ISSN 1945-6557

Posts Tagged ‘ human sexuality ’

Lifestyle drugs and the new wave of pharmaceutical personality sculpting

By Breanne Fahs | December 15th, 2009 | Category: Featured, Issue 6, On Public Life | 2 comments

“Ask your doctor if medical advice from a television commercial is right for you.” —Bumper sticker slogan At a the annual conference for the Society for the Scientific Study of Sexuality last year, I heard a researcher describe how the pharmaceutical industry “jukes the stats”—that is, crunches numbers creatively in order to persuade the public [...]


Is the Selling of Virginity a Feminist Act?

By Breanne Fahs | March 15th, 2009 | Category: Featured, Issue 3, On Public Life | 2 comments

Directly following the Obamania surrounding the January 2009 presidential inauguration, U.S. news media began running stories about Natalie Dylan, the 22-year-old women’s studies graduate who decided, in the wake of completing a degree based on the refutation of patriarchal principles, to sell her virginity online to the highest bidder. While the media made much ado about the implications of Dylan as a failed “role model”—with much hand-wringing about the decline of civilized courtship, the encroaching tidal wave of raunch culture onto “good girl” suburbia, and the loss of old-fashioned values of purity and chastity—they failed to take seriously Dylan’s own narrative about this exchange. This essay asks: What does Dylan’s reading of selling her virginity offer to a feminist politics?