Friday, March 27, 2009 - Posts
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Jess, I'm glad you brought up the Gardasil news. I'm amazed (if not surprised) by how different the rhetoric surrounding boys getting it is. A while back, I wrote about the totally bizarre idea that an HPV vaccine for girls would somehow promote promiscuity. As you may remember, this was the conservative critique opponents of the HPV vaccine: Having one would turn girls into sluts, and even allowing your teen daughter to getone somehow besmirched her purity. Never mind that according to the National Cancer Institute nearly 3700 women die a year of cervical cancer, which sometimes develops from the HPV virus; implicit in the opponents' critique was the idea that it was only "loose" girls who got HPV. (And I guess they don't matter as much. Or, serves them right.)
What was so strange was how the conservative firestorm somehow ignited another kind of anxiety, one more typically associated with crunchy liberal types: namely, vaccine anxiety. When Gardasil began to be administered, there were widespread reports of group fainting fits among the girls who received it. And so even liberals began to wary about the drug. I can't help but feel that the liberal anxiety grew out of the conservative one, partly because teenage girls, so quick to internalize external cues, were picking up on the fact that this particular vaccine had...drama at the heart of it. Every vaccine produces a few adverse reactions in those to whom it's administered; but in this case, those adverse reactions were being magnified, it seems, by the reactions of parents primed to be nervous about the vaccine, and by suggestible teenage girls who (in some cases, at least) had more of a psychosomatic response than a purely physical one.
The libertarian in me at times resists the idea of making any vaccine mandatory. But this vaccine will save women's lives. Cancer is not pretty. And it would be awful if our collective squeamishness about female adolescent sexuality meant that this vaccine never became as effective as it could be. To me, the great irony is this: We have been trying to come up with vaccines for cancer for decades. We have spent millions of dollars doing so. Now we found one. And no one wants to use it. Is teen sexuality that scary?
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Has anybody else been picking up on the effort to create a comparative health care storyline out of the Natasha Richardson tragedy? A friend mentioned a couple of days ago that she wondered if Richardson's death from "talk and die" syndrome would have been prevented had she fallen sick in the United States, and then today, this PR e-mail from a think tank that promotes health savings accounts arrived in my inbox:
NEWS REPORTS REVEAL NATASHA RICHARDSON’S DEATH MAY HAVE BEEN PREVENTED WITH U.S. HEALTHCARE
Lack of Equipment Under Government-Run System Delayed Lifesaving Measures
Washington, DC – News reports of the skiing accident, medical treatment and eventual death of actress Natasha Richardson last week shed new light on the limits of the Canadian health care. The timeline of the afternoon’s events indicate that the lack of medical equipment—a trauma helicopter and basic CT scanning equipment at the local hospital—delayed the treatment that may have saved her life.
Well, it's certainly possible. But I'd hope the Natasha Richardson Proof—the Canadian health care system didn't work perfectly for Richardson, ergo it sucks—doesn't become some major PR tactic during a health care debate, because it's a serious case of missing the forest for one tree.
A trauma helicopter might have helped Richardson, but on the flip side, in the United States such helicopters are generally way overused, in part because they're profit makers and because the burden of their costs is distributed in such a way that it isn't appropriately felt: This past September, a Medevac chopper crashed in Maryland, killing three personnel (including one ambulance volunteer, a gig I've done) and one of the two wounded girls it was transporting from the scene of a car crash. Both girls originally had non-life-threatening injuries. "We've just gotten into a situation here in the United States where we think that the helicopters are a panacea," an emergency medicine researcher told the press after the accident. The September crash, sort of the reverse image of the Richardson incident, could be considered an event in which the overabundance of medical equipment killed.
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I can't really say how I came to be reading a recent journal article on "discourses between physical, legal and linguistic frameworks impacting on the New Zealand public toilet." As it turns out, the culture surrounding illegal sex in New Zealand's public bathrooms—known as "bogs"—is full of terrific linguistic subterfuge. Here's a work-safe bit of "bogspeak" from midcentury:
A lockable door was known as a brandy latch, but the door itself was called a trade curtain. A nanti bog was one that was ineffective for cruising. Nochy and sparkle bogs described public toilets that were cruised at night or in the daylight respectively. A bog that had its lights broken to provide some security of darkness at night was called a nochy bog.
