Members of traditional societies accepted being told when and how to reshape their bodies. Their decision was binary: either participate or leave the group. In contemporary society, each individual is responsible for choosing and effecting her own reshaping, thus demonstrating her fitness for membership within a given field. Hierarchical position depends on displaying attunement to the field …. including what kind of body counts as right. The right body demonstrates having made the right assessment of capital, and thus becomes a potent display of rights to participation and position.

Most people experience times when as much as it’s blindingly obvious a problem is not theirs alone, it’s up to them alone to fix it – and a pill is often the quickest or only means.

That’s exactly what Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan wanted us to believe. “There’s no such thing as society.” Unfortunately, many medical distorders do have social, not biological causes. Like poverty.

Because China has never had a humanist revolution, sex and marriage have always been relatively divorced. That is why many Asian cultures have an immensely commercialised and categorised [sex industry]. … [I]f a husband is a man of means, and has a significant income, then he can take on a second wife without violating his obligation to his first wife. … This does not mean that the Chinese are incapable of love, it means that romantic love competes with that transactional element in a society where people are insecure because their individual interests are not institutionally protected.

The preoccupation with female appearance encourages evaluation of women in terms of sexual attractiveness rather than character, competence, hard-work, or achievement. Although some women benefit from their beauty, it is not a stable form of self-esteem.

[T]here is an elision here between these women’s oppression and what the U.S. military presence can and should do about it, which in turn simplifies the complexities of the debate and turns it into, “Well, do you want to help Aisha or not?”

Source: TopNews We’ll need government financed incentives to push pharmaceutical companies into developing new antibiotics. Just when we need Pharma to clean up its act and improve its image with the public, we have more unflattering news about the industry. 5,600 women have filed a class action suit against the multinational drug firm Novartis, claiming…

Source: The Witch Doctor Nearly half of students in US medical schools are female. Studies show that, compared to their male counterparts, women doctors are friendlier, spend more time with their patients, and are less likely to be sued. According to Jorge Girotti of the University of Illinois at Chicago Medical School, women doctors are…