Points thahr, misst
Yes, well, o sigh, 'pink Viagra' gets FDA approval:
Addyi gains US marketing licence after third attempt, but questions remain about its effectiveness, potential side-effects and the true need for the drug: includes some good solid sense from the ever-reliable Dr Petra Boynton: Dr Petra Boynton, an agony aunt and psychologist who has researched sexual functioning, says losing interest in sex is a real worry for women, “But what are they actually worried about? They think they are not normal because they don’t want sex that much. They wonder, ‘Will my partner leave me?’ and, ‘Am I undesirable or inadequate?’”
There are some who wonder if they are missing out on pleasure, she said, but that was not their main anxiety. “They are talking about not being good enough or not measuring up. People have a perception that everybody else is having fantastic sex all the time with exotic positions.” There is, Boynton said, “anxiety brought about by misinformation about sex”, which is perpetuated by the media and especially men’s and women’s magazines. “The cultural wallpaper is telling you that to keep someone and be desirable and not left alone, which is a huge fear, you must be having and providing frequent sex.”
Addyi could help a small number of women, but Boynton pointed out that, like the other drugs for sexual problems, it had only been tested against placebos. It would have been interesting, she said, to trial it against candles and bathnights and sex toys - and, for that matter, relationship therapy.
[T]he holy grail of the drugs industry. Let’s face it, it’s the holy grail of all kinds of cultural imaginings: the magic substance that makes women who mostly can’t be that bothered with sex suddenly crave it.:
The truth is that the drug that liberated women’s desire is the one we all take for granted: the contraceptive pill.
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O, Simon Jenkins, have you ever done archival research? I think you would bring less of the nostalging to the concept of handwriting if so, because most handwriting is not, actually, beautiful. And, okay, I can see that it does communicate something and one might miss certain characteristics, but even if she had been typing or word-processing her letters instead of exploding inkily all over and around the page, I think Stella Browne would have been including the extra levels of emphasis, the exclamation points and no doubt, in this day and age, emojis. As someone who can sometimes not read back my own handwritten notes, never mind communicating to anybody else, I bless the day (well, actually it was a week's intensive course) that I learnt to type.
I think there's a significant difference between pursuing calligraphy as an art, and writing as a functional thing.
I suppose I do wonder about how people unused to them manage when faced with handwritten documents. But I don't think that's necessarily about handwriting as an art that must be preserved. This entry was originally posted at http://oursin.dreamwidth.org/2323513.html. Please comment there using OpenID. View
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