Male Circumcision or Women’s Health, Not Both: The Case of Zambia
Feminism is, needless to say, not a monolith. I am happy to report that there are many feminists who are against male circumcision as an integral part of their stance against all genital cutting. See here, for instance. But there is a pretty strong strain of feminism which somehow feels that a single word said [...]
The Trouble with Technology: Africa, the Machine Gun and Clinical Trials
In my very first blog on the topic of circumcision, I talked about how weird it was that the US medical community was sponsoring mass circumcisions in Africa. A recent comment from a reader recently reminded me of the Africa angle and I thought it would be interesting to re-address it since my worst fears [...]
A Dialogue with Ass Sex
I was recently talking to a friend who, for religious reasons, is against gay marriage. While working in the fashion industry in the early ’80s, she had been an eye-witness to the ravages of the disease and remains quite upset at AIDS for taking her friends. At the peak of our discussion about the rights [...]
Questions Your Children Ask Me:Honesty, Please
I volunteer at Los Angeles-area public schools teaching sex ed to 9th graders. At the end of every class, I hand out index cards to the kids and they write down questions they don’t want to ask out loud. These are your kid’s questions. These are my answers. A few times a year, I get [...]
Triangle Trade in Foreskins, Part 3
So many great comments were made on both sides of the circumcision issue that I started doing research into the literature and added a part 3. I view studies that highlight the advantages of male circumcision with the same suspicion that I, and most people, would view a study implying an advantage to female circumcision. [...]
Triangle Trade in Foreskins, Part 2
It is no accident that the effort to circumcise men in HIV crisis areas of Africa came to the fore during the long reign of Bush’s Global Gag Rule. His administration’s sex-negative “health” policies erected barriers to condom distribution, limited the ability of organizations to educate populations about safer sex practices and preferentially funded abstinence-only [...]
Questions your Children Ask Me: “Why did you only say ‘women?’”
I volunteer teach sex ed for Planned Parenthood in the Los Angeles area. Every once in a while, I talk about a question I got in class. Here’s one. Kids and adults alike are freaked out about herpes, way out of proportion to what the disease does to the body. Some people get suicidally depressed [...]
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