Just wanted to share this image of a 3-D printed clitoris that I printed at the Wakerspace:
The file to print your own can be found here. It was created and made available for free by French independent researcher Odile Fillod. I think Fillod’s project is a wonderful example of feminist science studies and diy activism.
Pharmaceutical companies have been working for years in order to secure FDA-approval for Flibanserin, a drug intended to treat female desire disorders. Recently, there have been a number of new developments in the Flibanserin saga, involving drug companies, the FDA, feminist activists, and the media, which I analyze in this post. Here’s a quick preview of my judgment on each of these actors: pharmaceutical companies = profit driven (what else?); FDA = differential treatment of drugs for men vs. drugs for women; feminist activists = doing some good, but efforts have limitations; media = totally dropping the ball.
Background on the Flibanserin
Flibanserin is a drug that increases levels of the neurotransmitters dopamine and noradrenaline and lowers levels of the neurotransmitter serotonin. It was originally developed and tested as a treatment for depression by the German pharmaceutical company Boehringer Ingelheim, but it was not found to be effective in treating depression.
Credit: Wikimedia Commons
In 2010, Boehringer Ingelheim applied to the FDA for approval for Flibanserin as a treatment for Hypoactive Sexual Desire Disorder (HSDD) in women. HSDD is defined by the American Psychiatric Association in the DSM-IV as “persistently or recurrently deficient or absent sexual fantasies and desire for sexual activity” which must cause “marked distress or interpersonal difficulty” [1]. In clinical trials, women diagnosed with HSDD who took Flibanserin reported an increase of around 2.5 “sexually satisfying events” per month, while women diagnosed with HSDD who took a placebo reported an increase of around 1.5 “sexually satisfying events” per month. The FDA panel that reviewed Boehringer Ingelheim’s application recommended against approving Flibanserin, citing modest benefits and long-term safety concerns (the transcript of the hearing is available online).
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Cross-posted from The Neuroethics Blog (Emory Center for Ethics)
N is for Neurosexism
Twenty or thirty years ago, single-sex education for girls was a feminist clause célèbre. However, beginning in the late 1990s and early 2000s, people began to worry that boys were “underperforming” in school and in life (an idea nicknamed “the boys’ crisis” by the popular press). The media framing of the boys’ crisis has been critiqued on a number of fronts – specifically, critics have pointed out that both girls and boys are performing better in school than in the past and that the difference in educational achievement between white and middle-class students and low-income and minority students is far more pronounced than the difference between female and male students (see a 2008 report from the American Association of University Women).
However, despite these critiques, cultural commentators began to advocate for single-sex education in public schools as a solution to the boys’ crisis. Commentators like Michael Gurian (author of Boys and Girls Learn Differently!) and Leonard Sax (founder of the National Association for Single Sex Public Education and author of Why Gender Matters) argued that boys’ and girls’ brains develop differently, so boys and girls should be separated in school and should receive education targeted to their specific neuro-developmental patterns and mental strengths.
Cross-posted from The Neuroethics Blog (Emory University Center for Ethics)
A number of potentially problematic themes run throughout public discussions about sexuality in this country. One such potentially problematic theme revolves around innate sex/gender differences in sexuality. I see stories in the media almost every week about how men and women are almost diametric opposites when it comes to sexuality as a result of evolutionary pressures. In these articles, which are often reporting on scientific studies, the men are invariably sex-hungry and desperate to procreate with any available woman, while the women are invariably choosy and determined to find a “good provider” (for examples, see here, here, and here). I suspect these articles (and the studies they draw from) suffer from confirmation bias, developing elaborate evolutionary rationales to justify what seem like outdated stereotypes.
Another such theme revolves around the determinative role of hormones in sexual desire and activity. In a fascinating (although now somewhat out-of-date) study, sociologist Amy Schalet interviewed parents in the U.S. and the Netherlands about adolescent sexuality. She found that American parents were much more likely than Dutch parents to view adolescent sexuality as driven by hormones. In addition (perhaps as a result) American parents, unlike Dutch parents, viewed adolescent desire as potentially dangerous, and they were more likely to adopt an attitude of willful ignorance about the sexual activity engaged in by their children.
Cross-posted with permission by the Kinsey Institute.
Photo: anemoneprojectors
A recent episode of the TV series House, M.D. created quite a stir in the asexual blogosphere. The show, for those of you who don’t know, chronicles the adventures of the irascible diagnostician Dr. House as he solves medical mysteries.
[Spoiler alert] The episode of interest (“Better Half” which aired on 1/23/2012) features a husband and wife who both identify as asexual at the start of the show. The wife consults House’s friend and colleague, Wilson, for a minor medical complaint. Upon learning about the couple, House sets out to prove that the wife’s asexuality is caused by a medical condition. He lures her husband into the hospital and performs a number of tests on him, eventually discovering that he has a brain tumor which is affecting his libido. When Wilson tells the couple about House’s finding, the wife admits that she had been pretending to be asexual in order to remain with her spouse.
photo by Ann Douglas
I am currently working with a collaborator on an article reviewing contemporary sex advice literature. As a result, I have been reading a LOT of sex manuals. They range from the thoughtful, interesting, and potentially helpful to the narrow-minded, prescriptive, and possibly iatrogenic.
I found one manual particularly upsetting: The Sex Starved Marriage (2003) by Michele Weiner-Davis. Below please find my (somewhat) parodic inversion of her message: