The F Word: Amy Clausen -- Women and Skepticism

Women and Skepticism
The F Word

Amanda Chalmers and Meghan Murphy discuss women's relationship to skepticism with our guest Amy Clausen, and examine why it is such a male dominated movement.

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Feministing: Yes, women still earn 75% as much as men

Yes, women still earn 75% as much as men
By Maya
Feministing

Have you been repeating the stat that women earn only 75% as much as their male counterparts for years but secretly wondered if it could possibly still be true? Well, according to a report released yesterday by the White House, it still is! Which is pretty damn sad.

Described as the most comprehensive federal report on the status of women in the U.S. since 1963, the report mainly provides a statistical snapshot–filled with many a nice graph!–of a lot of facts you probably already know.

* Women (and men) are getting married later than ever before
* Women are delaying having children longer, having fewer of them, or sometimes not having them at all
* Women still typically do more housework than men
* Women are more likely to be victims of some crimes such as stalking and domestic violence
* Women are more likely than men to suffer from depression and chronic health problems
* Women are more likely to live in poverty than men

And that pesky pay gap! 75 cents to the dollar. At all levels of educational attainment. (And for Black and Hispanic women that’s 71% and 62% respectively.) A stat that persists despite the fact that women have not only caught up with men in education but have now surged past them. These days, young women are actually more likely than young men to have college or graduate degrees.

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William John Cox: Political Upheaval and Women's Rights

Political Upheaval and Women's Rights
By William John Cox
Consortium

As the youth-led Freedom Movement of 2011 spreads rapidly across the Middle East, one can only wonder what would be happening in Iraq today if the U.S. had not invaded eight years ago.

Might Saddam Hussein have been driven from power by an internal popular uprising – as happened to Hosni Mubarak in Egypt and Zine El Abidine Ben Ali in Tunisia – without all the death and destruction wrought by George W. Bush’s invasion?

And, what does the overthrow of authoritarian governments – whether in Iraq from the U.S. invasion or in Tunisia from a popular uprising – portend for the rights of women? Will the changes unleash more Islamic fundamentalism and thus worsen the status of women in those countries?

Women’s rights continue to deteriorate in Iraq under the U.S.-installed Shiite government; their status is also threatened by Islamists in Tunisia, which – like Iraq – was long renowned as among the most secular of Arab nations.

It should be noted, too, that the personal liberties of women are under assault in the United States – by Christian fundamentalist politicians. The rise of fundamentalism, whether Islamic or Christian, almost always translates into fewer freedoms for women.

Iraq’s History

Under Iraq’s longtime Ba’athist government led by Saddam Hussein, Iraqi women enjoyed greater freedom than women in most other Arab nations and they played an active role in the political, economic and educational development of the nation.

The 1970 Constitution formally guaranteed equal rights to women and ensured their right to obtain an education, own property, vote and be elected to political offices. Iraq acceded to the United Nations Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women in 1986.

However, at a cost of more than $1 trillion to the U.S. Treasury, President George W. Bush’s “Operation Iraqi Freedom” led to the slaughter of well over 100,000 Iraqis, including thousands of children, and the invasion resulted in women losing many of their previous rights.

After the ouster of Saddam Hussein, President Bush often bragged that now “Iraq is free of rape rooms;” however, his illegal invasion of Iraq not only exposed its women to rape by U.S. soldiers and mercenaries, but rape is increasingly used as a weapon by warring tribal factions, according to evidence gathered by women’s rights organizations.

“Rape is being used in the settling of scores in the sectarian war,” said Besmia Khatib of the Iraqi Women's Network.

While the new Iraqi constitution adopted after the invasion requires that women hold 25 percent of the seats in the parliament, it also provides that no law can contradict the “established rulings of Islam.”

Thus, the personal rights of women are subject to the interpretation of religious leaders, and those rights are being officially curtailed by the Shiite-controlled government.

Iraqi women must now submit to any male authority, including boys as young as 12-years-old, and they are being attacked and murdered for working, dressing "inappropriately" or attending university.

