Category Archives: Feminism

Big Pharma At It Again: Disease Mongering for Profit

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big pharma

As shameless as ever, Big Pharma is aggressively medicalizing the problems of living as they pursue obscene profits. Their latest disease mongering campaign, promoting the drug Flibanserin, is aimed at women. Like cancer causing Premarin, hyped for its ability to slow aging, and Sarafem (recently linked to birth defects), hyped for its effectiveness in industry-created “premenstrual dysphoric disorder”.

Originally developed by Boehringer Ingelheim, this new drug has been acquired by Sprout Pharmaceuticals, a company launched in 2011 to develop products for female sexual health (i.e. to cash in on the $1.5 billion Viagra market). It allegedly treats “low sexual arousal disorder” in women.

Taken Everyday, Potentially for Years

Last week the Telegraph reported that two key FDA advisory committees are recommending approval of Flibanserin, also known as “pink Viagra.” Despite its nickname, Flibanserin is nothing like Viagra. While a man only takes Viagra when he wants to have sex, Flibanserin is more like an antidepressant and must be taken everyday, potentially for years.

Pink Viagra works by combining a Viagra-like chemical that stimulates blood flow to the genitals with a small dose of testosterone, which stimulates sex drive in women. According to the Guardian, early clinical trials indicate the drug is only slightly more effective than placebo. On average, women taking the drug have 0.8 more “satisfying sexual events” per month. Flibanserin also has some pretty nasty side effects, including dizziness, sleepiness, fainting, nausea, fatigue and insomnia. The other downside is that the drug’s concentration (and side effects) increase if the woman drinks alcohol, or takes birth control pills or medications for vaginal infections, migraine or depression.

Sex, Lies and Pharmaceuticals

The Telegraph article quotes journalist Ray Moynihan, author of Sex, Lies and Pharmaceuticals, who describes female sexual dysfunction as a clear example of “corporate-sponsored creation of a disease.” And gynecologist Dr Sandy Goldbeck-Wood, who points out that low sexual desire, especially in women, is intricately linked to a person’s life and relationships. If a woman is depressed or stressed out from looking after kids and/or aging parents on top of her double role as breadwinner and homemaker, she’s very unlikely to be interested in sex – especially if her partner is unsympathetic and unsupportive.

Writing in the Daily Mail, psychologist and sex researcher Dr Petra Boynton complains that the corporate media promotes highly unrealistic expectations of sex (lots of it with mind-blowing multiple orgasms), just as they do about women’s appearance (thin, young-looking, with perfect faces and breasts).

My Own Clinical Experience

I totally agree with Boynton and Goldbeck-Wood. When I worked with women in Seattle, low sexual desire nearly always stemmed from unresolved relationship issues. Often when women felt totally dominated and controlled by their partner, saying no in the bedroom was their only opportunity to assert themselves. Other women complained they got nothing out of sex because their partner couldn’t or wouldn’t address their sexual needs.

Population studies suggest that approximately 50% of women require direct stimulation because they don’t climax through vaginal intercourse. The scientific literature is silent on the unwillingness of men to engage in oral sex. However based on what I read in social media, I suspect it remains a significant source of conflict among couples.

Astroturfing* Flibanseerin

Typically Big Pharma has created two Astroturf* groups, Eventhe Score and WomenDeserve. Both have accused the FDA of sexism for their reluctance to approve Flibanserin. According to the Daily Mail, EventheScore is claiming a biological lack of sexual desire negatively impacts 1 in 10 American women. This is pure corporate hype, as there is no biological marker or threshold for abnormally low desire.

My biggest concern is that FDA approval will lead to women being pressured to take a drug with potentially serious side effects – either by their partner or by the same phoney media marketing that induces them to spend millions of dollars on cosmetics, weight loss products and plastic surgery. In contemporary society, full equality and full control over their own bodies is still a long way off for most women.

 

* Astrotrufing is the creation of apparent public support by corporations who pay people or groups to pretend to be supportive. This false support can take the form of letters to the editor, postings on social media lobbying politicians in support of the cause.

photo credit: Prescription Prices Ver5 via photopin (license)

The Taboo Topic of Overpopulation

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The Mother: Caring for 7 Billion

Christophe Forchere (2011)

As the title suggests, The Mother is about the taboo topic of global overpopulation and its role in serious environmental degradation and growing food and water shortages. The film maintains that our refusal to discuss the population issue leads to confusion and oversimplification. Based on our success in halving population growth over the last fifty years, policy makers make out the problem is solved and there’s no need to discuss it any longer. This complacency can be very dangerous, especially as various countries, worried about supporting a large aged population, start bribing women to have more babies.

