Archive for June 2019
Can ASMR Put Porn Out of Business?
ASMR Creates Vacant Head Space We need an art form for the internet. Sitting and looking at a screen for a long time where nothing much happens creates a head space of its own. Something has to fill that space. One candidate is ASMR, Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response. It doesn’t make much sense, but…
Read MoreCreating a Disease to Fit the Drug
A Problem for Every Drug Isn’t it curious how something is barely noticed until a drug is created for it? Then it becomes an epidemic. Take what started out as “female sexual interest/arousal disorder” in DSM-5 in 2013. Fancy that! Two years later, a drug — Boehringer-Ingelheim’s Flibanserin (Addyi™) — was created for it, after…
Read MoreBusybodies Abound in the United States
Busybodies Are Offended On the surface, this is just another of those “fat-shaming” stories, which will become ever more frequent as the U.S. population grows in body size and is psychologically still back in the days of size 6. And it’s so sad. She “really felt cute” in her crop top, and then she experienced…
Read MoreToday’s Slayings Are Like Yesterday’s Lynchings
Slayings and Lynchings These tragic slayings of black transgender women are like the lynchings in Mississippi. Then, the victims were black males. This time, the murderers target a different subset of the population, and a different gender. But the cause is the same: the inability of a group of privileged males to handle cultural change.…
Read MoreThere’s More to Good Sex Than Conversation
An Exchange of Power Mallory Yu wrote an interesting column called “How To Talk About Sex (And Consent): 4 Lessons From The Kink Community” for Shots, Health News From NPR. But there is a basic problem with all the author’s talk about plenty of conversation — put everything up front, blah. blah. It is that…
Read MoreTransgender Isn’t a Disorder
The World Health Organization (WHO) has just abolished transgender as a disorder. In its guide to diseases, WHO has replaced “gender identity disorder” with “marked incongruence” between gender at birth and current gender. Sexual Variants Are Not Disorders So, once again, psychiatry follows the headlines! It’s not science, it’s public relations. The initial mistake was…
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