Science (Or Not) – Page 5

NPR Backs Out of Interview with Abortion Provider

In response to the WaPo article I wrote about this November, NPR’s Talk of the Nation got in touch with my charity of choice, Medical Students for Choice, to interview a doctor who is part of MS4C and did opt to perform abortions unlike the student profiled in WaPo. Apparently the interview with Dr. Rachel Phelps, medical director of Planned Parenthood of Syracuse, NY, was cancelled because the head producer refused to represent the doctor on air without also representing an anti-choice doctor.

Unfortunately (for NPR), MS4C had already sent out a press release to its followers telling them to keep a look out for the interview, and then had to send out a second release stating why the interview wouldn’t be aired. MS4C supporters were annoyed, and rightfully so, and flooded NPR with letters urging them to reconsider.

They did. The TOTN interview with Dr. Phelps is set to air on Monday. Meanwhile I, like MomTFH, am wondering why some controversial women’s health issues — controversial as it is that women may deserve some semblance of healthy living that may or may not involve their girly innards — aren’t treated like other controversial issues in the media. Why the emphasis on “moral” “balance” and equal time only when it comes to abortion, and not to, say, the environment? Or war?

Abortion is a legal, overwhelmingly safe, very common medical procedure, one of the most common surgical procedures in the country. The vast majority of the country supports the right for women to choose to terminate a pregnancy. The Alan Guttmacher Institute estimates between 30 to 40% of all women of reproductive age will have a pregnancy termination in their lifetime. Unfortunately, very few of these women will talk about it to anyone other than their immediate support circle, due to the stigma. Part of that stigma is due to many media outlets not thinking that a story about abortion is complete without having someone pointing out that some people think that it is immoral.

Many NPR shows, including TOTN, are successful at providing nuanced discussion of controversial issues without resorting to having one guest that calls the other guest immoral, one who completely disagrees with their legal ability to even do what they do…When you have on military experts or spokespeople, do you have a token pacifist on the panel saying war is wrong, or even someone who represents the 60%+ of us who think we shouldn’t be in Iraq? Just to remind everybody that some people think it’s immoral?

Maybe we should! And then we can start voting and legislating based on murky waters and human interest stories instead of on facts, or needs, or socio-political forecasts, or hell, the future.

The Perfect Woman

Never ever nags, can read a map, has a 32-23-33 figure, is in her 20s, will work 24 hours a day and doesn’t eat or sleep (kind of sounds like my life these days, minus the measurements and the nagging). And she’s a robot.

Computer ace Le, 33, from Ontario, Canada, has spent two years and £14,000 building his dream girl.

He had planned to make an android to care for the elderly.

But his project — inspired by sci-fi robots like Star Wars’s C3PO — strayed off-course.

Le said: “Aiko is what happens when science meets beauty.”

Actually, Aiko is what happens when science meets pathetic.

Once Aiko has been perfected, Le hopes to sell clones for use as home-helps.

He said: “Aiko doesn’t need holidays, food or rest, and will work almost 24 hours a day. She is the perfect woman.”

I wonder why this guy is still single.

Thanks to Jennifer for the link.

Blogging along with Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog

Hello, Feministe! I haven’t posted much lately because I’ve managed to get my hands a little too full with other projects. I do have some posts on other subjects that I hope to have up soon, but I first I felt it was my duty to inform you all that this is the last weekend that you can see Joss Whedon’s new musical, Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog, for free. The final episode was just released this morning, and they’ll all be up until midnight on Sunday. (I assume that means Sunday night, not late tonight.) After that, you’ll have to buy them from iTunes.

But why are you blogging about this on Feministe, Holly? Haven’t you been criticized before for calling people’s attention to topics that are only tangentially related to feminism? Like say, racism? Never fear, ye pure of heart, because there’s definitely a point. For one thing, Joss Whedon is an unabashed feminist himself. The kind who says clearly that he shouldn’t get any medals for something every writer in Hollywood should be doing: writing strong female characters like Buffy (you know, the Vampire Slayer) or half the crew of the good ship Serenity.

