The Pill

(link)

To continue the estrogen-fueled rampage...today in my Human Evolution (Anthropological Biology) class, we talked about male contraceptives a bit, and it made me wonder how technology is shaping up on that front. It can't be that much harder to make a male version of "the pill," it's been 48 years, after all.

"It is now believed that an MHC (male hormone contraceptive, i believe) in the form of a daily pill could be available on the market within 5 to 7 years and implants could arrive even sooner."

“It is time for men to have some control. I think it would empower men and deter some women out there from their nefarious plans,” says Brown. “Some women are out there to use men to get pregnant. This could deter women from doing this. An athlete or a singer is someone who could be a target and they could put a stop to that.” (MSNBC.com article) Hahaha...

Wikipedia article on Male Oral Contraceptives (here)

Graphic description of how male contraceptives work (here)

L'Abri wrap up:

Instead of giving an outline for each talk I went to (10 total), I'm going to do it "what I'm learning in class" style and give the bullet points for the stuff that I thought was mind-blowing, confusing, or had to look up later. Oh, and most of these points are what I got from the talks, not necessarily what they were trying to put across (I had to put in the postmodern subjective justification on this, sorry)

Jerram Barrs: "Common Grace: the general kindness of God"
- Gerard Manley Hopkins: "God's Grandeur"
- common grace makes people even more inexcusable in their suppression of the truth about God. (whoa.)
- human failure speaks to God's glory by contrast (interesting)

Richard Winter: "Sex: Agony and Ecstasy"
- sex in the beginning is like learning to dance, you step all over each others toes at first
- men and women: Vive la Différence!
- Lisa McMinn: "Sexuality and Holy Longing: embracing intimacy in a broken world"
- Proverbs 6:26 - "for the prostitute reduces you to a loaf of bread, and the adulteress preys upon your very life." - we can treat each other like objects when having sex.

Hans Bayer: "Spirituality in Contemporary Culture"
- definition of culture: what men and women value and deem 'good.' (fascinating)
- I would like to do a study on the 'solutions' in movies, because I think this speaks to the culture at that time, what is accepted as a resolution to a problem?
- the contemporary man has no cause to sacrifice his life for.
- postmodern community is built around actions, not talk. talk leads to division, while action leads to a utopian society of progress and diversity.
- there is transcendence through self-exposure in Facebook. Once it's all out there I will be able to figure it out. It's also navel-gazing (I love that term).

David Richter: "Modern Piracy: the ethics of file sharing"
- there is a whole anti-DRM (digital rights management) movement out there (Defective by Design site)
- the government and record companies are trying to get colleges to police file sharing: CNET news "Colleges must police copyright, or else" - which is extremely expensive and just not their job.
- Spiral Frog - a new type of music website that requires a monthly renewal fee? and covers some of the cost for the music by ads and customer surveys.
- THEY'RE THINKING ABOUT BUILDING A NEW INTERNET??? I'm still trying to figure this one out, but the NSF (national science foundation) - who invented the original internet (yeah, yours) for scientists to share info - are thinking about building a new internet with more safety regulations. Is it 1984 already? some articles: (BBC "Internet's future in 2020 debated", Wired "Old Hands Give Internet2 a Helping Hand", NSF - GENI, more to come...) It's pathetic that I haven't heard about this - all the articles I'm finding are from like 2005.
- Wired and Jeff Tweedy from the talk "Music is not a loaf of bread"

...more to come, must head off to Chipotle.

virtual vs. reality

I'm doing a group presentation on Monday and my part is on blogs and social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace. I'm reading a book for it called Interpersonal Divide: The Search For Community in a Technological Age by Michael Bugeja that I'm really excited about. Here's a short description of his idea from the preface (which is how far I've gotten):

"The phrase interpersonal divide concerns the social gap that develops when individuals misperceive reality because of media overconsumption and misinterpret others because of technology overuse. This book analyzes "the interpersonal divide" from different vantage points...detailing the overselling of media and technology and the impact on our behavior when we spend too much time in virtual rather than real habitats."

For my Critical Theory class I'm reading Kalle Lasn's (of Adbusters fame) Culture Jam: How to reverse america's suicidal consumer binge - and why we must. Here's something interesting that he says that is similar to Bugeja's point:

"But I wondered how they'd score on a 'reality index' - which I define as the ratio of time spend in a virtual versus a 'real' environment. The measurement is easy enough to calculate. Jot down in a notebook the number of times a day you laugh at real jokes with real people in real situations against the number of times you laugh at media-generated joke, the amount of sex you have against the amount of sex you watch, and so on."

Very interesting.

Perfume Paper

Okay, sorry, that original post was actually a note to myself for a paper I'm writing for my Critical Theory class. We're to pick a specific area of advertising and analyze it in regards to what basic human need they are manipulating. I picked perfume ads. Have you seen them? They're absolutely the most sexually explicit of any of the ads. I'm focusing on the Dolce & Gabbana, AXE, and Diesel cologne ads.

Here's a huge database of perfume ads from the 80s to present:
http://perso.orange.fr/imagesdeparfums/en/


In a lot of the ads the models seem like they're drugged, suddenly caught in ecstasy. extremely surreal. extremely sexual.

Here's the AXE website. It's highly offensive to women but also pretty funny. It's all in how you look at it. Check out their video for AXE Vice. It's pretty well done.
http://www.theaxeeffect.com

Here's for Diesel cologne. My friends and I saw them while watching the Office last week. A lot of them are basically snapshots of what Diesel thinks is manhood. IN FACT, FOR THE FRAGRANCE PART OF THE WEBSITE YOU HAVE TO CERTIFY THAT YOU ARE OVER 21. What the hell?
http://www.diesel-fragrances.com/_en/_us/index.aspx