoms by persons who have grave diseases, starting with AIDS,” Cardinal Javier Lozano Barragan, who is in charge of the Vatican’s health care ministry, was quoted as saying in Sunday’s La Repubblica newspaper.

“My department is carefully studying it, along with scientists and theologians entrusted with drawing up a document about the subject that will soon be made known,” the Mexican cardinal said.

“It is Benedict XVI who asked us for a study on this particular aspect of using a condom by those afflicted with AIDS and by those with infectious diseases,” he said.

There was no official comment Monday from the Vatican. Lozano Barragan was unavailable for comment despite repeated attempts by The Associated Press to reach him.

And the next round of creative thinking in how to make women suffer physically for the crime of having female organs like god gave us the right or something–some wingnut pharmacists are moving beyond merely denying women their birth control pills, but are now deciding that women who abort are obligated to get a nasty, potentially fatal infection. Because nothing says “pro-life” like “trying to kill someone for being a nasty, sex-having whore”.

Cedar River Clinics, a women’s health and abortion provider with facilities in Renton, Tacoma, and Yakima, filed a complaint with the Washington State Department of Health this week alleging three instances where pharmacists raising moral objections refused to fill prescriptions for Cedar River clients. The complaint includes one incident at the Swedish Medical Center outpatient pharmacy in Seattle. According to the complaint, someone at the Swedish pharmacy said she was “morally unable” to fill a Cedar River patient’s prescription for abortion-related antibiotics.

That’s right, the pharmacist thinks that her client is too low to deserve antibiotics. Actively taking measures to make someone get an infection is about preserving “life”, I guess. Actually, it makes sense–someone who thinks a zygote is worth more than a mere debased sex-having female shouldn’t really have a moral quandary preserving the precious lives of bacteria instead of helping the slut kill them.

I can see it now, “pro-lifers” lining up at hospitals, yelling at women there to get infectious diseases treated. “Murderer! Bacteria killer!” God blessed them with an infection; who are they to fight it?

Via Deborah Lipp.

While we were down and I was fiending, I was reading the comments at Lindsay’s post on drug companies inventing/exaggerating diseases in order to make more money. One example of a made-up disease was “sexual dysfunction”–an appropriately vague disease that afflicts 43% of women and apparently we all need pills to control it. I think ovulation is a less common disease at this point.

Problem is, sexual dysfunction is real. But it’s sure as hell not afflicting 43% of women in the way that it’s hitting those who, like Lis Riba has carefully detailed, have moved heaven and earth to get back to satisfactory levels of sexual desire/performance and just can’t get there. We don’t want Big Pharma shoving a pill down half our throats when it’s not going to work anyway, but we don’t want the medical establishment to forget those who do suffer. What to do?

Mrs. Coulter in Lindsay’s comments summed up the struggle in her mind, and I think it’s indicative of where a lot of people hesistantly stand:

On the one hand, I’m sympathetic to the idea that Big Pharma is hunting voraciously for new markets at the expense of patients.

On the other hand, restless leg syndrome, irritable bowel syndrome, and osteoporosis are all diseases that disproportionately affect women. The article also highlights attempts to call attention to female sexual disfunction (an interesting conundrum, since women aren’t supposed to like sex, except that if they don’t like sex, then who are men going to have sex *with*).

Women have expended a lot of energy in the last 50 years trying to get the (male) medical establishment to take their medical issues seriously. So, I’m reluctant to cheer about this study, even as I gaze skeptically at Big Pharma and their motives.

I’ll admit I was stymied for a minute. Luckily, my complete inability to remember my fucking server password gave me time to leave a long comment at Majikthise and the reboot means I get to share my thoughts with you. Everyone wins, barring the majority of people who don’t give a flying fuck.

My thought is that I like to steal Michael Bérubé’s excellent contribution to the blogging discourse–we’re not either/or thinkers here, we’re both/and thinkers. Mrs. Coulter touches on it, but let’s go whole hog and embrace the idea that the male-dominated medical establishment both ignores women’s real problems and makes up new shit for us to worry about that we shouldn’t have to.

