archive

Women's health priorities

From LRB, a review of The Modern Period: Menstruation in 20th-Century America by Lara Freidenfelds. A review of Flow: The Cultural Story of Menstruation by Elissa Stein and Susan Kim (and more and more). Why is menstruation still such a taboo subject? Lysol-scented vaginas: An article on the strange history of douching. How to sell a douche: A slideshow history of marketing feminine care. Lindsay Smith on how medicine fails the modern woman: More readily-available medical information has created a nation of hypochondriacs. A review of Get Me Out: A History of Childbirth from the Garden of Eden to the Sperm Bank by Randi Hutter Epstein (and more). Did the fathers of modern obstetrics murder more women than Jack the Ripper? A review of Pregnancy, Risk and Biopolitics: On the Threshold of the Living Subject by Lorna Weir. Let's give contraceptive researchers their due. Fertile territory: Reproductive technologies offer older women more choice, but who gains the most benefit? Slap on a pink ribbon, call it a day: Barbara Ehrenreich on how that little loop seems to have replaced real feminism, which is why women's health priorities are so screwed up. Dr. Marcel D. Waldinger of The Hague Leyenburg General Hospital has “renamed [a] combination of complaints as he speaks of Restless Genital Syndrome”. Restless Vagina Syndrome: By promoting the idea that "normal" women have explosive sex all the time, BigPharma helped launch "female sexual dysfunction" (and more and more on FSD). Women who want to want: As they revise their psychiatric diagnostic manual, researchers are wondering why so many women feel little sexual desire and what should be done for them. Arousing interest: The search continues for a pill that will lift a woman’s libido.