"Sparkle bog" sounds like it ought to be the name of a literary magazine. Bogspeak has since evolved into textese (n2 str8 act blks), and the Internet has encouraged the emergence of a written language alongside the older oral locutions.
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There's an interesting profile in this weekend's New York Times Magazine (it's not online yet) of playwright/screenwriter Neil LaBute. You get the impression that press-wary LaBute resigned himself to being interviewed because his latest play, reasons to be pretty, debuts next week, yet the resulting piece is, well, creepy. I'm sure many find LaBute and his work to be creepy already, but I've been a fan. I loved In the Company of Men, a heartless tale of two men who trick and seduce a woman, not for its cruelty but because its fundamental truth was about cruelty, something that seemed to escape the scores of viewers and critics who dismissed it by deeming it misogynistic. I've found his depictions of manhood, how complicated it is to be a man, some of the best discourses on the subject. Your Friends and Neighbors took his vivisections of relationships one step further; in LaBute's reality, nobody wins—regardless of gender, we're screwed equally. In the Times profile, though, LaBute comes across as a strange mix of one-note and enigmatic. First, he appears to be elusive about his Mormon upbringing, his maybe divorce, his estrangment from his children. When his profiler attempts to go deeper, LaBute balks at telling his own truth.
Then LaBute stopped. ‘‘I don’t want to talk about that,’’ he said. ‘‘And I wish you wouldn’t write about it.’’ (Later, LaBute e-mailed me through a publicist and said that if I didn’t mention his wife or kids or religion or misogyny that he’d tell me ‘‘a doozy of a childhood (personal) story that nobody knows about.’’) LaBute stood up and said: ‘‘I have to go. I’m tired of answering questions."
In the end, we never get LaBute's personal story. And maybe that's for the best, leaving us to experience reasons, "a love story about the impossibility of love," at face value, minus the psychobiography of its creator. Or maybe LaBute has something to hide. Reasons director Terry Kinney suggests LaBute is equal parts the misogynist men of which he writes and the deaf girl from In the Company of Men, their brokenhearted victim.
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With all this talk about OTC birth control, we've ignored another recent story about reproductive health: the news that Merck is trying to peddle Gardasil, the HPV vaccine, to boys. According to the Washington Post, when Gardasil was initially recommended for girls as young as 9, the argument against it focused on promiscuity and whether or not the vaccine would encourage girls to have sex. "Now the vaccine's maker is trying to get approval to sell the vaccine for boys," according to the WaPo, "and the debate is focusing on something else entirely: Is it worth the money, and is it safe and effective enough?"
It makes sense to give boys the vaccine as long as its safe, as they are carriers of HPV even though it primarily affects women's health. However, Merck is also lobbying for Gardasil to become mandatory for school attendance for girls—something that gives conservative organizations like the Family Research Council palpitations. "We do not oppose the development or distribution of the vaccine," the FRC's Peter S. Sprigg tells the WaPo. "The only concern we have is about proposals to make vaccination mandatory for school attendance. It's a parental rights issue." So I ask you ladies, should the administration of the vaccine be left to the parents? Or is HPV a public health nuisance on the level of measles and should Gardasil be mandatory?
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A trailer (see below) for the upcoming film of Where the Wild Things Are is out on the Web, and while I know the world has bigger problems, watching it infuriated me. I don't want a real-life Max, who goes to school and has a backstory! I especially don't want to see his face while he peers at his parents kissing in their bedroom! Nor am I moved by the 2009 special-effects version of Maurice Sendak's 1963 monster illustrations. Why did Hollywood have to come for this short poem of a children's book, which I'II bet many of us know by heart?
The magic of children's literature is the magic of imagination, of making up the visual renderings and actions of the characters for yourself. I know that some books are filmmaking candy, and to the inevitable screen version of Harry Potter I am resigned. I'll even concede that once in a while the movie or TV version of a kids' book augments the original, though for me these exceptions are usually cartoons, like The Hobbit. (And no I am not pleased that there seems to be a real-life version of that one in the works.) But do the imagination thieves in Hollywood really have to rob me of Max? All I want from him are the few words Sendak gives him. No more.
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