Yale art student stirs abortion controversy

Posted by Lance Gravlee on April 21, 2008 
Filed Under In the news, Politics, Pregnancy and birth | 5 Comments

Aliza Shvarts, a senior art major at Yale, provoked strong reactions last week after the Yale Daily News broke this story:

Beginning next Tuesday, Shvarts will be displaying her senior art project, a documentation of a nine-month process during which she artificially inseminated herself “as often as possible” while periodically taking abortifacient drugs to induce miscarriages. Her exhibition will feature video recordings of these forced miscarriages as well as preserved collections of the blood from the process.

The goal in creating the art exhibition, Shvarts said, was to spark conversation and debate on the relationship between art and the human body. But her project has already provoked more than just debate, inciting, for instance, outcry at a forum for fellow senior art majors held last week. And when told about Shvarts’ project, students on both ends of the abortion debate have expressed shock — saying the project does everything from violate moral code to trivialize abortion.

There seems to be some confusion about the facts. In a statement issued on Friday, Yale spokesperson Helaine Klasky said that Ms. Shvarts had twice assured university officials that she had not impregnanted herself or induced miscarriages. But the same day, Shvarts began an op-ed in the Yale Daily News with this sentence: “For the past year, I performed repeated self-induced miscarriages.”

Although some scholars defend the project on grounds of intellectual freedom, most people across the political spectrum—in academia and in the broader public sphere—have condemned the project. In particular, Yale officials have distanced themselves from Ms. Shvarts’s project. The Dean of the Yale School of Art, Robert Storr, said, “If I had known about this, I would not have permitted it to go forward.” Peter Salovey, Dean of Yale College, went further: “I am appalled. This piece of performance art as reported in the press bears no relation to what I consider appropriate for an undergraduate senior project. The Dean of the School of Art and I are reassessing what constitutes an appropriate senior art project and the manner in which those projects are mentored.” Indeed, this morning the Yale Daily News reports that Yale has disciplined two faculty members for exercising poor judgment in mentoring the student.

In my view, Ms. Shvarts’s claim that she impregnated herself artificially and induced miscarriages with abortifacient drugs is morally reprehensible—and an abuse of intellectual freedom. The high value that universities place on intellectual freedom does not mean that anything goes. Students and faculty still must exercise that freedom responsibly.

What’s your take?

Update: Yale administrators have indicated in a statement that Ms. Shvarts will not be allowed to exhibit her work unless she admits that it is a work of fiction—specifically, “that she did not try to inseminate herself and induce miscarriages, and that no human blood will be physically displayed in her installation.”

Sexual violence in the Congo

Posted by Lance Gravlee on April 18, 2008 
Filed Under Sexual violence | Leave a Comment

The Greatest SilenceIn class today, we screened the first half hour of The Greatest Silence: Rape in the Congo, a new documentary that debuted on HBO earlier this week. The film and filmmaker, Lisa Jackson, were also featured in a story on NPR this week, in the Washington Post last week, and in the New York Times last fall before the film was shown at the Sundance festival in January.

It’s unfortunate that we couldn’t watch the full 76 minutes, but I encourage you to catch it on HBO or grab the DVD when it comes out. As I suggested in class, the film is valuable not only because it puts a human face on the suffering and survival of Congolese women but also because it connects us to their story. First, because Jackson weaves in her own story of having experienced gang rape, it allows us to see the common inhumanity of sexual violence across radically different cultural and political contexts. Second, the film draws out the linkages between our society and a forgotten war in the Democratic Republic of Congo. As Jackson said in a hearing before the U.S. Senate, referring to foreign extraction of coltan from the DRC, “Everyone in this room should consider the fact that there is the blood of Congolese women on their laptop computers and on their cellphones.”

What are your reactions to this film?

Thinking about sexuality? “Me too.”

Posted by Lance Gravlee on April 16, 2008 
Filed Under In the news | Leave a Comment

In today’s news, the Chronicle of Higher Education writes about a confessional web site started by students at Duke University to dispell the myth of “effortless perfection” at that institution. The blog, “Me Too,” allows students to express their concerns and to hear from other students who may have similar experiences.

