The old news is that a lesbian couple were denied fertility treatments by their doctors back in 2000. Guadalupe Benitez was trying to get pregnant. Apparently, after charging Benitez and her partner for 11 months of fertility counseling and treatment, the doctors, Christine Brody and Douglas Fenton, refused to do the insemination procedure for Benitez, who sued them. Five years later, the lawsuit continues.

The is that the California Medical Association filed an amicus brief in support of the doctors who refused to treat Guadalupe Benitez. Here?s the CMA rebuttal to the GLMA press release. Then - Lambda Legal rants up a storm right back at the CMA.

Whatever you think about gay marriage, assimilation, breeders, and people?s right to insurance coverage for IVF; put that aside for a moment and think about the California Medical Association defending a doctor?s ?free exercise of religion.? Doctors can?t legally refuse a patient based on sexual orientation, gender, gender identity, or transgender status. But they can refuse a patient for not being married. Nice end run, fundie sleazebags!

Is this a ?right of conscience?? How come ?conscience? so often means ?control over women?s bodies? and fertility? You can?t have a baby? you have to have a baby? we won?t fill your birth control prescription because you?re not married? we?ll sterilize you because you?re not married. Oh, and by the way, if you?re already pregnant, remember that God meant you to suffer labor pain & hope that your anesthesiologist doesn?t have a religious conscience.

The world of IVF, fertility treatments, and IVF is brutal and strange. I began to intersect with it in 1998 or so, after having a miscarriage. Then I had an ectopic pregnancy and blew out a Fallopian tube. I found out why many women don?t talk about miscarriages. Everyone had an opinion on whether I should be pregnant, what was best, what was ?for the best,? what I should do and what I should feel. Another thing I hadn?t realized was that a miscarriage with complications was as expensive as private adoption; around $10,000. That?s also about what a hospital birth or an IVF treatment costs. My insurance wouldn?t cover any investigation of why I had miscarriages until I?d had three in a row, as if to keep getting pregnant and miscarrying were a minor inconvenience.

Fertility/infertility blogs like A Little Pregnant and The Naked Ovary give the bitter, witty, details of the insanity women go through: obnoxious things people say, horrible things their doctors do, and their own emotional rollercoaster, hopes, doubts, and fears. I think it?s interesting that the blogging world has opened up personal discussion of pregnancy and fertility issues; it?s something that hasn?t been done anywhere else. We should talk about our miscarriages, abortions, pregnancy scares, birth control, tube-tying, and all that messy stuff.

While I ramble all over the map, here?s another pregnancy tangent for your enjoyment: the Annouen archive of LOTR mpreg slash fanfic. Yes - you can fulfill your need to read Elrond?s diary as he agonizes over his own magical elfy uterus and what he and Frodo?s baby is gonna look like and what it means for his career as head of the Council. And when universes collide, and Galadriel knocks up Voldemort? what could be better? And what would the CMA say about it?

The Califonia State Supreme Court recently ruled that you can sue your boss for sexual harassment not just when you are directly being pressured for sex, but also when the boss? sexual relationships with other employees prevents you from being treated fairly. The case involved the warden of Chowchilla women?s prison, who was apparently sleeping with three of his employees concurrently. (I was going to say ?simultaneously", but that makes it sound way too much like a porn movie script.) ?the demeaning message is conveyed to female employees that they are viewed by management as ?sexual playthings? or that the way required for women to get ahead in the workplace is by engaging in sexual conduct,? wrote Chief Justice Ronald George, according to the CNN article above.

This ruling, methinks, does not do much to help out Dov Charney, creepy mustachioed CEO of American Apparel, who is being sued for sexual harasssment by three women in his employ. Charney has made a name for himself by selling socially-responsible American-made t-shirts on the one hand, and selling a sweat-soaked porny persona on the other. He readily admits to being overtly sexual at work, walking around in his undies, having an employee give him a BJ in front of a Jane magazine reporter, et cetera. He says it?s just part of his

But the ruling would seem to make Charney?s ?it was all consensual? defense is neither here nor there. It may have all been consensual, but this sort of work environment doesn?t bode well for the future job prospects of any employee who the boss doesn?t consider hot enough to bang. If he were a rock star, a photographer a la Terry Richardson, (who Charney seems to be channeling), or a writer, I wouldn?t give two shits about his under-the-desk masturbatory habits.

As the owner, operator, and beloved perk-bestowing benevolent overseer of a garment company, employing mostly young Latina seamstresses in a non-union factory, his ?first amendment right? to sleep with women who depend on him for their livelihood smacks a bit of droit du seigneur.

