“Ever-changing laws leave Italian couples mystified as the Catholic Church does These three drugs are the most popular amongst samples of levitra ED patients and often work best in treating male erectile problems. This medication may rarely cause a severe … Continue reading
Monthly Archives: April 2014
From the New York Times It’s about testosterone? Hardly. Some athletic authorities are now requiring women athletes to have their clitorises partially removed if their testosterone is “too high”? On the grounds that high testosterone is an unfair advantage? Even … Continue reading
I have written on diminished autonomy for pregnant women before for IJFAB blog in my piece, Not All Objectification Is Sexual: The Return of the Fetal Container. That piece, like Minkoff and Lyerly’s excellent 2010 piece in Hastings Center Report, dealt broadly with the choices which pregnant women are or are not constrained from making during their pregnancy, allegedly by state-imposed duties to their fetuses. There is another aspect of constrained medical autonomy for pregnant women, however, and it has to do with the priorities of some physicians (and patients) with respect to how risk and other concerns are viewed.
Continue readingFeminist scholars have, for many years now, analyzed and interpreted the problems of body image that plague Western culture. Susan Bordo, Sandra Lee Bartky, Susie Orbach, and bell hooks are only a couple examples of prominent feminists who have examined the problem of how women understand their bodies, the cultural expectations for women’s bodies, and how these expectations produce a skewed body image that has little to do with “health.”
Similarly, what constitutes a healthy female body is also a contentious issue, as more recent explorations of health perceptions have shown us. A recent Tumblr post explicitly challenges some of the standard tools of Western medicine for determining healthy body weight.
Foz Meadows’s post, entitled “Female Bodies, a Weighty Issue,” made the rounds recently on social media. In her post, she argues that we as a society are still obsessed with thinness and ideal female body types that have little to do with lived reality. She explodes the concept of BMI as an accurate measurement of health, considers the problematic institution of clothing sizes for women, and examines the lack of linkage between weight and health. She concludes by arguing that “fat” simply means “not thin,” thus anticipating the criticism of many who are quick to point out that being overweight or obese can have detrimental effects on one’s long-term health. The issue is not about obesity; the issue, for Meadows, is that women who do not embody an ideal of female beauty (unnatural and unattainable for the majority of women) are often perceived as fat.
Continue readingThe headline of a recent article on the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation’s website reads: “Labiaplasty defended by plastic surgeons.” The article discusses this often futile and possibly harmful genital surgery. There has been a rise in women requesting the procedure and … Continue reading
This version of this post originally appeared on the Albert Einstein College of Medicine’s blog. The debate over e-cigarettes has been heating up. Are the smokeless, battery-powered, nicotine-dispensing devices a gateway to smoking for young people or a helpful way … Continue reading