Because Iraq has more than three million widows – a result of Bush’s invasion and earlier wars under Saddam Hussein – sex trafficking has become widespread, as there is little or no opportunity for these women to find other employment.

Today, as the youth-driven Freedom Movement sweeps across the Middle East, it is touching Iraq, too, where freedom demonstrations have drawn thousands of protesters in the cities of Sulaimaniya, Falluja, Nassiriya Province, and Baghdad.

These demonstrations are being suppressed by the Iraqi security forces using U.S. supplied weapons and intimidation tactics, including raids on the office of the Iraqi organization that monitors press freedom.

The U.S. mainstream media and the Obama Administration have been largely silent about the Iraqi demonstrations; however, fair-minded Americans should conclude that, absent the invasion, the young people of Iraq would have been in the forefront of the Freedom Movement of 2011.

If history had taken that course, untold lives would have been spared and vast sums of money could have been spent improving the quality of life rather than destroying Iraqi standards of living. Plus, the United States would today enjoy greater respect from the world for promoting freedom and the rule of law, rather than violating those principles.

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Move On: Top 10 Shocking Attacks from the GOP's War on Women

(From Move On -- sources are at the end of the list.)

Top 10 Shocking Attacks from the GOP's War on Women

1) Republicans not only want to reduce women's access to abortion care, they're actually trying to redefine rape. After a major backlash, they promised to stop. But they haven't yet. Shocker.

2) A state legislator in Georgia wants to change the legal term for victims of rape, stalking, and domestic violence to "accuser." But victims of other less gendered crimes, like burglary, would remain "victims."

3) In South Dakota, Republicans proposed a bill that could make it legal to murder a doctor who provides abortion care. (Yep, for real.)

4) Republicans want to cut nearly a billion dollars of food and other aid to low-income pregnant women, mothers, babies, and kids.

5) In Congress, Republicans have a bill that would let hospitals allow a woman to die rather than perform an abortion necessary to save her life.

6) Maryland Republicans ended all county money for a low-income kids' preschool program. Why? No need, they said. Women should really be home with the kids, not out working.

7) And at the federal level, Republicans want to cut that same program, Head Start, by $1 billion. That means over 200,000 kids could lose their spots in preschool.

8) Two-thirds of the elderly poor are women, and Republicans are taking aim at them too. A spending bill would cut funding for employment services, meals, and housing for senior citizens.

9) Congress just voted for a Republican amendment to cut all federal funding from Planned Parenthood health centers, one of the most trusted providers of basic health care and family planning in our country.

10) And if that wasn't enough, Republicans are pushing to eliminate all funds for the only federal family planning program. (For humans. But Republican Dan Burton has a bill to provide contraception for wild horses. You can't make this stuff up).

Sources:

1. "'Forcible Rape' Language Remains In Bill To Restrict Abortion Funding," The Huffington Post, February 9, 2011

"Extreme Abortion Coverage Ban Introduced," Center for American Progress, January 20, 2011

2. "Georgia State Lawmaker Seeks To Redefine Rape Victims As 'Accusers,'" The Huffington Post, February 4, 2011

3. "South Dakota bill would legalize killing abortion doctors," Salon, February 15, 2011

4. "House GOP Proposes Cuts to Scores of Sacred Cows," National Journal, February 9, 2011

5. "New GOP Bill Would Allow Hospitals To Let Women Die Instead Of Having An Abortion," Talking Points Memo, February 4, 2011

6. "Republican Officials Cut Head Start Funding, Saying Women Should be Married and Home with Kids," Think Progress, February 16, 2011

7. "Bye Bye, Big Bird. Hello, E. Coli," The New Republic, Feburary 12, 2011

8. "House GOP spending cuts will devastate women, families and economy," The Hill, February 16, 2011

9. "House passes measure stripping Planned Parenthood funding," MSNBC, February 18,2011

"GOP Spending Plan: X-ing Out Title X Family Planning Funds," Wall Street Journal, February 9, 2011

10. Ibid.

"Birth Control for Horses, Not for Women," Blog for Choice, February 17, 2011

Progressive Radio Show: Ann Jones -- War Is Not Over When It's Over

Progressive Radio Show

Ann Jones, author of "War Is Not Over When It's Over."



