Pansynthesis

[In case it needs to be said: I don't agree with every word of everything I link to. --L.]

High Doses of Antioxidants Can Mutate Your Stem Cells [Medicine]

Hold off on the megadoses of antioxidant vitamins like C and E. A study by researchers at Cedars-Sinai Heart Institute shows that you can overdose on these health aids, and the result could be mutated stem cells that cause cancer.

The Dead Fly Artwork Of Magnus Muhr [Photography]

Magnus Muhr takes deceased flies and creates morbidly adorable illustrations of the poor dead buggers having a rollicking time. Witness some poor dead Drosophilas riding horses, hanging laundry, and behaving badly. Think of it as charmingly tacky taxidermy writ small.

Rubber: A Superhero Movie About a Tire That Kills With Its Mind. No, Really. [Wtf]

Just when you thought you've seen almost every permutation of the superhero mythos comes a French flick — premiering at this year's Cannes Film Festival — about revenge-mad automotive parts.

Not Katrina (Alas, a Blog – Jeff Fecke)

This was Hurricane Katrina. An horrific, catastrophic disaster of Biblical proportions. It killed at least 1836 people, caused over $90 billion in damage. The damage and death toll was compounded by a Bush administration reaction that allowed ongoing human suffering to stretch out for days, without serious action to alleviate it.

The ongoing oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico is awful, and it will cause billions of dollars in damage. But it has so far claimed 11 lives, all of them on the Deepwater Horizon. That is 11 too many, but it is less than one percent of those lost in Katrina.

Cathy Young on Duke’s Sexual Misconduct Policy

Let me be absolutely clear about this: I don’t believe Cathy wants people to be raped. But the reasoning she uses makes rape more likely to excused. And the more rapes are excused, the more rapists feel free to rape.

There’s a sexual script in our culture which says that women in certain contexts (a date, a frat party, a short skirt, an already existing relationship) have consented to have sex until the woman forcibly says “no” several times (preferably combined with a physical struggle and maybe a slap on the face). According to this sexual script, the default is that women have consented to have sex. It is only when women “take more than minimal responsibility” — which apparently, in Cathy’s view, means more than two refusals — that women can be said to have not consented to sex.

This sexual script is a recipe for disaster and rape. This sexual script teaches ordinary boys and men that they should “push” sexual encounters “as far as they can go,” ignoring at least the first couple of “no”s unless the “no” is said with tremendous force.

But in the real world, people don’t always say “no!” with tremendous force. Some will feel frightened or intimidated; some will freeze up or feel that further objections are pointless after the first couple of refusals are ignored. And under the all-too-common sexual script, too many girls and women are raped by boys or men who have been taught that they can assume consent — or, at least, that they have plausible deniability — until they hear the word “no” said very forcefully.

That sexual script is what most feminists (but not, it seems, Cathy) are trying to change. And feminists have changed it, to an extent.

SEXIST BEATDOWN: You Will Always Remember That Very Special Time When You Were Like “Oh, Just Stick It In Already” Edition

And, like, a while ago, there was this headline all over the place, which was “Abstinence Only Education: Totally Works!” And what it actually WORKED at, apparently, was delaying vagina-to-weiner intercourse for a few years among the preteens. Good job! But also, this magically effective abstinence-only education program taught abstinence this way: Don’t have sex until you are totally comfortable with having sex and know how to make good sexual decisions for you. This program that worked? NOT TEACHING ABSTINENCE, actually. What it was teaching was SEXUAL CONSENT.
Like, “Hey, when you decide to have sex, your decision should probably be full and informed!” Uh, OK. But feminists have been teaching this for approximately FOREVER? I guess we never thought to call it “abstinence.” I guess that’s why we don’t get the credit for our revolutionary sex-education technology!

[...] what I had NEVER been taught, apparently, was how to respect what I wanted, and to ask for it, and how to say “no” if I did NOT want something he wanted. I mean, I didn’t even know how to say “ow” or “yikes.” My impression was that one could Have Sex or Not Have Sex, and so my first few experiences were like, “oh, so apparently sex is AWFUL? It seems weird that people are so into it! But, OK! I am Having Sex!”

The Link(s): Wed, May 5th, 10am by Lee Salazar, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License. Terms and conditions beyond the scope of this license may be available at leesalazar.com.