women's health

In honor of National Breast Cancer Awareness month, the porn site Pornhub.com is promising to donate money for every 30 “boob videos” viewed on its website during October. Perhaps the most craven example of pinkwashing yet, a visit to Pornhub.com reveals that the site's logo has been decked out with Pepto-Bismol pink and adorned with a breast-cancer awareness ribbon. Below a call to “Help Save the Boobs!” a pink “boob views” counter records the number of times videos tagged as “small tits” or “big tits” have been viewed on the site. (Below that, there is an ad for “squirting” videos. Thankfully, it hasn't been pinkwashed.)

There’s just one catch to Pornhub’s plan: After announcing its intentions to donate the money to the Susan G. Komen Foundation, the research stalwart unequivocally told Pornhub to keep their dirty money to themselves.

This conception of empiricism—what it means to do “good,” “reliable,” and “valid” science—constrains what work can be done in the future. The exclusions “necessitated” by these models of research aren’t an accident either—broadly speaking, the conception of rationalism underpinning the Scientific Revolution and the Enlightenment came out of white, Western, bourgeois and aristocratic thought. Also, the scientific and social scientific paradigm that reigns in university research (and in much of the private, state-sanctioned research programs) says that many types of studies require a certain-sized subject population in order to claim statistical validity. So studies about, say, queer people or trans people, or queer trans people, are often thwarted by the comparatively smaller numbers of folks who a) feel comfortable being out to a group of strangers in a clinical environment, b) feel comfortable exploring potentially sensitive issues in the context of their unequal status as a research subject, c) even believe in this type of research, and d) are targeted by researchers’ advertisements or happen to see such adverts.

While I never thought I'd be declaring someone who doesn't like Bart Stupak anything but a friend, Randy Neugebauer's "baby killer" accusation this Monday on the House floor to Stupak earns him a raging douchebag award, which he gets to share with Senators Stupak and Nelson, and the Tea Party brigade.

Natural disasters are gendered, with women facing aid discrepancies at every step of the recovery process. Particularly in areas that are already impoverished, there are simply fewer opportunities to rebuild after a disaster. If women are already largely shut out of the more lucrative jobs, this continues the cycle of poverty. Women are often the ones overburdened with domestic responsibilities and largely responsible for caring for children and the elderly, which is also exacerbated by catastrophe. Often overlooked are reports of sexual violence following a disaster, but much like rape and sexual torture are weapons of war, they are also employed in the aftermath of disasters, connected with looting and other violent crime that rises during such unrest.

A landmark federal bill aiming to put $3 million into research and education about postpartum depression is gathering controversy as it heads to the Senate floor. Advocates of the Melanie Blocker-Stokes Postpartum Depression Research and Care Act (known as the Mother's Act) say it will save the lives of women and finally help develop decent education about a long-dismissed female health problem. Critics say it will cause more women to take pharmaceuticals unnecessarily. But recently the big debate has been not so much about the bill itself as media coverage of the bill.

Last week, Time ran an article about the Mother's Act which featured an interview with a mother who was prescribed Zoloft after giving birth. The drug made things worse, causing her to have violent fantasies.

Time's story ignited the ire of many who argue that the article intentionally left out pro-Mothers Act voices to push an editorial agenda. Keep reading for more details!

Well it's about damn time! Though physicians and therapists (not just Dan Savage, we're talking mainstream doctors) have been known for decades that vibrator use can be great for sexual health, there's never been a scientific study to back up the common knowledge. Until now!

Trojan funded a national research project to determine the extent and impact of vibrator use and la-di-da, look what they found: not only do a majority of American women use vibrators, they're happier for it!

According to the surveys of 2,056 women and 1,047 men ages 18-60, a whopping 53 percent of women (and 45 percent of men) say they use a vibrator - a quarter of those in the last month. Women who use vibrators were more likely to say they were sexually happy and more likely to get gynecological exams.

Whenever you're feeling down about the grim economy, stop and consider for a moment that your ovaries are tiny goldmines. Over 5,000 American babies each year are born from eggs "donated" to in vitro fertilization clinics or couples -- but in reality, those eggs are rarely donated. Instead, as you've probably gleaned from the backpage ads of alt-weeklies, some families are willing to pay big money for egg donors. The average payment for a US egg donor, according to researcher Harvard researcher Deborah Spar, is $5,000.

But strangely, until now, it has been illegal to pay women who give eggs for research rather than reproduction. This month New York state okayed cutting checks to women who undergo (often difficult) weeks of hormone treatment to donate eggs for stem cell research.

The state expects a backlash and it's getting some from bioethics and religious groups. But the legal change raises the question of whether it's okay to pay women for their eggs at all - and if so, why have different rules for research eggs and babymaking eggs? Make babies, make money!

There is not much we can agree on as a nation, but if there’s one thing we every American should be able to declare a common enemy, it’s cancer. Right? Sometimes we’re allies with Afghanistan, sometimes we let North Korea slide but we, as modern intelligent Americans, will never defend that old varmint cancer. So then why are some true-blooded American politicians getting on their soapboxes to kill legislation that could help kill cancer? The way some politicos are spinning it, female sexuality is a greater risk to our nation than cancers that kill 3,700 American women every year. The HPV vaccine shouldn’t be controversial – it prevents 90 percent of those types of deadly cancers in women. But as the HPV vaccine snags headlines recently thanks to new research showing it's more effective than previously thought, conservative leaders are seizing the spotlight to swap morality for science and make sexually-active women the threat, rather than our arch-nemesis cancer.

"Forty-three per cent of American women suffer from female sexual dysfunction. Or do they?" Is "female sexual dysfunction" a real disease? Or is it just a marketing ploy invented by Big Pharma in hopes of profiting from "female Viagra"? These are the questions documentary filmmaker Liz Canner set out to answer in Orgasm, Inc.

One of the great things about the intersection of new media and feminism is that we (consumers and creators of media) are able to learn more about the efforts to improve women's lives and have unprecedented accessibility AND ability to assist organizations in need. As the holiday season continues, let your spirit of giving continue to support initiatives like the New Orleans Women's Health Clinic.