Today I learned of independent documentary, Orgasm, Inc., which examines the current race by pharmaceutical companies to develop a female sexual enhancement drug. The idea is that with the remarkable financial success of Viagra, there must be a market for a drug to offer women sexual satisfaction, to which end medical researchers have been aggressively promoting the idea of widespread female sexual dysfunction. As explained in Newsweek piece on the film, “The selling of the female orgasm,” Liz Canner, the filmmaker, was approached by Vivus, a company whose suppository for erectile dysfunction lost its market dominance with the advent of Viagra and wanted her help with their female sex research. Another article in the Guardian identifies the drug (which they subsequently gave up on developing) as an “orgasm cream“, which sounds all kinds of disgusting.
Conveniently, I learned of this film but three days after it debuted in NYC at the Film Society of Lincoln Center, so it looks like I won’t be able to watch it for the foreseeable future without coughing up $30 for a DVD. So I figured I’d help other people avoid making the same mistake and encourage anyone interested to find a screening this summer – the filmmaker is showing it on various campuses in hopes of building up to a nationwide theatrical release. It also looks to be coming to Netflix, although it’s not there yet.
I get into a fair number of … heated discussions … with religious people. Like caffeine addiction, this is probably something I should be concerned about and address, but which I prefer to nurse. Today something popped up in the ol’ Google Reader that brought me back to three specific old fights.
The spark is this Politico piece about how, “The National Organization for Marriage, a prominent backer of the successful campaign against same-sex marriage in California, is launching a $1.5 million ad campaign this morning aimed at forestalling same-sex marriage support in other key states.”
Before I get started, let’s go to the tape:
Now dig this:
“The biggest argument — and the biggest lie — put forward by those who want to redefine marriage is that it’s not going to have any affect on you. ‘Why should you care? It’s not going to have any effect on your marriage,” said NOM executive director Brian Brown. “In state after state we’ve seen same-sex marriage directly conflict with people’s religious beliefs.”
What a fun bait and switch. He sets you up by claiming that he’s going to show that it’s a lie that, “It’s not going to have any effect on your marriage,” but then actually argues that it, “conflict[s] with people’s religious beliefs.”
So this is for the friend whose retort, when I said that religion is the problem at the root of this issue, was “Some of the most famous homophobes were godless and closeted: Roy Cohn, J Edgar Hoover.” Seriously, that’s great and all, but J Edgar Hoover didn’t put up $1.5m to manipulate public opinion.
Last November I had a long argument with a colleague who listed as one reason to support Proposition 8 the fact that she didn’t want her preacher sued for refusing to marry some gay dudes. At the time, I thought that made sense, and I was happy to tell her that exceptions exist for that kind of thing. I thought this made so much sense that I later defended the right of the Catholic church to excommunicate bishops who ordained women, saying:
[I]t may be somewhat important to protect these stupid rules. For instance, one of the things the pro-Prop-8 crowd says is, “What if some gay couple sues my priest to make him marry them, which is against his religion?” It’s important for them, and it’s important for us to be able to say, “Look, your [...] religion is safe, there’s an explicit judicial precedent which says those types of lawsuits are not valid.”
But then I read something like:
Brown cited the decision of Catholic Charities in Massachusetts to stop handling adoptions in response to a law banning discriminating against gays and lesbians hoping to adopt children.[...]
Proponents of same-sex marriage argue that the legal changes will, if anything, strengthen marriage. There have also been moves to protect groups like Catholic Charities from conflicts, and the Vermont same-sex marriage bill that became law yesterday, for instance, contains religious exemptions.
And the kowtowing drives me crazy. There is absolutely no reason to allow anyone to discriminate against gays and lesbians hoping to adopt, so that sort of “exemption” should be out of the question. But it’s clearly something they would want. So now I don’t know how I feel about this.
Anyway, I’ll give the last word to Tony, because he’s smarter than I am:
So, the evidence of the real impact it will have on your lives is, religious bigots will stop doing charitable work if they can’t discriminate? I really fail to see how this is something for which gay marriage is responsible. It’s a but-for cause, to be sure, but we don’t get to blame everything on but-for causes: If a guy kills someone who mouths off at him in a bar, he doesn’t get to say “What? I wouldn’t have done it but for his crack about my mom.”
I mentioned a couple of days ago that I’ve been getting email from the American Family Association loony bin. The most recent of these asks me to boycott Pepsico because, “Pepsi has produced another TV ad not only promoting Pepsi but also promoting the gay lifestyle.”
I found this somewhat hard to believe, so I followed the link to the YouTubes, where I found this awesomeness:
It’s probably lame to think this is great. Pepsi is just sucking up to me to sell soft drinks. But it’s kind of cool that someone at Pepsi decided that (in Canada, anyway) the people who would be amused by this ad outnumber (or at least out-purchase) the people who would boycott them for it.