According to the filmmakers, population pressures play out differently in developed and developing countries. In developed countries overconsumption compounds the impact of population growth on fragile ecosystems and increasingly scarce resources. This overconsumption is largely driven by artificially created consumer demand orchestrated by a political/economic system obsessed with continuous economic growth. In the US, especially, population pressures (eg media pressure on women to have babies) are an important driver of consumer demand and economic growth

When you include immigration, the US is the third fastest growing country in the world. Rapid population growth is a major culprit in continuing joblessness in the US. The economy would need to add 150,000 jobs per month just to keep up with their growing population, yet clearly falls short of this number.

In the developing world, overpopulation plays an important role in malnutrition, starvation deaths and epidemic disease levels. Here, the film asserts, the number one cause of excess population growth is male dominance over women. In many developing countries, poverty leads families to marry off their daughters as young as nine or ten, while patriarchal fundamentalist religions forbid them from using birth control.

For me the high point of the film was a section on the Population Media Center, which works to empower Ethiopian women and improve their access to education and contraception. Their most effective strategy has been to create radio soap operas with charismatic female characters who serve as role models for young women.

One study revels these programs increased the use of contraception by 150% in a single year. They also gave teenage girls confidence to stay in school rather than following family dictates to marry older men. Research consistently shows that educating girls postpones them marrying and having children, keeps them HIV negative and causes them to have fewer children.

The film also stresses the importance of microfinance in empowering women – and communities – as women are more likely than men to invest their profits in their communities. Globally only 1% of women are able to obtain loans from traditional banks.

*Microfinance is the provision of savings accounts, loans, insurance, money transfers and other banking services (usually by non-profit organizations) to customers that lack access to traditional banks. Traditional microlending models gear these services towards women in developing countries.

Miss Representation

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Miss Represention

Jennifer Siebel Newsom (2011)

Film Review

Miss Representation takes an in-depth look at sexualization of women and girls by the corporate media. In addition to examining the psychological damage this inflicts, the film explores the largely commercial factors behind it, as well as potential solutions.

The primary role of American media (TV programming and ads, movies, music videos, billboards, etc) is to convince women that their personal appearance and the approval of men should be their number one priority.

Even more pernicious, the media project a totally unattainable standard of beauty. What makes this messaging particularly harmful is that girls and women incorporate it subconsciously without realizing it. It’s especially dangerous for the developing brains of teenagers, who lack the critical judgment skills to weigh what they see and hear. By age 17, 78% of girls are unhappy with their bodies. Even more ominous, 68% of American women and girls develop an eating disorder in their determination to be skinnier.

The effect of this messaging on men and boys is to condition them to value a woman’s appearance above intelligence, integrity and other personal characteristics.

TV’s Fixation with Youth

Although women forty and over represent 44% of the population, they only play 26% of TV roles. Being youthful isn’t enough for female TV celebrities – who are frequently pressured to lose weight or undergo breast enhancement and/or botox and collagen injections.

The film outlines three principle reasons for the entertainment industry’s one dimensional portrayal of women. The pressure to live up to an impossible ideal is incredibly effective in selling beauty products. American women spend millions of dollars yearly on cosmetics and plastic surgery, far more than they spend on education.

The media’s constant parade of stunning, sexually provocative bodies is also essential in luring men aged 18-34 (the demographic targeted by advertisers) into watching TV. Men this age tend not to watch TV, except for sports.

Finally nearly all the decision makers in the entertainment industry are men. At Walt Disney, only 4 out of 13 board members are women. At GE (which runs NBC), the ration is 4/17. At Time Warner, it’s 2/13, Viacom 2/11, CBS 2/14 and Fox 1/16. Only 16% of movie and TV directors, producers and editors are women and only 7% of screenwriters

Low Representation in Government

The objectification of women by the mass media discourages them from playing leadership roles in business, community affairs, academia and politics. The US is rapidly falling behind developing countries in this regard. Unlike the US, 67 other countries have elected female presidents and prime ministers, and the US is 90th in female representation in government. China, Cuba, Afghanistan and Iraq all have more female representatives in their national legislatures.

