Lybrel more of a marketing tactic than a novel idea (pills without periods not exactly new)

ABC News:As 21st century women dominate the universities and continue to climb the executive ladder, and metro-sexual men explore their feminine side, it’s harder to define what it means to be a woman

In the mildly frustrating category of the week … why is everyone so up in arms about this “new” birth control that allows women to not have periods at all? Doctors have been telling women to just take their regular birth control continuously (skipping the placebo sugar pill week) in order to avoid periods all together for years now. Seasonale, the pill that allows women to only have 4 periods a year when taking it regularly, has been out since 2003. The fact that this new pill, Lybrel, is touting itself as the birth control pill that allows women to skip periods entirely is more of a marketing ploy than some sort of grand scientific or cultural development; the regular old pill has been doing the same thing for years.

What’s funny is that “The Pill” — in it’s earliest form, in it’s iconic 1960s incarnation — could have been just like Lybrel, more or less. The earliest versions of the pill did, in fact, halt menstruation. But somewhere along the line pharmaceutical companies decided that giving women a pill that would stop their periods all together would be too radical, too unsettling, for most of their consumer market, so they created the whole one-week-dummy-pill system to make it seem more “normal” and “natural.” Notes the Washington Post:

The birth control pill was originally developed to mimic a normal cycle in the belief that women would find it more acceptable, not because it would be safer or more effective at preventing pregnancy.

More about the particulars of all this here.

So people back in the day, worried by the kind of moral outrage the Pill would provoke over lost fertility and womanhood, etc. etc., decided to keep periods as part of the pill, assuming America wasn’t ready for the other version. What’s amazing is that, more than 40 years later, a period-free pill is STILL provoking this kind of moral outrage about “lost” fertility and womanhood, what with Leslee Unruh out there screaming about this pill being a “pesticide” that’s somehow part of an evil NARAL and “big Pharma” conspiracy plot to make women hate babies; ABC news worried that, without the little ladies bleeding every 28 days, our society will suddenly lose the ability to differentiate between men & women (hint: it has something to do with penises and vaginas, yo. And maybe differential amounts of body hair); and Eugene Volokh imagining ridiculous scenarios where every month, we gals call all our friends a la the telephone scene in Bye Bye Birdie to share the news that we’re once again shedding the lining of our uteruses (What the story? Morning Glory? Called to tell you that I’m on the rag.).

I suppose this sort of crazy is not entirely surprising, though, considering that it still seems hard to get it through certain conservatives’ heads that birth control does not cause abortion (quite the opposite, really), nor does it represent a complete rejection of having children, as Unruh seems to think (in the Think Progress article, a NARAL spokeswoman notes that 98 percent of American women will use some form of contraception in their lives, and we’ve yet to see the USA become a land of childless harpies, so…).

Ann at Feministing wonders how the tampon companies will react to Lybrel. I kind of hope the tampon companies are the ones behind all this lost-womanhood-we-love-babies-gender-bending nonsense. A stealth, Bernays-like advertising campaign by the feminine-hygeine-products cabal would make a lot more sense than people actually believing this crap …

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potato, potahto: I say homobigotry, you say quality control

I don’t understand this kerfluffle over these ads. The ads, for online-dating-service startup Chemistry.com, feature a gaggle of attractive young people who were allegedly rejected from another online dating site, eHarmony.com. eHarmony is all riled up and asking media outlets to stop running the ads, which they feel make the site appear discriminatory and racist. Some friends of mine tried to argue the other day that this is true, because this ad features a black man:

I think that’s just ridiculous. I suppose there is a chance that racism could be inferred, but the ad does nothing to connote this in any way, and the site also runs about six other ads with white people, including this one:

In fact, the only ad that implies eHarmony is being outright discriminatory is this “still gay” ad:

.. which eHarmony hardly has any right to complain about, considering the site openly has a hetero-only policy. As noted by Pam at Pandagon, apprarently the site (which gives extensive compatability tests to mate-seekers) thinks “gay folks don’t have ’29 dimensions of compatibility’ that hets do.”

A private dating service can come up with whatever criteria it wants to decide who can join — their are all sorts of services dedicated exclusively to various things, like a certain religion or people over a certain age, etc. These measures are well within a site’s prerogative, and many probably help narrow the dating pool for members. If eHarmony wants to exclude gay people or muliple-divorcees (which it also does) or left-handed people or blonds or people with funny birthmarks, that’s fine. It’s just, well .. one can hardly be discriminatory against gays and then pissed when called out about it (I mean, one can, one just doesn’t really have a valid claim to).

