day! I've gotten up early (for me) (actually to be honest, I didn't sleep very well and was up at 4, 6, and 8, but whatevs), I've had a fantastic breakfast, and now I'm going to hop in the shower and head into the city. I'm just going to the library or the grad student lounge, but it was really nice getting away from my desk and apartment the last two evenings, and I need to get a substantial amount of reading done, so I think the best way to do that is succumb to my need for switching up locales and get out there.
But first: a look at the headlines. I love the New York Times, I do, but headlines like this beg being blogged about. Sex Infections Found in Quarter of Teenage Girls. First of all, I find it odd that this story is in the Science section and not the Health section, but whatever. The point is that - although I am certainly not disputing the findings and I applaud Cecile Richards's comment that “The national policy of promoting abstinence-only programs is a $1.5 billion failure,” especially since she is the president of the Planned Parenthood Federation of America - it is only women that are being held accountable. The word "men" is only used once in the entire article.
"Health officials recommend treatment for all sex partners of individuals diagnosed with curable sexually transmitted diseases. One promising approach to reach that goal is for doctors who treat infected women to provide or prescribe the same treatment for their partners, Dr. Douglas said. The goal is to encourage men who may not have a physician or who have no symptoms and may be reluctant to seek care to be treated without a doctor’s visit."
[Note the use of 'men' here. While the women are referred to as 'women' in the article itself, they are 'girls' in the headline, which names the text. The text about '(young) women' is about 'girls.']
Treatment: good. Making it really easy to continue to not go to a doctor: not so much. Let's not even get into the heteronormativity of the whole thing or the early emphasis (2nd paragraph) on the disparity between 'African-American' and 'white' girls, or the omission of economic class. Too bad healthcare is so ridiculously expensive - over 40 million American adults (!!) can't afford it (how many children?), according to a CDC report in December. Americans paid 15% of $2 trillion out of pocket in 2004 alone! That's $300,000,000,000 - three hundred billion dollars. In one year. That's insane to me. Let's not even talk about how much the unjust and inhumane war is costing this country or the one its being waged on. (Monetarily, the US is footing the bill, but 700,000 Iraqis have been killed [as many as 1 million according to the ORB] and 4 million displaced out of a population of about 27 million. Compare this to the 166k foreign troops [all but 10.5k American] and 531k Iraqi security forces [this includes 340k police].)
Absurdity.
What's really absurd is that I'm going to go take a hot shower and safely ride a pretty reliable train into the city and grab a cheap fancy coffee and go read literary theory in a library the size of a city block with 44 miles of books. And at the end of the day, I will curl up in my warm loft bed in Brooklyn, and if I can't sleep, it's not because of explosions outside my four walls or fear that more are coming. And I'm glad for that. But why are we paying to do that to so many other people? (And to turn the mood back around:) This is why we vote, this is why presidential terms are limited, this is why I'm going as far with my education as I possibly can and donating to charitable organizations like the Red Cross and Greenpeace and Heifers International, and this is why I'm writing, blogs or otherwise.
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