'Birth control is a political act': the pre-Trump contraception rush starts now.
And what strikes the mind, so recently after the somewhat misleading reports of tests on a 'male pill' being terminated because of side-effects - “I used to say I didn’t want to deal with getting it inserted, or the fear that it might be dislodged. But now I want to ( Read more... )

But have A Historian's Thoughts.
That it's very difficult to see very close-up what the historically-significant things will be. They are clear in hindsight, but not so much at the time. I may have whinged about this when trying to write the concluding chapter of the Textbook a few years ago.
Regular readers will have noticed me complaining about ( Read more... )

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 ( Read more... )

On the one hand (yesterday) you have bloke obsessing on woman he has met for somewhat under a minute and exchanged a few insignificant words with and who lives a very long way away.
(I have now tracked down the classic princess lointaine story: Rudel and the Lady of Tripoli - yes, crusades are involved - According to his legendary vida, or ( Read more... )

Was 2014 the Year Science Discovered The Female Orgasm?
Okay, sometimes I think the female orgasm is much like those 'forgotten/neglected' novels/writers which are regularly being 'rediscovered'.
Alternatively, maybe the elusive Big O is always news, no?
But really, it demonstrates a particularly presentist mindset to suggest that Now! it has ( Read more... )

Life after lust - the appeal of sexless marriage.

Myself, I am inclining to the first, but I will cut this article quite a lot of slack for leaving in verbatim extensive quotes of nuanced thoughts from Dr Petra Boynton (a regular recipient of the IAMC award) and hoping that her good sense will penetrate many minds concerning the topic of people and ( Read more... )

*Quite right: let's be strident here, it's the only way to get heard.

A few quotations for International Women's Day:
A political system which denies women alike equality of opportunity and adequate special protection; an economic system which is iniquity and waste incarnate; and sexual institutions founded on the needs and preferences of a ( Read more... )

In spite of having my yoga class today, I still finally let out an increasing groundswell of strop at someone on one of my listservs who has been being annoying for about a week now. (Maybe, however, I did it in a more serene and caring way than I might otherwise have done...)

I.e. asking a question aimed at a previous post which was (to my mind) a ( Read more... )

Because this was a day when I was going wibble and trying to remember which of my multitasks I was supposed to be doing next at around 3 pm; and the day didn't stop there, just before I was due to go off duty as on-call archivist I got called down to show someone how to use the microfilm reader (which the supervisor is supposed to do), and it was ( Read more... )

A Source sent me the link to this article in the New York Times, which is about the work of several female sexologists who are working on still understudied and little-understood questions about female desire, arousal, lust, etc. And yay for them all being all All More Complicated about the subject.

But I was very struck by the degree to which ( Read more... )