But this ad isn’t the worst of Pepsi’s sins. Full list, along with what you can do about it, after the jump.
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Consider the following transcript from a recent television broadcast:
FIRST PERSON: If the American people are not convinced that we should overturn the definition of marriage, then I would say that those who support the idea of same-sex marriage have a lot of work to do to convince the rest of us [...].
SECOND PERSON: I think it’s an absolute — it’s a travesty that people have forced someone who is gay to have to make their case that they deserve the same basic rights.
Question: Which of these two people received more than 20% of the popular vote during a major party’s presidential primary?
Extra credit: Explain how anyone could say the following sentence with a straight face. No credit will be given for “Maybe if he was a robot or something?”
The basic purpose of a marriage is not just to create the next generation, but to train the replacements.
And no, its not a clip from Good Will Hunting; he’s commenting on why Sarah Palin is a scary VP pick. Highlight:
I need to know if she really thinks dinosaurs were here 4,000 years ago, that’s an important – I want to know that, I really do, because she’s going to have the nuclear codes.
This is a great clip of The Daily Show surgically dismantling the two-faced bullshit of right-wing talking heads. How anyone takes a guy like Karl Rove or Bill O’Reilly seriously is just way beyond me.
Meanwhile, you should check out this description of how the people at TDS put together these clips, which Adam linked to a few days ago. And while I’m here, I should say that I’m glad the people at TDS built their website so that sharing these types of clips is so easy. Way to embrace technology and free advertising, guys.
For reasons that are no longer apparent to me, I was looking up the Tales from the Crypt show that ran on HBO in the 90s. I’m hoping that some of you, like myself, have fond memories of watching this show, more notable for twist endings than being particularly scary (although I’ll confess that I remember an episode or two that created a sense of creepiness that lingers to this day). As always, Wikipedia is the best resource for everything, and their coverage of the show comes complete with an episode list that conveys better than anything just how cool the show was. Anyone remember the episode where the old millionaire is buying (piecemeal) the body of a young stud? Did you realize that Ahnold directed it? Remember that one where the criminal is handcuffed to the dead body of a state trooper in the middle of the desert? Did you know, back then, that Kyle MachLachlan played the criminal? Or that he later directed the episode where a husban suspects his wife of having an affair with a priest? (The husband is Adam West, by the way.) Another gem that I only discovered when looking up the show is an episode where Ed Begley, Jr., plays a travelling salesman struggling to escape alive from a hillbilly family played by Tim Curry (yes, all three family members are Tim Curry). You can watch it online here (I’d embed the video but it’s in four parts, so you’d need to click through anyway). It’s not terribly scary, but it is mildly disturbing, somewhat amusing, and actually a great performance by Curry on all three counts – just about everything that made the show worth watching when I was young.
Why hasn’t anyone shown me this clip of Mos Def on Bill Maher’s show last year? Mighty Mos clearly has some strange ideas (Bin Laden wasn’t behind the September 11 attacks? No one walked on the moon? OJ was innocent? Hard to tell if he’s joking anymore), but his take is interesting, and it’s definitely fun to watch him blowing Maher’s mind. Meanwhile, when did Bill Maher become one of those “Oh noes, the Islamofascists are coming for us” dudes?
The clip also includes a performance from Dr. Cornel West which constitutes a watershed moment in the history of YouTube*.
Yesterday, PZ Myers linked to a Vanity Fair article for which Christopher Hitchens had himself waterboarded. Hitch wanted to decide for himself whether or not it’s torture. In short:
I apply the Abraham Lincoln test for moral casuistry: “If slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong.” Well, then, if waterboarding does not constitute torture, then there is no such thing as torture.
That’s pretty interesting, and I considered posting it at the time. But, lacking anything to add, I passed. Then today Scott Kaufman brought back the reaction from the wingnut frontier, and it included bits like this:
The enemy believes that we are weak, & Hitchens & his ilk are to blame. It will come to a point, & soon me thinks, when real force will be required. And then it shall come to pass that the unpleasant realities of preemption need to be replaced with the even more unpleasant realities of vengeance […] & the Hitchens of the world will cease to be relevant.
They think we’re weak, and Hitchens is to blame? You mean, this Hitchens: “I shall go on keeping score about this until the last phony pacifist has been strangled with the entrails of the last suicide-murderer”? How hard-assed do they want our rhetoric to be? Perhaps from now on, whenever you write about terrorists, you should pretend to be that the masked dude from the Saw franchise or Arnold’s character from Predator. Then you’ll have the right levels of machismo and sadism to sound like a patriot.
Over at Cosmic Variance, Sean Carroll addresses the Wired article on the “end of theory.” He makes a similar argument to mine, only he does it much better. For instance, I didn’t have this excellent one-line demolition of the whole argument: “Theory is understanding, and understanding our world is what science is all about.”
Highly recommended for examples involving Brahe, Kepler, Newton and the Large Hadron Collider.