Besides, for all the people eHarmony might turn off with its policies, it will attract those like this person, who believe rejecting gays and divorcees is a “quality control” issue.

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confusing skeezy with predatory

I just read old article in Columbia Journalism Review about Dateline’s “To Catch a Predator.” Douglas McCollam casts a skeptical glance at whether “sting” shows like this are really a “public good” or a modern approximation of the gallows, and makes a compelling case for the latter, with which I am prone to degree.

The article contains IM transcripts from some of the “predator”-baiting that took place — alleged 13 and 14 year old girls enticing men into meeting up with them. Not that grown men who agree to meet up for sex with a 14-year old are ever completely blame free, but it seems like in many of these cases the men may have been the harmless internet perv sort who never would’ve acted on their desires had they not been provoked.

Also, in two of the cases detailed, the men are 20 and 21. I remember being a young teenager (13, 14, 15) and having guys in their late teens or early 20s (18, 19, 20) trying to hang out with me and people my age. These were mostly loser-ish guys in tommy hilfiger shirts and scumstaches who hung out at local fourth-of-july festivals and hit on young teens because they couldn’t get a woman their own age to look at them. It was less pedophilia, more desperation and power trip (and, for the record, they often hung out with 14 and 15 and 16 year old boys as friends, too, instead of having friends their own ages). So in cases like these (21 year olds hitting on 14 year olds), I think it’s often probably less about being turned on by little girls and more about not being able to meet grown women.

McCollam is sure to point out that he is not exonerating the actions of men who chat up young teens in chat rooms. But are they “dangerous predators?” Some, yeah, sure, possibly. But many of them, hardly. And Dateline’s whole public penance, scheudenfreude-laden, moral panic hoopla of a show is just disgusting.

Elizabeth Wood at Sex in the Public Square (which I think is my new favorite blog, p.s.) points out that shows like To Catch a Predator are designed to unite the “good” against the “bad” a la Stanley Cohen’s “folk devils” concept.

I think we’re in the midst of a moral panic around sexuality. In our current situation, the folk devil is the sexual predator, (and by association, any “sexual deviant”) and these folk devils are useful for at least a couple of other purposes, aside from generating solidarity-through-exclusion.

1. We can use the sexual predator’s behavior, and our exposing of it, as a way to indulge in the sexuality of children without admitting to any actual interest in that sexuality.

2. We can direct attention away from real, likely, sources of harm that are hard to face and instead focus on those “bad guys” that we can lock up.

But, while indulging these two desires, we hurt ourselves in serious ways.

1. We fail to truly protect children from abuse. A majority of sexual assault cases involve parties that already know each other. The stranger/sexual predator is the exception, not the rule.

2. We generate so much hostility toward the sex criminal that we hamper our effectiveness in dealing with them.

In other words, our fear of sexual predators and the moral panic around protecting children from all things sexual makes it easier to ban the sale of vibrators, support the sale of guns, and lock people up for consensual sex, all while actually reducing our ability to actually deal with sexual violence.

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Ann Coulter is a crazy bitch

The great folks at Slate wrote an interesting article about batshit crazy conservative pin-up Ann Coulter today, mostly in response to her latest hoof-in-mouth gaffe, wherein she called John Edwards a faggot. The Slate article proffered a collection of choice Coulter quotes from over the years, and I looked up a few more. Remember, if you keep laughing she can’t hurt you. And I’m pretty sure she can’t be exposed to daylight, either, should it come to that. Enjoy:

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But Mommy, what about the others?

So yes, I’ll admit it. I am not an Obama flag waving 20 something. Nor am I a bra burning Hillary addict. They are both way to liberal for my small pocketbook and both like to infringe on my ever decreasing personal rights.
But yes, Mom, what about the others? Two major news makers and not much for the others. I’ll be honest here, I have hadn’t the proper time to indulge in presidential election. The bit I’ve done, I kinda like Bill Richardson. He has the experience and seems a little less far leaning. Plus, he’ll be the first Hispanic president! (sarcasm should be noted).

I’m just hoping for the day pre-elections campaigns will be announced before the results.

Aw shucks.

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In a post-9/11 world …. long-haired freaky people need not apply

Thing I love, love, love this week (along with everyone else, I know): the Boston Lite-Brite Terrorists 70s-Hair Press Interview. My favorite part is when some reporter shouts out, “Why don’t you get a hair cut?” It’s a nice throwback touch.

Most annoying part of all of this: In a post -9/11 world….”. It’s the quote-de-rigeur for any administration official talking about the incident. I think that phrase should be banned from existence. Unless it ends with .. we’re not any less retarded than in the pre-9/11 world!”