Like I said in Lindsay’s comments, the all-time classic example is hysteria, mostly due to Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s famous story about her bout with the disease called “The Yellow Wallpaper”. I hate to drag out a standard feminist trope, but that story is classic for a reason because Gilman accurately captured how you can both be sick and be made worse by medical “help” that’s more interested in bolstering male dominance than helping female patients. Hysteria was real, all right–it was a nervous breakdown caused by the stress of being so contrained as a woman in Victorian times.

That story’s insight is a good model with which to really understand what’s likely going on with the catch-all diagnosis of “sexual dysfunction”. The problem is that women are often not understood as people who exist for our own reasons, but as objects for male use, and therefore when it comes to disease diagnosis, the sufferers who are often the object of concern are not the women themselves, but the men around them who are anything from agitated to inconvenienced by the woman’s problems. Using that model of understanding, it’s easy to see why what happens in “The Yellow Wallpaper” makes perfect sense–from Gilman’s perspective, her suffering is caused by isolation and lack of purpose so the “cure” furthers the disease. But if you shift perspectives and view the victim as not her but her husband who has to deal with her, then the cure of locking her up out of sight makes perfect sense. The problem–the troublesome woman–is cured, so medical science works.

I suspect the problem with the diagnosis of “sexual dysfunction” is that it’s broad by design. It means, essentially, “not able to perform sexually to standards set by the male-dominated society”.  Considering that the standard is that women are both to be, as Mrs. Coulter noted, highly orgasmic and responsive while also hating sex and self-depriving, the actual rate of sexual dysfunction in women is probably about 100% by that standard.

The major problem is that if you don’t diagnose correctly, you can’t cure the damn disease.  For instance, in Gilman’s story, she wasn’t really cured because the cure was just more of what caused the disease.   And as such, there’s a good chance the medical establishment’s eagerness to overdiagnose women for not responding to prescribed sexual stimulation is obscuring their ability to diagnose women who can’t respond even to the kind they like.

I just thought this was cool:

Ginger can kill ovarian cancer cells while the compound that makes peppers hot can shrink pancreatic tumors, researchers told a conference on Tuesday. Their studies add to a growing body of evidence that at least some popular spices might slow or prevent the growth of cancer.

Being a big fan of the above spices, I’m psyched.  If they could only find that generic diet sodas reduced your chance of breast cancer, I’d be set.

Last week, I wrote that members of the Anti-Sex League are probably getting good sex, and they’re just selfish and don’t want anyone else to enjoy sex. While that’s probably true to a large degree, I have to add the caveat that doesn’t preclude the idea that some wingnuts really are just jealous. Evidence today–caught one wishing AIDS on gay men who aren’t hiding miserably in the closet.

As a heterosexual man who once engaged in homosexual behavior for 11 years, I’ve lost numerous dear friends to AIDS. While recent news in the search for a cure for AIDS is promising, I believe this possible HIV prevention pill is only going to push a culture down an already dangerous and risky path. This pill is the equivalent to a drug rehab assisting heroine [sic] addicts in their addiction by giving them needles. What is wrong with this picture? Why can’t these intelligent scientists and doctors understand we need to educate people on abandoning their risky, unsafe sexual practices and behavior–not give them a pill to enable and encourage them?

This “heterosexual” is Stephen Bennett–obviously, he’s just an “ex”-gay man and he sounds a little bit pissed that other guys are getting away with the hot sex that he can’t have anymore. But man, wishing a painful death on someone because of jealousy isn’t so very Christian, I’m thinking.

But I’m still holding firm to my theory that a lot of the Anti-Sex League are just selfish and sadistic and get a kick out of depriving others of the pleasures they themselves would enjoy. The “ex-gay” movement is prime evidence of this–it wouldn’t exist but for bona fide straight people funding and supporting and promoting it. I wonder if Bennett realizes the people who are encouraging him to forsake genuine sexual pleasure then go home and get to have sex with someone they actually find attractive. Which means of course that the real enemies aren’t random gay men who stubbornly won’t die to make Bennett feel superior. The real enemies are his so-called “friends” who get joy out of depriving him of pleasures they don’t feel like they need to give up themselves.

