Fetishes I Don't Get

The subject headings in library catalogs -- such as those that have labeled some babies "monsters" -- are created by real people. And so it takes real people to fix them. Here's the story of one fixer. Read More

What are the problems with the new Australian passport system for genders? In a nutshell: (1) confusion of sex and gender; (2) pretending intersex is a simple natural category; (3) imagining that transgender people never have anything but one of two simple genders; (4) letting doctors be the arbiters of social identity; and (5) uh, did they really have to pick "X"? Read More

I asked a colleague what's wrong with this question: "Is obesity a handicap or a lifestyle choice?" And why calling obesity a disease is a problem. Read More

A doctor promotes an off-label drug to pregnant women as "safe for mother and child," while telling her colleagues it is, in fact, experimental. The FDA can't seem to do anything about it. The doctor's medical school won't seem to do anything about it. Won't somebody please think of the children? Read More

Are the people who felt uncomfortable hearing about a sex act in a university classroom really "sex negative"? Or are they just human? Read More

A major new laboratory study demonstrates (again) that gay men do not have a higher level of sexual interest in children than straight men do. It also suggets (again) that, in men, sexual orientation isn't just about the sex of a man's preferred partners, it's also about the age. Read More

The story of a man who could have been sex-changed at birth, and wasn't. Read More

We've been told that men are much more "target specific" in terms of sexual arousal than women. But recent research that pays attention to the clitoris instead of just the vagina suggests maybe that isn't quite true. Read More

A recent article put out by the American Association of Wine Economists suggested that maybe monogamy drives us to drink. A cultural anthropologist looks at the data and says maybe its really hoes that drive us to drink. Read More

A brief follow-up to "No Science, Please; We're Anthropologists," featuring noteworthy communications from readers and hilarious commentary from the AAA spokesperson. Read More

If we can't count on our doctors to treat us and our children as patients, and not as lucrative lab rats, and we can't count on the Institutional Review Boards, and we can't count on our government, and we can't count on the courts....Who is left to protect our families from bad drug experimentation? Read More

What should we do about the fact that the messy closets of the medical literature are stocked with papers that might well harm patients and practitioners who don't know what insiders know: that those papers are based on problematic studies, are seriously biased, or are just plain wrong according to virtually everyone else in the field? Read More

"VAGINAS UNDER ATTACK," screams the cover of the July issue of Cosmo: "Don't Let Greedy Gyno Talk You Into This Horrible Mistake." So I'm going to forgive Cosmo the mistake of capitalizing a preposition in a title... Read More

I worry about people hitching LBGT rights to the wagon of innateness. Not only does it not capture the experience of all queer people (especially women), it seems too easy to then turn being queer into an impairment, one that might be preventable. Read More