Do you ever worry that your genitals are retracting into your body? Ever worry that your vitality might just disappear with your vanishing member? If so, you are not alone. Koro (as it’s known in China and Southeast Asia) is recognized as a kind of social or mass hysteria where individuals become convinced that their genitals are shrinking and will ultimately disappear completely, and seemingly may injure themselves trying to prevent that. Unsurprisingly, the Wikipedia article notes that this tends to occur among poorly educated populations who fear supernatural forces, and notes that in China mental health campaigns and improving economic conditions have reduced epidemics (Wikipedia cites to this study, which I cannot access).
Beyond the worry that someone might harm themselves, this condition can also potentially can create hostility against others accused or blamed for causing it. For example, this case recently reported in Nigeria demonstrates how penis disappearance will manifest in a culture that believes in witchcraft that can be used by one person against another. A report from Harper’s followed up by traveling to Nigeria to try to understand the belief that your penis is disappearing. He doesn’t do a bad job of it, but one wonders if he couldn’t have saved himself a trip to Nigeria and just watched this German remake of Jekyll and Hyde where Jekyll is a novelist who awakes to find that the character he created (Hyde) has stolen his penis. (No, I haven’t seen it. But yes, I want to).
Incidentally, if you’re curious how I ever came across Koro, I’ll just say it had something to do with this xkcd strip.
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 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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Here’s a transcript of a nice speech on “the hook up culture” by Jessica at Feministing. I wanted to pull out a representative passage, but the whole thing is uniformly good. So I’ll just ruin the end, and hope that makes you want to see how we get there:
Let’s be clear, this was an FDA official holding up a safe contraceptive because of the fear of teen sex cults.
So really, all of this writing and talking about hooking up is about a lot more than just wanting young people to have less sex, or to date more. This is about a return to traditional gender roles – a world where women go to college not to get an education, but to find a husband; a world where women don’t really like sex but just do it to have babies. A world where women have no reproductive choices.
[...]
For a young woman living in poverty, spring break isn’t even an option, let alone a concern. For a young woman who has no health insurance, the “moral” debate over STDs won’t do anything for her the next time she needs to see a doctor. And for a young single mother, hearing about herself as an unfortunate statistic isn’t going to make her life any better or easier.
I’d only like to add that I feel discriminated against. Why haven’t any conservative organziations produced shady statistics saying that young men who participate in the hook up culture are all depressed and warty? Men have feelings too, you know.
(Edit to add: I got this from Cosmic Variance.)
(Edit again to add: Ta-Nehisi is also on this, and adds:
I deeply suspect that at the bottom of it all lay the sexual insecurities of people who wish they’d been a little more carefree in college. I strongly suspect that they don’t resent hook-up culture–they resent that they didn’t get hooked-up. Wouldn’t be the first time. Hell if I knew in college, what I know about the opposite sex now, I’d have been Denzeling fools. Alright probably not. Wait, what was I saying?
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