Radley Balko on the “hoax”:

I don’t blame Boston officials for initially being suspicious of the devices, though one would hope our paid homeland security experts can by now distinguish a bomb from an LED device shaped in the figure of a cartoon character without first shutting down major thoroughfares. The shame comes in what happened after they realized their mistake — in their refusal to admit it was a mistake, and in their scapegoating Turner Broadcasting, Aqua Teen Hunger Force, and the artists for their own rash and ill-considered decision to close down the city. You guys screwed up. Quit calling this a “hoax.” It was a marketing gimmick. No one meant any harm. Stop the prison and punishment talk. Own up to your mistake and move on

The whole thing reminds me of an incident that happened at my college a few years ago, only on a much smaller level. A kid parked his bike in front of one of the campus eating establishments. The bike had a bumper-sticker on the back of it advertising for the band This Bike is a Pipe Bomb. A cop sees the bike, ropes off the area, and then half the campus ends up being shut-down for part of the day, while the Athens bomb squad DESTROYS the bike. All the while, the kid who owned the bike is there, telling them that it’s just a sticker, that it’s advertising for a band, etc., etc. The kid gets charged with inducing panic, although the charges are dropped a few days later and, surprisingly, the kid actually gets awarded damages for the destruction of his bike.

I know it’s better to air on the side of caution where bombs are concerned and whatnot, but you’d think that maybe, i don’t know, while the police are roping off the area and the kid is insisting it’s just a bumper sticker, they could have called back to their office and had someone do a quick google search to, you know, see if such a band exists and if they sell bumper stickers similar to the one this kid had, and that would’ve been that, before Totally Overreacting. Same for the folks up in boston.

{if you haven’t seen the press conference, it’s here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zx2ytr2Oyv4}

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celebrities are sometimes racist, sexist, homobigoted people, too. get over it.

I don’t understand the media frenzy over Isaiah Washington gay-bashing co-worker TR Knight, mostly because I don’t understand we expect celebrities to live up to a higher standard than everyone else.

You could make the argument that celebrities, by virtue of being in the public eye, are inherently supposed to be role models (an argument which I would reject), but even if that’s true, that would only account for what their behavior is like when they’re in the public eye. Washington didn’t call his co-worker a faggot in a national magazine, on a TV interview, in a public place … he said it on the closed set of their TV show. Which doesn’t excuse it. It just means … well, it’s really none of the rest of our business. A friend made the argument last night that it probably didn’t contribute to a good working environment for the cast — well, sure. But that’s kind of the show’s producer’s thing to worry about, isn’t it? I mean, if they want to fire Washington, fine. That could be a reasonable course of action. But why does everyone feel like that’s the general public’s decision to make at all?

People do not necessarily become good people just by virtue of being a celebrity. Just as their are homobigoted office managers and policemen and school teachers and scientists and grocery store clerks out there, some celebrities are probably going to be racist or sexist or intolerant, too. Do we really all expect them to be paragons of tolerance just because they’re on TV?

And then there’s everyone’s reaction to his repeating the word faggot at an awards ceremony last week.

“No, I did not call (co-star) T.R. (Knight) a faggot,” Washington told reporters. “Never happened, never happened.”

This is, according to other cast members, patently untrue. So, okay, find fault with him for lying. But people seem to be finding fault with him for the public use of the word faggot. My friend argued last night that it was completely inexcusable for him to repeat the word, especially at the golden globes ceremony (hallowed ground, apparently). Um, what was he supposed to say? “The F-word?” (I think that implies something else).

Via Julian Sanchez, a Texas mayor proposes a ban that would make using the word nigger illegal and punishable by fine, no matter in what context the word is used.

Says Mayor Corley: “The word is not used or abused in the streets of our town; it’s more, amongst the black community, as a term of endearment, OK? … But it is a national issue, and I would like the city of Brazoria to take a leadership role throughout the nation in banning the use of this word.”

… ugh. words are not just, like, these completely object things with unilateral intent and meaning. they derive their power and meaning from context.

So back to Washington, I’m not saying that what he said is excusable, or that he wasn’t wrong, or that people shouldn’t be offended by his intolerance, or feel negatively about Washington now. I just don’t understand why everyone is always so SHOCKED when a celebrity acts in an intolerant way. Especially when we don’t hold are politicians to the same standard ….

Making celebrity bad behavior into a media frenzy like this doesn’t really serve any purpose, as far as I can see, except to have celebrities then go on a disingenuous apology tour while the initial offense gets repeated over and over and over …. the same magazines chastising Washington for his repeated use of the word in his denial of ever using it are now positively bursting with faggot headlines …

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