Pill Users Choose 'Wrong' Sex Partners

And it's not just the awful headline, folks.  It's the whole article.  Yes, this is the worst of so-called science reporting by the mainstream media, none other than CBS News this time.  This study has been going around the feminist and sex-positive webs for a little while now.

It's a small study.  In the text itself, it doesn't introduce a lot of new material for science.  It confirms a few things we already know while asking a larger in hopes that it will "get people thinking." Or in hopes that it will garner them the kind of massive media attention they in fact got for their otherwise non-noteworthy study.

Apparently the gestalt of the last few weeks (since the HHS decided to go on all out war against a woman's right to choose when -- and shriek IF -- she has a child) is to demonize birth control from every angle.  It's abortifacent, even the IUD.  It's linked to weight-gain.  It's linked to weight-loss.  It's linked to depression. It's linked to Hypoactive Sexual Desire Disorder (yes, really, and they have a cream for that, too). It's linked to nymphomania. And NOW it leads women to the wrong men!  Oh no!

Much like caffeine, red wine, and beer, the birth-control pill has been studied to death and is linked to as many health problems as it is health benefits. All these links come with greater or lesser claims of certainty, greater and lesser claims of degree of effect, and with varying amounts (from zero on up, folks) of scientific rigor applied to those claims.

What exactly are the wrong men that the CBS article refers to?  Not evil men, stupid men, bad men, men who kick puppies, Yankees fans, nor men who revert to basement-dwelling losers. No.  The Wrong Men are men who smell funny. This "news" is presented as if a woman who decides to date a man while she's on the pill or god forbid might decide to marry one could be making the mistake of her life.  I'm sure television news has done horrible things to it as well, but I don't watch television, so I wouldn't know.

Yet more scare stories (along with a couple this week about American women's fertility being down) trying to "keep the conversation going" about whether or not women are having enough of whose babies in what kind of family unit and when those who would like to decide these things want them to have them. Yeah, that didn't make a lot of sense to me either, but then again, neither does the whole male obsession with women's sexuality.

Oh, and while I'm on my soapbox, this is from the other article I linked to:

"We know there is a tremendous medical need to address women suffering with low sexual desire," said James A. Simon, MD, a LibiGel study investigator, Clinical Professor of Obstetrics and Gynecology at the George Washington University in Washington, D.C., Medical Director at The Women's Health Research Center in Laurel, Maryland and past president of the North American Menopause Society. "Currently, there are no medications approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for the treatment of low sexual desire."

Alright, without treading on ground I don't know much about, why is there a tremedous medical need for a drug (topical or otherwise) to treat low sexual desire? Is this something we can treat as strictly a pharmaceutical problem outside of the societal problems with the traditional marriage power dynamic, norms, and mores or the interpersonal problems that occur between people that stifle sexual desire?  I doubt it, seriously.  And so I have to ask, what's the treatment regimen?  What constitutes requiring the pharmaceutical solution rather than addressing society?  What constitutes requiring the pharmaceutical solution rather than a relationship counselor?

I could be idealistic and say that this will be prescribed to people in addition to relationship or personal counseling, but somehow, I think this will be used as the shortcut around them, or as one more way of putting them off until later.  I think this is the product some man's wet dream of a gel that you rub on a woman's pussy and it magically makes her want him.  A shortcut around foreplay and healthy relationships, and around dealing with issues of self-worth, societal ideals of beauty, body, gender, and sexuality.