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UCLA African Studies Center: Stephen Lewis -- Promises in AIDS Fight Not Met

Promises in AIDS Fight Not Met
African Studies Center (UCLA)

Focusing on Africa, former UN envoy Stephen Lewis expresses amazement at the passivity of the international community as the HIV/AIDS epidemic traumatizes women, creates orphans, and continues on its decades-long path of devastation.

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Claire Cain Miller: Out of the Loop in Silicon Valley

Out of the Loop in Silicon Valley
By CLAIRE CAIN MILLER
The New York Times

CANDACE FLEMING’S résumé boasts a double major in industrial engineering and English from Stanford, an M.B.A. from Harvard, a management position at Hewlett-Packard and experience as president of a small software company.

But when she was raising money for Crimson Hexagon, a start-up company she co-founded in 2007, she recalls one venture capitalist telling her that it didn’t matter that she didn’t have business cards, because all they would say was “Mom.”

Another potential backer invited her for a weekend yachting excursion by showing her a picture of himself on the boat — without clothes. When a third financier discovered that her husband was also a biking enthusiast, she says, he spent more time asking if riding affected her husband’s reproductive capabilities than he did focusing on her business plan.

Ultimately, none of the 30 venture firms she pitched financed her company. She finally raised $1.8 million in March 2008 from angel investors including Golden Seeds, a fund that emphasizes investing in start-ups led by women.

“I didn’t know things like this still happened,” says Ms. Fleming, 37. “But I know that, especially in risky times like the last couple years, some investors kind of retreat to investing via a template.” A company owned by a woman, she adds, “is just not the standard template.”

Though many people say that outright sexism is rare in the tech world these days, the barriers that Ms. Fleming encountered aren’t unusual. Tech communities in Silicon Valley and in other hubs — like New York, Austin, Tex., and Boston, where Ms. Fleming lives — pride themselves on operating as raw meritocracies ready to embrace anyone with a good idea, regardless of education, age or station in life.

For women, though, that narrative often unfolds differently.

Women own 40 percent of the private businesses in the United States, according to the Center for Women’s Business Research. But they create only 8 percent of the venture-backed tech start-ups, according to Astia, a nonprofit group that advises female entrepreneurs.

That disparity reaches beyond entrepreneurs. Women account for just 6 percent of the chief executives of the top 100 tech companies, and 22 percent of the software engineers at tech companies over all, according to the National Center for Women and Information Technology. And among venture capitalists, the population of financiers who control the purse strings for a majority of tech start-ups, just 14 percent are women, the National Venture Capital Association says.

That reality is even more complex when race is factored into the mix. Small percentages of workers in information technology are African-American, Asian or Hispanic, and that number is even smaller for women.

“It’s not like people are making an effort to exclude people, but I see very little diversity in the candidate pool,” says Aileen Lee, a partner at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, the big venture capital firm. She says this could reflect the different educational paths men and women follow in high school and college: men, for a variety of reasons, are more likely to pursue computer science and engineering degrees and subsequently rise through start-up or management ranks.

WOMEN now outnumber men at elite colleges, law schools, medical schools and in the overall work force. Yet a stark imbalance of the sexes persists in the high-tech world, where change typically happens at breakneck speed.

And analysts say more than social equity is at stake. A dearth of ideas and participation by women in the technology churn has business consequences as well.

The latest Web start-ups — for socializing, gaming and shopping — often attract more women than men as users. And many products from tech giants are aimed at women. But when Apple unveiled its new mobile computing device, it called it the iPad — a name that made many women wince with visions of feminine hygiene products.

Research indicates that investing in women as tech entrepreneurs is good for the bottom line. Venture-backed start-ups run by women use, on average, 40 percent less capital than start-ups run by men and are increasingly involved in successful initial public offerings of stock, according to a recent white paper by Cindy Padnos, a venture capitalist who compiled data from 100 studies on gender and tech entrepreneurship.