For another thing, you know what the most fun part of Joss Whedon’s work is, at least for me? Dissecting it. Buffy has inspired quite a lot of scholarly work and criticism, to the point where it ostensibly has its own sub-field of cultural studies. (I have to admit at this point that I wrote my own undergraduate thesis about Buffy, although it was an anthropological study of early fan communities c. 1997. I also have to admit that I lost my taste for the show after the fifth season.) Although the most rabidly loyal of Whedonites may disagree about the need to be critical, I think a lot of other fans relish the fact that Whedon’s work often invites thoughtful questions, quirked eyebrows, even nitpicking.

So here’s what I want you to do. Go watch Dr. Horrible, all three episodes, while they’re still free. You’l be glad you did. Then come back here and click into the rest of this thread, where we’ll do SPOILERS and discussion and ask the question… is this a comic musical about a Nice Guy^TM?

Thanks

It’s been great guesting here! Thanks so much to the Feministe crew for the invite.

I’ll leave you with two things. First, this is a recent, absolutely fantastic series of five articles and brief videos about some of the most common claims about “innate” behavioral differences between the sexes. I can’t recommend it highly enough as a quick reference when you get into another tiresome conversation about how “biology” has proven this or that antifeminist claim.

As you could probably tell from my posts, it’s always a pet peeve of mine when people fall back on “biology” as a justification for patriarchal norms and practices. It’s just such a shady rhetorical trick—attempting to claim that social change is impossible by implying that the current social order has been proven unchangable by a completely unquestionable authority, when in fact no such thing has occurred. Ack. Drives me up the walls just thinking about it. Must be my wandering womb.

Second, a rather shameless plug for the new database created by Students Active For Ending Rape (SAFER), the organization I work with. SAFER works to empower college students to hold their colleges accountable for sexual violence on campus, and we help students organize to create better sexual assault prevention and response procedures on their campuses. The policies database lists various colleges and gives a rundown of their sexual assault policies, so if you’re a college student, you can use the database to look up your school’s policies, find ideas for reform by looking at the positive aspects of other college policies, and add information about your school policy to help prospective students evaluate how your college stacks up against others when it comes to dealing with sexual violence. Please take the time to check it out, and add info about any schools we don’t have listed!

Thanks again for having me here on Feministe. I had a blast.

Oh, one last thing:

Reproductive Tourism

This kind of out-of-control globalization, wherein wealthier women are able to rent the wombs of poorer ones, makes me extremely uncomfortable.

I’m certainly sympathetic to the plight of couples who can’t conceive for whatever reason. And it certainly makes sense for women to voluntarily carry someone else’s pregnancy if it means making a lot of money. But I think it’s possible to be skeptical of this situation without passing judgment on the people involved in it, most of whom are doing the best that they can in tough circumstances.

An article published in The Times of India in February questioned how such a law would be enforced: “In a country crippled by abject poverty,” it asked, “how will the government body guarantee that women will not agree to surrogacy just to be able to eat two square meals a day?”

One could argue that surrogates are simply providing a service like any other. But I’m not sure that we want to turn reproduction into a service industry. The inequalities here are so stark — and the carrot of thousands of dollars so tempting for women in a country with astounding poverty rates — that writing if off as purely business is inadequate.

“Surrogates do it to give their children a better education, to buy a home, to start up a small business, a shop,” Dr. Kadam said. “This is as much money as they could earn in maybe three years. I really don’t think that this is exploiting the women. I feel it is two people who are helping out each other.”

Mr. Gher agreed. “You cannot ignore the discrepancies between Indian poverty and Western wealth,” he said. “We try our best not to abuse this power. Part of our choice to come here was the idea that there was an opportunity to help someone in India.”

In the Mumbai clinic, it is clear that an exchange between rich and poor is under way. On some contracts, the thumbprint of an illiterate surrogate stands out against the clients’ signatures.

Thoughts?

Sex: Yr Doin It Wrong

Three minutes?!

The US study is the first to review what experts believe is the ideal length of time to have penetrative sex, with the random sample of Americans and Canadians labelling seven to 13 minutes most “desirable”.

Intercourse lasting between three and seven minutes was deemed “adequate”, but anything less was considered “too short” and beyond 13 minutes was “too long”.

Cara aptly points out that the study has a pretty narrow definition of “sex,” and perhaps that accounts for some of the study’s… oddities. But even if sex only refers to PIV penetration… three minutes?

Back to Cara:

The problem here is — as is generally the case — the media coverage. You’d think that in 2008, we’d have a more encompassing view of sex than “man inserts penis into vagina, thrusts for X minutes, ejaculates, rolls over and sleeps.” You’d think that we’d understand that acts like oral, anal and manual sex count as sex, as do mutual masturbation, play with sex toys, etc. You’d think we’d realize through this understanding that wow!, men can have sex with each other and so can women! Maybe it’d even occur to people that straight couples engage in these acts, too — and that while many women love PIV penetration, a majority of the female population requires at least one other tactic to actually have an orgasm. In 2008, shouldn’t we be at a point where we realize that the ultimate goal of sex is not a male orgasm, and that a male orgasm should not be seen as the definitive end to anything that we could potentially refer to as “sex?”

Seriously. Although I guess if I were partnered with someone who saw sex that way, I’d probably want to get it over with in three minutes, too.

Damn Funny Women! (part 2)

I’m splitting my last post up into two sections, because it was too long, and the second half isn’t about the BBC’s horrible “science reporting” anyway. It’s about the related subject of whether women are allowed to be funny.

So what is up with humor being characterized as inherently “aggressive?” Everyone seems to take this for granted, and it’s part of why the “women just aren’t funny” trope gets rehashed over and over again. (Because you know, women just aren’t aggressive either, right?) From the recent slamming of Katharine Heigl for pointing out that Knocked Up unfairly cast its women as humorless non-jokers all the way back to Christopher Hitchens’ infamous essay in in Vanity Fair about why women aren’t funny unless they’re “hefty or dykey or Jewish,” it hasn’t been a good year for women in comedy. Or at least, the idea of women in comedy. Although they’re in a minority, there are plenty of extremely funny female comedians out there doing just fine and proving all this shit wrong.

The BBC says: humour “comes from testosterone.”
Holly says: bad reporting “comes from the BBC.”

If you’ve kept track of the scant number of posts I’ve contributed to Feministe over the past half-year, you may have realized that I get very irritated when I come across blatantly misleading “science” reporting. (I guess it must come from being raised by scientists, then working in the media.) So my eyeballs bulged and turned a hilarious shade of pink when I came across this lead for a “Health” story on the BBC News site courtesty of Feministing:

Humour ‘comes from testosterone’
Men are naturally more comedic than women because of the male hormone testosterone, an expert claims.

Men make more gags than women and their jokes tend to be more aggressive, Professor Sam Shuster, of Norfolk and Norwich University Hospital, says.

The unicycling doctor observed how the genders reacted to his “amusing” hobby.

Women tended to make encouraging, praising comments, while men jeered. The most aggressive were young men, he told the British Medical Journal.

Previous findings have suggested women and men differ in how they use and appreciate humour.

Women tend to tell fewer jokes than men and male comedians outnumber female ones.

What we really need to do is find out the gender of whoever research and wrote this story for the BBC, because few things are funnier than someone who’s supposed to be a journalist, working for the largest broadcasting company in the world, making a complete ass out of themselves. Not to mention spreading the story to all sorts of other news services that seem to be taking the story seriously.

So, the first thing I always do with these science stories is find the original study: Sex, aggression, and humour: responses to unicycling. It turns out that Sam Shuster is a retired professor of dermatology. (Note to BBC researchers: this means he studied skin, not hormones or psychology.) Shuster wrote about reactions to his unicycle for the traditional end-of-year issue of the British Medical Journal. This season, the BMJ also features densely written scientific papers on which brand chocolate bar doctors ought to use to demonstrate bone fractures and whether magical powers are heritable, based on an analysis of Harry Potter novels. In short, it’s clearly a joke. I would blame the notoriously dry wits of the British for the confusion, but it seems all too likely that the BBC reporter is… also British, albeit maybe not a doctor with enough time on hand to write witty, self-referential papers about the statistical mistreatment of orthopedic surgeons in medical journals.

Back in the dark ages of 1992, I believed the gay evil eye could give me AIDS!

Ah, 1992. I remember the year fondly… Dr. Dre came out with his first solo album, Kurt and Courtney got married, and movie reviewers struggled with how to describe The Crying Game without giving away that oh-so-titillating secret. (I was more interested in seeing Jeunet & Caro’s Delicatessen, personally.)

That year, my best friend Michele started a letter-writing chapter of Amnesty International at our high school, as well as another student organization dedicated to sex education. We volunteered to help teach sex education in middle schools, and I learned an awful lot of facts very well, especially about HIV–which had definitely become the Huge Scary Thing that was driving a lot of parents & teachers to want more and better sex education. It might seem a little odd that teenagers were teaching pre-teens about sex, but we took it very seriously. I had relatives and family friends who were HIV+ (and still alive, at that point) and a few years before, some of them had been involved in tests of a new drug called AZT, and methods to keep the virus from infecting newborn babies of seropositive mothers.

One thing we were careful to stress to the middle school kids was that they didn’t need to be scared of people with HIV. They couldn’t catch the virus from toilet seats, contrary to urban legend, or from kissing someone with HIV. We even had a big bucket full of water that we would haul out to show how much saliva you’d theoretically have to drink in order to stand a chance of transmitting the virus; it was a big bucket and never failed to get a chorus of “ewwww, gross!” at the thought of that much spit. Sex ed information has changed and updated since then, and we didn’t have as much precise information as we do now. But it was pretty clear to us, from our own education as well as the little sessions we were teaching, that you could not “catch AIDS” just from being in the same room with people who were positive, and that it was far from just being a “gay disease.” This stuff had been known for years and years.

Well apparently down-home traditional-values Mike Huckabee, who applied to run for the U.S. Senate in 1992, was far more confused about HIV transmission than a bunch of high school kids like us. He answered a questionnaire sent to him by the Associated Press and more or less advocated quarantining people with HIV, comparing the epidemic to tuberculosis. Which, by the way, is transmitted via airborne droplets that can infect anyone who breathes them in regularly, especially children and people in poor health for other reasons. Huckabee also said “I feel homosexuality is an aberrant, unnatural, and sinful lifestyle, and we now know it can pose a dangerous public health risk,” and it’s all too obvious what he was talking about. A “gay disease.”

Since then, Huckabee has made all sorts of excuses about why his comments were appropriate at the time. He claims that transmission wasn’t well understood back then… somehow to the extent that it was all right for a man running for office to spread myths that I was trying to counter at the time, that only schoolchildren and apparently evangelical politicos believed? He even invoked the “but I had a friend who died of AIDS” card, twice: once for hemophiliacs and once for honest-to-gosh gay people. I wonder how he treated that unnatural, abberant, sinful friend of his, dying of AIDS in the late 80s or early 90s? (Actually, I wonder if that friend existed at all, or is just a rhetorical device.)

I don’t really have much more to add that Pam didn’t already say in her first post on the subject or her more recent one. It’s just a shame that in this day and age — whether it’s 15 years ago or today — someone running for public office can get away with spewing this kind of ignorant, fear-mongering bullshit. Not only get away with it, but be rewarded for it.

(Footnote: I just remembered that early in 1992 was also when I discovered a very strange computer network. I managed to get access to some University of Washington servers and then discovered that I could talk to people in Sweden. Mind-boggling. “All the college kids are using it and calling it… the internet! It’s way better than AOL and it’s free!” I exclaimed to my friends. Then I ran off to try and develop my first online game, which was based on a very nerdy roleplaying game about vampires, and got about 30% finished despite me enlisting a boy who could actually program.)

I think it’s about time we started protecting the innocent, adorable spermies

Masturbation is Murder, originally uploaded by JillNic83.

Amanda wrote a satirical piece for RH Reality Check about how the next anti-choice step should be to outlaw menstruation. Well, it looks like anti-choicers have caught up with her — they’re trying to pass legislation in Colorado that would give fertilized eggs full Constitutional personhood rights. Unfortunately, the majority of fertilized eggs (somewhere around 70 percent) naturally don’t implant in the uterus and are flushed out onto tampons, pads and panties everywhere. Meaning that, well, Menstruation is Murder.

But my question is, what about the little sperms? They’re fucking adorable (way cuter than eggs), clearly alive (until they are cruelly wanked into oblivion), and completely innocent in their host’s perverted, self-indulgent proclivities. Do they not deserve life? Should they not be spared? Must they be slaughtered for your own selfish pleasures?

What about them?