I guess there really isn’t much you can say about this story except to print the facts as they are and let it fly…(Asheville Citizen-Times):

Three men charged with performing castrations in a sadomasochistic dungeon in their Haywood County home will go to court on Monday, a prosecutor said today.

A judge during the hearing, called a 96-hour hearing, will advise them of their right to remain silent and to legal representation. They will also be given the opportunity to apply for a court-appointed attorney, District Attorney Michael Bonfoey said.

…The first hearing that could provide more details of the castrations and illegal surgeries will be an April 12 probable cause hearing. The state will offer evidence that shows it had cause to believe a crime was committed, the prosecutor said.

Readt for more details?

Investigators believe at least six men traveled from across the nation and abroad to learn “slave training� and have their genitals mutilated by a man they called “Master Rick� in a sadomasochistic dungeon inside a home in the Allens Creek community.

Haywood County authorities said Friday the men were castrated during eight illegal surgeries at the house on Peace Mountain Road. The operations took place from June 2004 to November 2005.

OK. How many guys out there aren’t holding the family jewels at this point? Oh, yes, and the investigators said that the victims were willing participants to boot.

By the way, as one expects in unhinged cases like this, there’s always some joker who is a complete dunce when doing something illegal — one of the suspects actually filmed himself doing the slicing and dicing and burned it to DVD, which was found by the police when his home was searched.

Now when I posted this over at my pad, some thought that I was passing judgment on the s/m bent of this when I called it an unhinged case. Actually, the sexual gratification of these consenting adults isn’t what crossed my mind first.

What is unhinged about this situation is that these people are conducting medical procedures without regard to any health codes and laws. It moves up the unhinged meter when the person performing the procedure is crazy enough to indict himself on video. He had to know this could lead to prosecution.

The gross-out factor of putting yourself through that level of mutilation willingly in a “dungeon” (clearly not a sterile environment) just creeped me out. Having been the victim of a nasty, actually life-threatening abdominal staph infection a few years ago that was contracted during surgery in a hospital operating room (it required a second operation as a result), that’s right where my mind went.

Update:Â PZ below corrects me–this isn’t really news, just a new feature story on something that’s been a model for a long time. Â Still, I think it’s interesting.
As anyone who reads this blog regularly has probably figured out, I’m drawn to feminist writing out of a sense of justice and a sense of self-preservation, but it’s not really a big secret that what keeps me hanging in is my fascination with the symbols and metaphors people conceptualize life in. So that’s why I read this article in the NY Times about a scientist named David Haig that is looking at pregnancy through a theory about how evolution might create situations that pit offspring against parents in a fight for resources. (To simplify it.) Basically, he’s examining whether or not a fetus and the woman it’s in can be looked at, from a biological point of view, as “fighting” each other for the woman’s body’s resources. This framework of understanding the process of pregnancy is proving to be useful, because it makes the myriad of health problems that often come with pregnancy easier to comprehend.

I for one think that if scientists haven’t been looking at pregnancy as a parasitic relationship before, then it’s high time to entertain the possibility that is the best way to understand it. Mary Beth’s excellent post from a couple days ago about having a pregnancy-caused condition called hyperemesis really brought home to me how useful it would be for science to have the best possible framework to understand pregnancy.

Aside from the baseline science issues I can’t even start to delve into, due to being like not educated in biology or anything like that, I’m interested in how this metaphor for scientific understanding will play out in the public mind. The public is notoriously bad for not grasping that just because a metaphor is good for conceptualizing scientific ideas doesn’t make the metaphor some kind of on high commandment on how we should conceptualize society. The most notorious example of this kind of bad thinking is social Darwinism, of course–using a shallow understanding of what evolution is (survival of the fittest), powerful people decided that meant they had license to abandon certain moral frameworks about exploiting the weakest members of society.