“When you have gender diversity in an organization, you have better innovation, and I don’t know where innovation is more important than in the high-tech world,” says Ms. Padnos, who recently founded Illuminate Ventures, which invests in start-ups led by women.

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Martha Coventry: Making the Cut

Making the Cut: It's a Girl! ... Or is it? When There's Doubt, Why are Surgeons Calling the Shots.
by Martha Coventry
Ms. Magazine

On New Year's Eve, I sit with an acquaintance and talk. We are nearing the end of a long, pleasant evening. My friend, also a writer, leans toward me into the little circle of privacy we've created. "So you mean what happens to African girls?" she asks, after I tell her what I am working on. "No," I say. "I mean what happens to children in the United States." And as I explain the details of the story, she earnestly watches my face, then sits back, stunned. "I am astonished," she says, and I have to agree with her. It is an astonishing story.

The tale begins in England. It is 1858, and the Victorian Age is in full swing. A respected gynecologist named Isaac Baker Brown, who later served as president of the Medical Society of London, has an interesting theory about women: most of their diseases, he believes, can be attributed to over-excitement of the nervous system, and the pudic nerve, which runs into the clitoris, is particularly powerful. When aggravated by habitual stimulation, this nerve puts undue stress on the health of women. He lists what he calls the eight stages of progressive disease triggered by masturbation: first comes hysteria, followed by spinal irritation, hysterical epilepsy, cataleptic fits, epileptic fits, idiocy, mania, and finally, death.

Baker Brown wasn't alone in his focus on "excessive venereal indulgence." A cultural obsession with masturbation had been building since the end of the eighteenth century and would reach its zenith in Britain and the U.S. in the early 1900s. Various methods had been tried for decades to curb the habit in girls and women, including applying caustic substances to the clitoris and vulva to produce a chronic sore, but masturbation continued unabated. Its consequences, believed to be chiefly hysteria and epilepsy, were becoming nearly epidemic in some people's opinion. The cure Baker Brown offered was complete excision of the clitoris with scissors, packing the wound with lint, administering opium via the rectum, and strictly observing the patient. Within a month, the wound usually healed, and according to Baker Brown, intractable women became happy wives; rebellious teenage girls settled back into the bosom of their families; and married women formerly averse to sexual duties became pregnant.

Physicians had been recommending clitoridectomy for masturbation since the writings of ibn Sina, the tenth-century Persian scholar, but it never became a regular procedure. And they had been removing clitorises that were diseased or so large they interfered with intercourse for at least a century before Baker Brown. But what made Baker Brown the "inventor" of the medical clitoridectomy was his sterling reputation, the scale on which he carried out his surgeries, and the fact that he popularized his method in a book called On the Curability of Certain Forms of Insanity, Epilepsy, Catalepsy, and Hysteria in Females.

Eventually Baker Brown fell out of favor with a medical establishment that would have preferred more discretion about women's genitals. But before his fall from grace, Baker Brown influenced U.S. doctors, who were discussing his procedure in medical journals by 1866. It was used off and on for decades to stop masturbation, nymphomania, and hysteria. In 1894, a surgeon reported in the New Orleans Medical and Surgical Journal that he had excised the clitoris of a 2 1/2-year-old to stop her from masturbating and slipping into insanity. He noted that after the operation, she had "grown stouter, more playful, and (had) ceased masturbating entirely." As late as 1937, Holt's Diseases of Infancy and Childhood, a respected medical-school text, stated that the author was "not averse to circumcision in girls or cauterization of the clitoris." A couple of years ago, I spoke with a 66-year-old woman in Michigan who had a secret to tell me: as a 12-year-old in 1944, her parents took her on a car ride that ended at a doctor's office. There, as she sat on the exam table, an attendant clamped an ether-soaked rag over her mouth from behind. When she woke up, her clitoris was gone. "They tried to keep me from masturbating," she said. Then, after a pause, added, "Didn't work."

Toward the middle of the 1950s, just as U.S. medicine seemed to be awakening to the brutality and ineffectiveness of clitoridectomies as a means to control behavior, it found another use for the procedure. This time the rationale was that the operation could be used to make a child whose clitoris appeared bigger than other girls' look "normal," thus helping the child, and everyone around her, feel more comfortable. In 1966, a full century after Baker Brown's clitoridectomies were first discussed in this country, this recommendation appeared in the Journal of Surgery: "Some persons have been reluctant to advocate excision of even the most grotesquely enlarged clitoris. . . . half-way measures are much less satisfactory than complete clitoridectomy." Given this attitude, in 1966, was any girl in the U.S. whose clitoris protruded noticeably beyond her labia at risk of getting it amputated? Yes. Would a girl in the year 2000 still be at risk of losing at least part of her clitoris? Yes.

The rationale for clitoridectomy in Baker Brown's time was straightforwardly terrible, and ridiculously unscientific. By contrast, modern theories seem slightly more humane, but when you get down to it, the same question of gender links the Victorian Age's clitoridectomy to its Dot-Com Age cousin. We have been altering the healthy genitals of our children-—boys as well as girls-—for 135 years so that a girl will look and act like a girl, and a boy will look and act like a boy, according to social norms. The strict division between female and male bodies and behavior is our most cherished and comforting truth. Mess with that bedrock belief, and the ground beneath our feet starts to tremble.

To begin with, we rely on the notion that the bodies of females and males are distinctly different. We imagine a dividing line with penis, scrotum, testicles, testosterone, and XY chromosomes on one side, and clitoris, vagina, uterus, ovaries, estrogen, and XX chromosomes on the other. But were we to look between the legs and into the chemical and chromosomal makeup of real people, we would see that nature often refuses to abide by that tidy division.

Over the past 50 years, medicine has established standards for female and male bodies. Girls, if they want to perceive themselves, or be perceived, as fully "feminine," should have clitorises no longer than about 3/8 inch at birth. Boys, if they hope to grow up "masculine," should have penises that are about one inch in stretched length at birth. (Variation in phallus length can be a sign of an underlying medical problem, but it is also used for nonmedical judgments about "normality.") Girls should have vaginas fit for future intercourse, and boys should have urethral openings at the tip of the penis.

By eight weeks gestation, all external fetal genitals have the potential to develop into what we think of as female or male genitals. The genitals will become female if testosterone, or a hormone that mimics testosterone, does not interfere. If it does, then the clitoris extends to make a penis and the inner labia wrap around the underside of the penis and fuse to form the penile urethra. The outer labia come together to create the scrotum. The process for the internal sexual organs is similar. All fetuses start out with precursors of female and male sex organs. By the third fetal month, if the rudimentary male ducts have not been triggered to mature into testes and vas deferens, they will disappear. The female ducts will then grow and develop into ovaries and a uterus.

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Sue Halpern: Breaking a Conspiracy of Silence

Breaking a Conspiracy of Silence
By Sue Halpern
The New York Review of Books



This past July, a little over a year after the United Nations Security Council finally declared rape a crime of war, the parents of Taraneh Mousavi, a twenty-eight-year-old beautician from Tehran, received a call from an anonymous stranger. The young woman had been missing for weeks, ever since she'd attended a post-election rally at the Ghoba mosque; it was rumored that she was being held by Basiji militiamen. The caller said that Mousavi had had "an accident," and was in the hospital with "tears in her womb and her anus." Mousavi's parents rushed to the place where she was supposed to be, but she wasn't there. They still have not found her—or her body.

UN Resolution 1820 expressly foresaw the situation that Taraneh Mousavi found herself in on June 19, one year to the day of its adoption. " Noting," it says,

...that women and girls are particularly targeted by the use of sexual violence, including as a tactic of war to humiliate, dominate, instill fear in, disperse and/or forcibly relocate civilian members of a community or ethnic group.

There are many ways to define war, just as there are many ways to violate a woman's body.

It would be naive to imagine that a string of tortuously constructed sentences issued by an organization whose own "peacekeepers" have been implicated in the rapes of girls and women in Sierra Leone, Congo, Ivory Coast, Haiti, Cambodia, and Bosnia, among other places, would reverse or forestall a practice that dates back to the Mongols, and likely before them. Indeed, as the playwright Eve Ensler wrote in The Washington Post the day that UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon was supposed to issue a one-year assessment of the resolution, rape in the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo, where girls as young as three are systematically brutalized, has actually doubled and in some areas tripled in that time. As she pointed out, "The girl children born of rape are now being raped."

Ban's report, when it was finally released, was full of recommendations to gather

more and better data to enhance our understanding of the various forms of sexual violence in conflict and its aftermath, including its magnitude, nature and risk factors; the profile and the motivation of perpetrators; the consequences of this violence; and the effectiveness of programmes and prevention strategies.

It urged

State and non-State parties to armed conflicts to ensure that civilian superiors and military commanders use their authority and powers to prevent sexual violence and punish crimes committed by subordinates, failing which they themselves must be punished.

Still, as toothless as all this reads, UN Resolution 1820 was a small step toward ending what Jan Egeland, the former United Nations undersecretary-general for humanitarian affairs, called recently "one of the biggest conspiracies of silence in history."

One party to that conspiracy has been the mainstream media, which, as Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn point out in their stellar new book, Half the Sky: Turning Oppression into Opportunity for Women Worldwide, is what happens when a phenomenon is extensive, entrenched, and so common as to be perpetually old news even while it's happening. The one consistent exception has been Kristof himself, in the column he's written for the Op-Ed page of The New York Times since 2001. On a page where others can be relied on to elevate the conventional wisdom, Kristof earnestly takes up the cause of the poor and oppressed of the world, most of them women, and of those who work on their behalf. For him, it seems, the traditional newsroom dynamic is reversed: the fact that another girl has been denied an education, or sold to a brothel at seven, or raped by the police to whom she was reporting that she had been raped, or left to die because of an obstetric fistula that has left her leaking urine and feces is worthy of comment because it has happened again, and will keep on happening until something—moral outrage, jurisprudence, grace—intervenes. In the meantime, and to press for change, Kristof invites us all to bear witness with him.

It wasn't always like this. As Kristof and WuDunn, who is both his writing partner and his wife, point out, when they were young reporters, newly married and newly posted to China for the Times,

We assumed that the foreign policy issues that properly furrowed the brow were lofty and complex, like nuclear proliferation. It was difficult back then to envision the Council on Foreign Relations fretting about maternal mortality or female genital mutilation. Back then, the oppression of women was a fringe issue, the kind of worthy cause the Girl Scouts might raise money for. We preferred to probe the recondite "serious issues."

Then Tiananmen Square happened, and the recondite was overtaken by the intractable but urgent issue of human rights. (The two reporters won a Pulitzer Prize for their coverage of China.) And then they stumbled upon another, less dramatic human rights story, the widespread practice by Chinese parents of withholding medical treatment for their baby girls, who were, therefore, dying in infancy in statistically anomalous numbers. "Those Chinese girls never received a column inch of news coverage," they write, "and we began to wonder if our journalistic priorities were skewed."

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Ad Freak: '2028' movie is actually teen-pregnancy PSA

Read this Ad Freak report first: '2028' movie is actually teen-pregnancy PSA

JoAnn Wypijewski: Sexual Healing

Sexual Healing: Carnal Knowledge
By JoAnn Wypijewski
The Nation



...

As Rachel Maines demonstrates in her delightfully illuminating history The Technology of Orgasm, making patients out of sexually unsatisfied women was good business. The afflicted would neither die nor be cured but required regular massage treatments, weekly, sometimes daily, for an hour or even three. By one 1863 estimate, such therapies accounted for three-quarters of physicians' business, but doctors seem to have got no pleasure out of diddling women. It was, Maines says, "the job nobody wanted." And bringing women off was work, abstracted from sex (i.e., the robust progression from male hard-on to vaginal penetration to male orgasm) and requiring time and skill. With the vibrator, doctors' productivity exploded, as sixty-minute visits shrank to ten, raising more revenue from more patients per day, until the device became so popular and multipurpose (Sears marketed a home vibrator with attachments for beating eggs, churning butter, operating a fan) that the medical profession had worked itself out of a job. Miraculously, the sick were healed as soon as the first vibrator popped up in porno in the 1920s.