Two direct outcomes of this low representation are unequal pay (American women still only earn 77% of what men earn for comparable work) and the failure of the US to mandate parental leave (like all other industrialized countries) following childbirth.

Even more ominously, numerous studies link the media’s objectification of women with growing rates of domestic violence and sexual assault.

The Negative Effect on Men

Miss Representation also speaks briefly to the negative effect of this systematic gender distortion on men. Bombarded by constant media pressure to be smarter, more powerful and more respected than women – as well as making more money – men can find it difficult to cope when this fails to pan out real life. This psychological conditioning also causes young men to be “emotionally constipated.” Lacking realistic no role models, men can have a hard time learning to express emotions in a healthy way.

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Sext Up Kids

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Sext Up Kids: How Growing Up in a Hyper Sexualized Culture Hurts Our kids

Doc Zone (CBC) 2012

Film Review

The ubiquitous sexualization of children in the mass media is having devastating effects on our adolescents. Sext Up Kids interviews a range of experts, including teachers, psychologists and teen sex bloggers. They all agree that pop culture has become a virtual porn culture, with the increasing prevalence of sexually provocative teen and pre-teen (as young as 9) girls in advertising, music videos and movies.

Teenage girls seem to bear the brunt of the psychological damage. They feel immense pressure to copy the sexualized image of their teen idols, at risk of being unpopular or socially excluded if they don’t. The pressure is aggravated by boys, who are also constantly exposed to the same soft porn and call them sexually abusive names if they don’t measure up.

With boys as young as five accessing hard porn on the Internet, there’s also intense pressure for girls thirteen and up to engage in sexual activity. Because boys base their sexual expectations on male-dominated pornography, intercourse is frequently painful because the girls do it without being aroused or lubricated.

Pressure for girls to engage in oral (fellatio) and anal sex is also intense. Teenage boys expect it because they see it on-line. In one study by an Atlanta psychologist, 22% of teenage girls reported having anal sex in the past sixty days.

Sext Up Kids also covers the controversial topic of sexting, sending sexual explicit texts and selfies. Sexting can have extremely painful consequences for both girls and boys, especially aggravated sexting, a form of bullying in which the naked photos a girls sends her boyfriend are forwarded and go viral.

Apparently girls succumb to their boyfriends’ requests for nude selfies out of fear boys won’t like them if they don’t flaunt and promote themselves. While increasingly boys run the risk of being charged with sex crimes for possessing pornographic photos of girls under eighteen.

The documentary concludes with a plea to parents, urging them to talk to their teenagers about their sexual choices. Experts agree this is the best way support them in resisting pressure to be sexual before they’re emotionally and psychologically ready.

The New Rape Culture

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Blurred Lines: The New Battle of the Sexes

BBC (2014)

Film Review

Blurred Lines is about the new misogyny, which makes it socially acceptable to be sexually offensive to women.

BBC reporter Kirsty Wark makes a clear distinction between sexism, which she sees as an irrational bias against women’s equality, and misogyny, which is the dislike and deliberate denigration of women.

She focuses on four main manifestations of so-called “rape culture”: in stand-up comedy, social media, on-line gaming and adolescent male-female interactions.

The Year of the Rape Joke

2012 was known as the Year of the Rape Joke at the Edinburgh Festival. Several men Wark interviews argue strenuously that casual talk about rape is perfectly acceptable so long as it’s done in a humorous or ironic way. Others disagree. She talks to a psychologist who has studied the effect of sexual assault jokes on male behavior. His research shows that rape jokes validates the sexist views of men with underlying resentment towards women. After listening to jokes about sexual assault, they are more likely to oppose women’s equality in politics, in the workplace and in the home.

Misogynistic Social Media

Blurred Lines also examines several high profile incidents in which prominent females were subjected to vicious, graphic sexual slurs and rape threats on social media. The most highly publicized involved Caroline Criado-Perez, who received around 50 abusive tweets an hour for a 12-hour period after successfully campaigning for Jane Austen to appear on the ten pound note.

Misogyny is also extremely common in on-line gaming. Grand Theft Auto, the most popular on-line game of all times, is a classic example. It provides for players to score points by paying prostitutes and then mugging or killing them to get their money back. Meanwhile women gamers are frequently bombarded with sexually dismissive language and rape threats once male players discover they are female.