It?s not a good time to be a pornographer, or even just somebody who enjoys posting dirty self-portraits on the Interweb. First the Justice Department came out with of the 2257 rule. In the new version, anyone who posts on the Internet any images of ?an actual human being engaged in actual sexually explicit conduct? must maintain records of the performer(s). These records include actual name and any aliases, plus a driver?s license or other Picture ID. You must make them available during normal business hours (9-5) and post on your Web site a street address (not a P.O. Box) where someone can view these records. In other words, anyone who posts adult photos on the Web has to make the performers? personal info available to anyone, and has to maintain an address where they?re available during the day to talk to the feds or anyone else. The bad news is the main group challenging this hideous rule is the Free Speech Coalition, which seems mostly interested in gaining minor concessions that will help big adult companies ? such as more exemptions for porn made overseas. (See the FSC?s for more about these concessions, which don?t help indy porn makers or small-time exhibitionists.)

And then a federal appeals panel refused to find the Communications Decency Act unconstitutional ? even though the judges admitted it had led to self-censorship by photographer Barbara Nitke, and that Nitke had good cause to fear prosecution. The judges conceded that ?community standards? in the most conservative town in America could be used to squelch online expression in more permissive communities. But they said Nitke hadn?t given enough evidence about community standards to clinch the law?s unconstitutionality. The Nitke case may end up before a newly conservative Supreme Court.

As the New York Times article on the case notes, a California couple served federal prison time in 1996 after a Tennessee postal inspector downloaded some images from their bulletin board system and decided they were obscene.

I remember visiting Canada after that country passed the Dworkin-MacKinnon obscenity law. I was told several places that Roberta Gregory comix weren?t available because they were obscene. But you could buy XXX porn featuring California blondes with silicone breasts almost anywhere. That?s how these things work ? the 2257 crackdown and Nitke defeat won?t worry the big porno companies at all. They can afford attorneys and custodians of records and age-verification services. But if you ever post an image of yourself or someone else involved in ?actual sexual conduct? on the Internet, you could find yourself behind bars for a decent stretch.

Blog-a-thon tag:
EFF15


I hope you?re not reading this blog entry using somebody?s open wireless network. It could get you arrested for trespassing. Earlier this month, a Florida man was arrested for sitting outside somebody?s house in his car and using their open wifi network. What the hell? The network was open, people. But as Engadget reports, another guy was arrested for the same thing in the U.K., and found guilty last week of ?dishonestly obtaining an electronic communications service.? Law enforcement in both instances claimed that the problem with accessing an open wifi network is that it allows people to commit crimes anonymously. And yet we have only a very few examples of such crimes, comparied to the millions of examples of happy people using open networks without doing anything illegal.

All this bullshit about arresting people for sucking free bits out of the air with their antennae makes me think back to a time, many years ago, when I first realized the social injustices suffered by geeks didn?t originate entirely from groups of jocks and generic popular kids in the halls at my high school. When I was a teenager, many of my friends met on a local BBS where we could chat and exchange cracked software ("cracked? meant the copy protection had been stripped away by a friendly geek who thus enabled all the poor teenagers of Orange County to have amusing games and nifty applications). While we infringed copyrights blithely, without any opinions about the justice of the intellectual property system, we took hacking very seriously. It was an art, and a way of being conscientiously disobedient. Nobody who broke into systems ever defaced them. The idea was to go in, look around, and leave no trace.

Only a few of us were hardcore hackers, people who had seen WarGames and taken it to heart. But one pretty day in spring, a few people in my extended group of online acquaintences were arrested and had their computers confiscated by the FBI. These guys weren?t criminals, and they weren?t trying to steal military secrets. They were just exploring the nascent Internet, peeking into any computer network they could find to learn about it. I don?t want to say that they were as innocent as the guys I described earlier who were arrested for accessing open wifi networks. My online pals knew they were breaking into computers. Nevertheless, to my teenaged sensibilities, they were heroic explorers being punished for daring to ask questions and go where the adults didn?t want them to. How could the quest for knowledge be so violently censured?

This question has continued to haunt me twenty years later. As the Internet has grown into a fully-adult communications medium, packed with everything from motion pictures to poetry, our ability to access it and publish to it unmolested is more critical than ever. But government and private industry are working to erode the distinction between harmless exploration and crime. Most of my activities involving high technology could probably be deemed unlawful in the right court, under the right circumstances. I rip CDs, access the Internet from open wifi networks, download Doctor Who from BitTorrent, play DVDs using an ?unauthorized? media player on my computer, run port scanners on random computers I encounter on the Internet, republish sexual images online, and own a modded Xbox. I?ll leave it to you to unbury all the laws that could make any one of these activities unlawful ? suffice to say that they exist, and they?re being used right now to punish people who dare to use their technology in ways that defy convention. In my own humble way, I am still honoring those brave teenage geeks who were arrested in my neighborhood two decades ago.

With my work, I?m trying to create a world where fewer explorers will be punished for what they do, and for teaching others how to understand technology better. July marks the fifteenth anniversary of one of my beloved workplaces, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a high tech civil liberties group in San Francisco which fights to keep freedom of expression and privacy alive on the Internet. This blog post honors EFF on its birthday. May its team of attorneys, geeks, and activists make the future better than my past.