Leap across the decades, and this quaint history appears positively progressive in that, willy-nilly, medicalization marched toward putting sexuality into women's hands, into their heads in terms of body knowledge, and into the mix of culture, personal relations and a polymorphous physicality more true to life than biological function alone. The white coats came out again with Masters and Johnson but bumped into a counterculture and an emancipation movement that pushed against their categorizations of normal or not. Every 1970s woman might not have gone to one of Betty Dodson's masturbation workshops; every man certainly was not reborn as an attentive, exploring lover. But nor was everyone straight, in all senses of the word, and the fluidity of sexuality as part of the great mishmash of human experience was in the air-conditioning system of the culture. It was sexual but political, too. Today the cultural air is thick with sex, but the rhetoric of freedom and rights largely serves a commodified notion of sexual satisfaction. The politics has dropped out, and without politics we're all just patients, or potential patients.

How else to explain that a reality as old as god--that the vast majority of women do not climax simply through intercourse--has re-emerged as dysfunction? Or that another grab bag of indicators of dissatisfaction and low desire are renamed as symptoms of hypoactive sexual desire disorder, for which a female Viagra or a testosterone patch or cream or nasal spray must be developed? How to explain that middle-aged women go under the knife for vaginal rejuvenation, basically pussy tightening, and that young women go under the knife for laser labiaplasty, basically genital mutilation, saying they only want to feel pretty, normal, and raise their chances of orgasm through intercourse? How to explain that a doctor like Stuart Meloy of North Carolina, a throwback to charlatans who tried to shock hysterics into health with electric charges, has even one patient to test his Orgasmatron, an electrode threaded up a woman's spinal cord and controlled by a hand-held button that the patient can push (assuming the procedure doesn't paralyze her) to make her clit throb with excitement during intercourse and reach the grail of mutually assured orgasm?

A terrific new documentary, Orgasm Inc., by Liz Canner, addresses those questions in terms of corporate medicine and the creation of need via pseudofeminist incitements to full sexual mastery by Dr. Laura Berman and other shills for the drug industry. Female sexual dysfunction, it turns out, was wholly created by drug companies hoping to make even bigger money off women than they have off men with the comparatively smaller market for erectile dysfunction drugs. That's capitalism; that's its nature. The more obstinate question is why so many people are willing to be its slaves, and whether a resistant politics can grow up to say not just "We want in" to healthcare but "We want out" of the profit system and, on the sex front, out of a medical model that elevates a doctor over "playing doctor" or a more sensual ease with oneself and others.

"So many times I don't think sex is a matter of health," Dr. Leonore Tiefer, a sex therapist and founder of the New View Campaign to challenge the medicalization of sex, told me the other day. "I think it's more like dancing or cooking. Yes, you do it with your body. You dance with your body, too. That doesn't mean there's a department of dance in the medical school. You don't go to the doctor to learn to dance. And in dancing school the waltz class is no more normal than the samba class." You might not be a good dancer by some scale of values. You might not get the steps right, or do steps at all, but even in wheelchairs people learn to move to the music.

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Counterspin: Mark Cook on Honduras; Diana Duarte on "Saving the World's Women"

Counterspin

Mark Cook on Honduras

The media lie that will not die about the Honduras coup is that ousted president Manuel Zelaya was attempting to change the Honduran constitution in order to extend his time in office. But there is nothing new about this current set up; the same lie was used 45 years ago to remove another democratically elected president from office. Journalist Mark Cook has written about the eerie parallels in the September issue of FAIR's magazine Extra!. We'll talk to Mark Cook about his piece and the latest on Honduras.

Diana Duarte on "Saving the World's Women"

'Saving the World's Women' was the theme of a recent special issue of the New York Times magazine. The centerpiece was an article co-written by Times columnist Nicholas Kristof. While the focus on supporting women in the developing world might be laudable, what are the blindspots in Kristof's analysis? We'll talk to Diana Duarte of MADRE.

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