Perhaps it’s no surprise—but it’s striking all the same—that a lot of posts relate to sexuality. When I checked this afternoon, more than half of the most recent comments dealt with relationships (1, 2, 3), body image (1, 2), sexual orientation (1, 2, 3, 4), or sexual violence.

Students at any college or university can contribute to the blog, and readers can comment on any existing post. “But,” according to the Chronicle, “the only response allowed is ‘Me too.’”

See the world differently

Posted by Lance Gravlee on April 15, 2008 
Filed Under STIs, Sexuality research | Leave a Comment

Worldmapper: HIV PrevalenceA few students have asked for more information about the maps I showed in class to visualize the global distribution of sexually transmitted infections, poverty, and violence. The maps, like this one showing HIV prevalence, come from worldmapper.org, a project of researchers at the University of Sheffield and the University of Michigan. See the full index of available maps here.

You can also read more about the Worldmapper project in a recent article from PLoS Medicine, an open-source, peer-reviewed journal.

Texting for sex(info)

Posted by Lance Gravlee on April 15, 2008 
Filed Under Adolescent sexuality, Sex education | Leave a Comment

Last week we discussed the state of sexuality education in the U.S. and elsewhere, and we examined some of the evidence that more pragmatic approaches to sex ed are associated with lower rates of unwanted pregnancies, abortions, and sexually transmitted infections. We also saw that most Americans think young teens should have access to reliable information about all aspects of sexuality.

In a related development, last month’s American Journal of Public Health included a brief report about SEXINFO, a sexual health text messaging service developed by Internet Sexuality Information Services, Inc., in partnership with the San Francisco Department of Public Health.

The service was developed as a response to rising gonorrhea rates among African American youth in San Francisco. In developing the service, ISIS and the health department sought input from young people ages 15-19 to ensure that it was relevant to the groups they were trying to reach. So far, SEXINFO has exceeded expectations. According to the report in AJPH, there were more than 4,500 inquiries in the first 25 weeks of the service. More than half of those inquiries led to follow-up information and referrals. The top three inquiries, according to the developers, were (1) “what 2 do if ur condom broke,” (2) “2 find out about STDs,” and (3) “if u think ur pregnant.”

The service is currently available only in the San Francisco area, but it wouldn’t be difficult to replicate elsewhere in the U.S. How valuable do you think it would be to have access to such a service where you live? Do you think young people would use it? Why or why not?

Food insecurity, structural violence, and HIV

Posted by Lance Gravlee on April 14, 2008 
Filed Under STIs, Sexuality research | 3 Comments

In class today, I discussed a study published in 2007 on the links between food insufficiency, sexual behavior, and HIV transmission in Botswana and Swaziland. I cited the links between undernutrition, food insecurity, and HIV as an example of how structural violence constrains and influences individual behavior and well being.

If you’d like to learn more about this study, check out this interview with Sheri Weiser, M.D., lead author on the study and assistant adjunct professor of medicine at UC-San Francisco.

How, if at all, does this study—or our discussion in class—change your thinking about the causes of the AIDS epidemic? What other factors do you think need to be addressed? How useful do you find the concept of structural violence for making sense of global inequalities in health?

Exam 2 postponed to Monday, March 31

Posted by Lance Gravlee on March 19, 2008 
Filed Under Announcements | 2 Comments

The second midterm exam has been postponed until Monday, March 31. The main rationale for this change is to ensure that students in all sections benefit equally from the review session in next week’s discussion sections. Like the previous exam, this one will be administered online through the E-learning system. This schedule change means that we will not have lecture on the day of the exam, although Monday discussion sections will meet as usual.

This change has already been updated on the course schedule. Your TAs will provide more details about the exam during discussion section next week.

“Polyamory” and the Internet

Posted by Brian Tyler on March 7, 2008 
Filed Under Love and relationships, Sexual behavior | Leave a Comment

Last week we learned that polygamy, or plural marriage, exists in many societies around the world. This week we discussed how changes in technology alter the experience and expression of sexuality. Those two themes come together in a recent commentary from Wired, which suggests that polyamorous relationships are on the rise in America, in part due to social networking outlets on the Internet that offer new ways of interacting with similarly minded people. From the Wired piece:

While having multiple committed partners is not a new concept, many polyamorists have told me they felt lost, guilty, alone or freakish until they came across the word polyamory on the internet and for the first time had a context for the way they felt about love.