Recently Anita Sarkeesian, a Canadian media critic, tried to crowdfund a study on women’s roles in on-line games. The reaction she got was a barrage with graphically violent rape threats, in addition to having her crowdfunding site hacked and shut down. What was even more remarkable was that many of threat threats weren’t anonymous, as they were linked with Facebook pages.

Male Anger Towards Women

Wark, explores where this intense anger comes from by interviewing Australian feminist Germaine Greer, who shocked the world by discussing men’s unconscious hostility towards women in the Female Eunuch (1970). Greer maintains that many men still view a women’s position in family and society as subordinate. Thus they feel threatened by women assuming previously male roles.

Martin Daubney, editor of the British men’s magazine Loaded, has a somewhat different take. He blames the anger on extreme role confusion, especially among young men who have no jobs or clearly defined gender roles and see women passing them by.

The Role of Pornography on the Adolescent Brain

The documentary ends by examining the extremely violent on-line pornography teenage boys consume and whether this has an effect on their developing sexuality. According to the young women Wark interviews it does. They feel on-line pornography leads teenage boys to demand sex in the male-dominant way pornography portrays it. It also causes them to feel threatened and dismissive towards women who express sexual needs.

Another, more pernicious effect of ubiquitous on-line pornography, humor that makes light of sexual assault and the constant objectification of women in advertising is confusion about consent. This ranges from inappropriate groping at parties to gang rape which is posted to Facebook or live tweeted on Twitter.

Jay Leno Defends Women Alleging Sexual Assault Against Bill Cosby

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Cosby-Grizzly-ap

 

From the Guardian:

 

Former host of NBC’s The Tonight Show Jay Leno voices support for the women have come forward claiming they were sexually assaulted by comedian Bill Cosby.

“‘I don’t know why it’s so hard to believe women,” Leno tells the audience at the annual convention of the National Association of Television Program Executives. “I mean, you go to Saudi Arabia and you need two women to testify against a man, here you need 25.”

See video clip here: Guardian

How Advertising Hurts Women

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Killing Us Softly 3

Jean Kilbourne (2000)

Film Review

Killing Us Softly 3 is the third Jean Kilbourne documentary on the advertising industry’s destructive effect on women. It updates Killing Us Softly (1979) and Still Killing us Softly (1987). It’s presented in lecture format, illustrated by dozens of ad images.

The majority of Americans deny being influenced by advertising. Kilbourne challenges this. Modern advertising deliberately targets the unconscious. Ads are everywhere, continuously surrounding us with unconscious messaging about values and attitudes, as well as products.

Advertising has a massive impact on the way women think about themselves and the way they are viewed in society. The number one message pounded home by the ad industry is that women should be judged by the way they look. The expectation is flawlessness (young, thin, white and perfectly proportioned and groomed). Important secondary messages are the hard work it takes to look that way and that women who don’t measure up should feel guilty and ashamed. Sex is used to sell everything. Kilbourne is particularly concerned about the sexualization of children and teenagers in ads deliberately modeled after child pornography.

Only 5% of women have a model’s tall thin body type, with the narrow hips, long legs small breasts (unless they’re enhanced) favored by the fashion industry. This body type is based on genetic inheritance and can’t be achieved by diet, exercise or surgery, no matter how hard the advertising industry tries to persuade us otherwise. Often models are airbrushed to appear thinner and more flawless than they really are.

This constant emphasis on an unachievable ideal also negatively impacts the way men feel about real women, who are pear shaped. In addition, the objectification of women (ie their portrayal as sex objects) is directly linked to increased violence towards women. Viewing people as objects rather than human beings makes it easier to commit violence against them (and is used in military training).

The problem is aggravated by a growing tendency to eroticize violence and male dominance in advertising imagery.

Killing Us Softly 4, produced in 2010, isn’t available on YouTube for copyright reasons. It can be viewed for free on trutubetv (an uncensored noncorporate alternative to YouTube now that it’s been taken over by Google).

Killing US Softly 4 repeats most of the same ad images as number 3 but puts more emphasis on upsurge of appearance medicine (plastic and laser surgery, botox injections, etc). It also bemoans the introduction of size 0 and size 00 clothing, the pressure this places on models to starve themselves and the rise of eating disorders in the industry. Anna Carolina Reston was still modeling in 2009 when she died of anorexia nervosa.