The biological struggle between a woman’s body and a fetus isn’t a metaphor for something outside of the mechanics of survival, but in light of he abortion debate, the urge is going to be irresistible for people to try to make it so. To my mind, it doesn’t matter which metaphorical understanding scientists apply to pregnancy, so long as it’s the one that produces the best predictions–if they found they did best by looking at pregnancy as a generally sympathetic relationship and that the things that go wrong are just massive malfunctioning of some sort, that wouldn’t change my opinion one iota on whether or not health-related abortions were morally correct. And because of this, I’m quite reluctant to say, “See, fetuses are parasites! Abortion should be legal!” because it doesn’t matter what the evolutionary background on pregnancy is–all that matters is it’s a condition, and if a woman doesn’t want to be in it, she shouldn’t be forced against her will.

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Good news up front–Ohio federals court upholds the health exemption. Of course, the very existence of “health exemptions” presume that the law is a better judge of health than a doctor, but we take our victories where we can nowadays.

The NY Times has an article on shackling women to bed when they give birth, which many prisons do. I’m inclined to agree with zuzu that this is just one more way the existence of pregnancy is used to humiliate and degrade women. If people showed an ounce of respect towards non-prisoner pregnant women, I’d hesitate to say that, but between the blather about “snowflake babies” to all the horror stories I hear from my friends who’ve procreated about how everyone wants a piece of you when you’re pregnant, I can’t be optimistic.

On the front of punishing sexuality, there’s still rumblings out there that the upcoming HPV vaccine could be strongly resisted by the Wingnutteria. Actually, despite this blog post title, I don’t think that it’s sexuality so much that the wingnuts are salivating to punish, it’s being born female. A friend of mine wrote me the other day and asked if I thought that if HPV caused male cancer if it would be resisted and upon thinking it over, I have to say no. If there was a disease out there that the vast majority of people have that didn’t affect women but caused a certain percentage of men to have their dicks shrivel up and fall off, my guess is that we wouldn’t be hearing a peep from the Wingnutteria about a vaccine.

Well, unless the vast majority of men who lost their dicks were gay. Then conservatives would be agitating for funding cuts in the research. Not of course that there’s any disease out there that hits gay men way more than straight men that has been treated like a just “consequence” by conservatives or anything.

By the way, Blog Against Sexism Day is March 8th. We do that every day around these parts, but it’s a great time for bloggers who focus on other issues to weigh in against sexism. That’s also the day for another Carnival of Feminists, so get your submissions into Indian Writing by March 5th. I don’t see that she’s announced a theme, so I guess it’s open-ended.

A reader sent me this supposed-to-be touching article about a doctor who’s torn between giving his patient medication that actually treats her schizophrenia but causes her to gain weight or giving her a drug that doesn’t work but preserves her looks in a way that the doctor approves of.

It was likely that the weight gain associated with Olanzapine would be very difficult to treat and that Nia would be fat, if not obese. But more disconcerting to the young psychiatrist was Nia’s apparent indifference to her predicament. While those around her worried about the beauty she had lost, she seemed unconcerned. Was she really as well as her family suggested? Had she really rejoined the image-conscious world of her peers?

Is there a chance that she was so relieved that her mind wasn’t driving her crazy anymore that the side effects seemed like a minor concern? Of course not–any woman who thinks there’s anything more important than beauty is by definition mentally ill. Jesus.

For further reading on the distressing influence of the romanticized stereotype of the beautiful, white, crazy girl on the quality of mental health care, I have to recommend Bitch again–there’s an article by a woman who only calls herself Angelina in the byline called “Black Girl, Interrupted”. The shoddy treatment the author receives when she seeks help for her depression is absolutely maddening.

Zuzu has more.

The proposed Medicare cut that would prevent physicians from receiving much of the money owed to them by Medicare was cancelled. This is good news for both doctors and patients, the former for obvious reasons, the latter because it means that they won’t be as likely to be cut from patient rolls because of their inability to pay.