“You can argue that before the internet, the poly community didn’t exist,” says Franklin Veaux, author of What, Like, Two Girlfriends?, a respected polyamory FAQ. “There’s no question that the rise of the internet and the rise of polyamory coincided, although poly does predate the net by 6,000 years or so.”

Polyamory may not be a new practice, but the concept is probably new to most Americans, and relatively few research papers have been published on the subject. What do you see as the benefits and difficulties of a polyamorous lifestyle? If you could have two partners consent to such an arrangement, would you be interested? What moral or ethical issues does polyamory raise for you?

Not-so-human sexuality

Posted by Brian Tyler on February 18, 2008 
Filed Under In the news, Sex and evolution | 7 Comments

Two recent stories in the news highlight some of the ways in which human morals and human behaviors are used to discuss sex behavior in the animal world.

In the first story, two western lowland gorillas in Congo were filmed having sex in the “missionary” position - that is, face to face. This is a style of sex that has not been reported before in this subspecies of gorilla, much less filmed in the wild.

Leah and George’s encounter made their plight even more poignant for Breuer.

“It leads me to think about how similar gorillas can be to humans, [and yet] we humans are destroying them,” he said.

In the second story, wildlife experts and animal rights activists are clashing over the controversial pregnancy of a juvenile endangered elephant. Wildlife experts are excited over the pregnancy, as it represents the first pregnancy of a captive elephant in Australia; activists argue that the breeding standards for captive elephants have been violated and the zoo has acted irresponsibly in allowing a juvenile to become pregnant.

Allowing such a young elephant to fall pregnant was “the equivalent of allowing your 12-year-old daughter to become pregnant,” said Erica Martin, Asia Pacific Director of the International Fund for Animal Welfare (IFAW).

“It is completely irresponsible,” Martin said in a statement on Thursday. Martin said that under captive breeding plans elephants should be at least 11-years-old before conceiving.

Like Lauren’s earlier post on macaques and “grooming for sex,” these two stories are news, in part, because we attach human meaning to animal behaviors. Certainly, humans are animals themselves, but are we reasonable to ascribe human values to animal behaviors? Does face-to-face sex in the gorilla world suggest greater intimacy between partners, as we suggest about human lovemaking? Does the pregnancy of a juvenile in the animal world mean the same thing that it does in the human world? In what other ways do we ascribe human qualities to animal sexual behaviors, or vice versa?

How Cupid’s Arrow Works

Posted by Brian Tyler on February 15, 2008 
Filed Under In the news, Love and relationships, Sex and evolution | 2 Comments

In the wake of Valentine’s Day and our discussions about sexual attraction this week, you might want to take notice of several recent research reports.

On Tuesday, the results of two new studies were announced, just in time for Valentine’s Day. The first, soon to be published in the journal Psychological Science, suggests that attractive people are indeed attracted to other attractive people. Surprise, surprise… From the UPI story:

The study, scheduled to be published in the journal Psychological Science, found people with similar levels of physical attractiveness tend to date each other, with more attractive people being more particular about the physical attractiveness of their potential dates.

In addition, the study found people prefer to date others who are moderately more attractive than they are. The researchers also found that most people agree on what is attractive, characteristics like symmetrical faces.

However, results from a different study, soon to be published in the journal Evolution and Human Behavior, suggest that when people fall in love, they find other people to be comparably less attractive. From a Reuters story:

Feeling love for your romantic partner appears to make everybody else less attractive, and the emotion appears to work in very specific ways in enabling you to push thoughts of that tempting other out of your mind,” said Gian Gonzaga of eHarmony, whose study is published in the journal Evolution and Human Behavior.

“It’s almost like love puts blinders on people,” added Martie Haselton, an associate professor of psychology and communication studies at UCLA.

These two announcements follow on the heels of similar recent research on human sexual attraction:

All of this research might lead one to think that we really have no control over who we fall for in matters of love. In my discussion sections, many students felt that physical qualities were far less important than personality characteristics. Do you agree? If so, is personality something that can be evaluated with first impressions? Do you believe in “love at first sight”? What about “first sound” or “first smell”?

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