When you were mostly offline for a week it’s tough wanting to call attention to cool, cool posts that everyone else might already think of as, well, last week’s news. But they’re big-deal posts and somebody besides me might have missed them the first time, so…
Amanda Marcotte, writing at RHRealityCheck.org wrote about the paradigm-ridden nature of efforts to “deal” with women’s “low libidos.”
It’s an indicator of how male-dominated our society is that the fact that women have diminishing libidos and don’t seem to care that much about it is treated as the problem, when in fact it’s merely the symptom of a larger problem—that women feel overworked, underpaid, underappreciated, understimulated, and shamed about their bodies. If we treated the actual problems that women face, higher libidos would be the happy result, I’m sure. But in order to do that, we’d have to treat male domination like a problem to be solved, and since few people really want to do that, instead we’re left with articles that note women’s lack of libido, but carefully resist asking why.
Another consequence of being off line so much last week is that I can no longer find a cool political/policy-wonk post I read… too long ago to find again evidently… by, I thought, food blogger and health-care policy wonk Ezra Klein. The insight there, though, was that a heck of a lot of increases in national healthcare costs are related to keeping us alive in the face of the really unhealthy diets, sedentary lifestyles, and environmental impacts brought about largely by… other national agricultural, transportation, and environmental policies. We might not be happy campers if we just stopped getting 40% of our calories from corn syrup and soybean oil, if we had to walk to a bus stop instead of drive a car, or if we had to stop jagging off with phthalate-ridden “novelty items”... but whether or not we were wiser we’d be both healthier and wealthier: finding money for better medicine so we can keep making money making ourselves sicker doesn’t make sense. On any level.
Amanda’s saying the same thing: finding “cures” for “low libido” so that we can maintain the conditions that suppress libido doesn’t make any sense either. On any level.