Elisabeth Lloyd, who recently published The Case of the Female Orgasm : Bias in the Science of Evolution, is blogging on the heritability of female orgasms:

The gist of her statement is that surveys and other studies haven?t shown any evolutionary basis for human female orgasm, and that in fact the evidence they have all points away from female orgasm being an adaptive trait.

In this post she criticizes a study by Tim Spector that concludes women?s ability to have orgasms during intercourse, and the ease and speed of those orgasms, is inherited. Lloyd?s cheerful ranting builds up a great head of steam. Nobly, she refrains from making fun of anything other than their faulty understanding of statistics and heritability. I?m not noble. I?m giggling madly picturing the Scientific Study of ?sperm upsuck? and time-to-orgasm of the Doublemint Twins.

to help beat the crap out of Spector et al:
??not only is female orgasm supposedly entirely genetic, it’s also a means of mate selection, and something you can blame your mother for.? Dr. Petra points out that , with no evidence cited, Spector and his fellow orgasm survey analyzers think that female capacity for orgasm is ?probably inherited from the mother.? Petra also slams the Spector crowd for saying that women never or rarely having an orgasm with intercourse is ?sexual dysfunction? and that ?some women orgasm too quickly?. The implication is that if you?re slut enough to come too quickly (remember, this is with intercourse) then you aren?t going to be very good at ?mate selection? which is an evolutionary disadvantage. Er, what?

Rowan Hooper, writing for New Scientist, has a good summary of the issue. Hooper mentions three main theories to explain the evolutionary importance of female orgasm:
1) The wonderfully named ?sperm upsuck? theory: Orgasm?s motions give a shove to sperm, slurping it up closer to that mighty traveler, the ovum.
2) The man-tester theory: If the guy?s fiddly and patient enough to get his mate off, he is a better child-raising mate. This theory is mentioned often in the press but apparently there?s zero evidence for it.
3) The social bonding theory: Orgasms promote social ties and give an evolutionary advantage. I wish this were true and that we were more like bonobos, who have the best naughty housewife lesbian leg-humping child-raising co-ops ever invented.

Hooper?s article ends on a note of promising weirdness. What Spector is hoping for is to do pharmaceutical or genetic fixes so that women can have just the right number of orgasms in just the right way. Not so many as to be indiscriminatingly slutty, and not so few as to be labeled neurotic and frigid, or whatever the ?problem? is defined to be.

Not too long ago, when screening emails of prospective new roommates, one of the candidates described herself this way: “I work at a marketing firm, I love Harry Potter and Desperate Housewives. I’m also a total chore nazi in the kitchen, because a clean home is very important to me. It’s just the way I am.” I didn’t write back, because, well, if we squared off, we might have a conversation I’d regret:

Her: Hey, did you leave that dish in the sink?
Me: Hey, did you gas my relatives?

Why is it that this particular murderous regime became synonymous with a clean kitchen? Phrases like “chore nazi”, “kitchen nazi”, and “dish nazi” turn up lots and lots of Google hits. At this point it’s become so widespread that if it bugs you, you’re liable to be branded as “too sensitive.” So, I’m not going to let it bug me. The more the merrier, I say. There’s nothing problematic or scary about turning a term for perpetrators of genocide into a morally neutral phrase meaning Neat And Tidy. Here is my roommate ad:

I’m a writer, I like music, and I’m a total Kitchen Klansman: I’m always scrubbing that grout to keep it white. I’m also a bit of a House Hutu, a Sink Serbian— an “Ethnic Cleanser” if you will! I like to keep a clean house, it’s just the way I am.

What? Stop being so sensitive.

Don?t blame bisexual African American men for the high rate of HIV among African American women, says a . The article, called ?Focusing ?Down Low?: Bisexual Black Men, HIV Risk and Heterosexual Transmission,? claims that only 2 percent of African American men are behaviorally bisexual. But at least one study showed ?black MSM? who were ?on the down low? were less likely to engage in risky behavior than men who were open about their activities.

?The flawed logic that is often perpetuated by the media is that ONLY homosexual men have HIV, bisexual men ONLY contract HIV through homosexual behavior, and the ONLY way black women contract HIV is through sexual contact with these bisexual men,? said one of the report?s authors in an interview.

The JAMA article doesn?t present any new research, and it?s basically just a survey of the existing literature. In exonerating bisexual African American men from HIV infections among women, the study reaches for other stereotypes, including the idea that blacks are more promiscuous or likelier to trade sex for drugs than other ethnic groups. Black heterosexuals are likelier to have unprotected anal than vaginal sex, the authors claim. They also point to a higher prevalence among African American women of vaginal douching, which may increase their susceptibility to HIV. They admit that the causes of HIV in the African American community need further study, but make a plea for people to treat the issue as more complex than just secretively bisexual men on a rampage.