Search Results for: drugs

The Shames of Men

Getty, Illustration by Homestead

Don Kulick | Longreads | June 2019 | 14 minutes (3,788 words)

A few months ago, in April 2019, an eyebrow-raising headline appeared in the British newspaper the Guardian: “Botched penis enlargements: Papua New Guinea doctors warn of nationwide problem.”

The article reported that over the past two years the General Hospital in the country’s capital city, Port Moresby, has treated more than five hundred men who injected baby oil and other foreign substances into their penises to make them bigger. The medical professionals who sounded the alarm about this practice warned that it seems to be widespread and is a growing threat to men’s health throughout the country.

I read this story and sighed. I knew that those doctors were glimpsing only the tip of a ghastly iceberg.

*

Only a few weeks before the Guardian article appeared, I had returned to Gapun, a remote village in an all-but-forgotten corner of Papua New Guinea where I have been doing anthropological research for the past thirty years. The village is much further off the beaten path than any doctor working at Port Moresby General Hospital is likely to have traveled. Getting there from the nearest town can take two days, but this time I made it in a record fourteen hours.

Leaving from the nearest town with my traveling companions — three health workers from a local NGO — I rode in the back of a truck with no shock absorbers on an unpaved road cratered with potholes. For nine hours. At the end of the road we climbed into a flimsy outboard motor-powered canoe, bobbing on ocean waves up the coast before entering an immense mangrove lagoon and, after three hours, arriving at the end of a shallow, narrow creek. From there, we shouldered our bags and trekked for an hour, through viscous mud and clouds of mosquitoes, across slim slippery waterlogged poles that villagers call “bridges.”

Finally we arrived in the small windless slit in the rainforest that is Gapun; a village with a usual population of about two hundred people. Read more…

Yentl Syndrome: A Deadly Data Bias Against Women

Illustration by Homestead

Caroline Criado Perez | An excerpt adapted from Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men | Harry N. Abrams | 22 minutes (5,929 words)

In the 1983 film Yentl, Barbra Streisand plays a young Jewish woman in Poland who pretends to be a man in order to receive an education. The film’s premise has made its way into medical lore as “Yentl syndrome,” which describes the phenomenon whereby women are misdiagnosed and poorly treated unless their symptoms or diseases conform to that of men. Sometimes, Yentl syndrome can prove fatal.

If I were to ask you to picture someone in the throes of a heart attack, you most likely would think of a man in his late middle age, possibly overweight, clutching at his heart in agony. That’s certainly what a Google image search offers up. You’re unlikely to think of a woman: heart disease is a male thing. But this stereotype is misleading. A recent analysis of data from 22 million people from North America, Europe, Asia and Australasia found that women from lower socio-economic backgrounds are 25% more likely to suffer a heart attack than men in the same income bracket.

Since 1989, cardiovascular disease has been the leading cause of death in US women and, following a heart attack, women are more likely to die than men. This disparity in deaths has been the case since 1984, and young women appear to be particularly at risk: in 2016 the British Medical Journal reported that young women were almost twice as likely as men to die in hospital. This may be in part because doctors aren’t spotting at-risk women: in 2016, the American Heart Association also raised concerns about a number of risk-prediction models “commonly used” in patients with acute coronary syndrome, because they were developed in patient populations that were at least two-thirds male. The performance of these risk-prediction models in women “is not well established.”

Common preventative methods may also not work as well in women. Acetylsalicylic acid (aspirin) has been found to be effective in preventing a first heart attack in men, but a 2005 paper found that it had a “nonsignificant” effect in women aged between forty-five and sixty-five. Prior to this study, the authors noted, there had been “few similar data in women.” A more recent study from 2011 found that not only was aspirin ineffective for women, it was potentially harmful “in the majority of patients.” Similarly, a 2015 study found that taking a low dose of aspirin every other day “is ineffective or harmful in the majority of women in primary prevention” of cancer or heart disease. Read more…

On Truth and Lying in the Extra German Sense

Illustration by Homestead

Rebecca Schuman | Longreads | June 2019 | 15 minutes (3,962 words)

Would you like to know if you’ve gained weight? If you’re annoying, or too talkative, or not as smart as you think? If you’re doing something, literally anything, the wrong way? Just ask a German and they will tell you immediately. Germans do not do this to hurt your feelings. There isn’t even a single long word in German for “hurt feelings,” they just translate the English directly (verletzte Gefühle), and everyone knows that direct translation from the English is how Germans demonstrate their disdain. There is, however, a common and beloved expression for an individual who makes a big show of having hurt feelings, and that is beleidigte Leberwurst, or a perennially “insulted liver sausage,” because hurt fee-fees are for weak non-German babies.

After all, Germans are just being direct: unmittelbar, or literally translated, “unmediated.” Their assertions are simply unverblümt, or “not putting a flower on it.” They’re not mean, they’re freimütig, or “free-hearted.” They’re just being forthright: offen, “open,” which is a good thing, ja? Germans couldn’t even begin to imagine why being brutally honest would hurt someone in the first place! If the truth hurts you, isn’t that more your fault than the truth’s?

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We Still Don’t Know How to Navigate the Cultural Legacy of Eugenics

Illustration by Tom Peake

Audrey Farley | Longreads | June 2019 | 13 minutes (3,381 words)

 

On May 28, Justice Clarence Thomas issued an eyebrow-raising opinion. It concurred with the Supreme Court’s decision to uphold an Indiana law that requires abortion providers to follow a certain protocol to dispose of fetal remains and prohibits abortions on the sole basis of a fetus’s sex, race, or disability. It wasn’t the justice’s position that caught attention, but rather his method. In speaking to the law’s second provision on selective abortions, Thomas launched into a history of eugenics, the debunked science of racial improvement that gained popularity in the early decades of the 20th century.

Arguing that abortion is “an act rife with the potential for eugenic manipulation,” the justice offered a lengthy discussion of the origins of the birth-control movement in the United States. In this discussion, written for the benefit of other courts considering abortion laws, Thomas explains how Planned Parenthood grew in tandem with state-sterilization campaigns, providing the foundation for the legalized abortion movement. (As historians corrected, legal abortion preceded birth control, as it was not regulated until the 19th century.) The justice cites the disturbing rhetoric of Planned Parenthood’s founder, Margaret Sanger, who wrote in The Pivot of Civilization that birth control was a means of reducing the “ever increasing, unceasingly spawning class of human beings who never should have been born at all.” While conceding that Sanger did not support abortion, Thomas nonetheless argues that “Sanger’s arguments about the eugenic value of birth control in securing ‘the elimination of the unfit’ apply with even greater force to abortion, making it significantly more effective as a tool of eugenics.”

Thomas does not offer concrete evidence that American women actually abort fetuses solely because of sex, race, or disability. Nor does he explore the possible reasons for abortions related to these criteria, such as financial hardship or the lack of societal support for individuals with chronic conditions. His grievance with abortion boils down to this point: the practice is ill-borne. This claim is inaccurate, for reasons that historians swiftly noted; it also obscures the fact that eugenics did in fact initiate many traditions in this country, not all of which are perceived to be heinous today. Thomas’s incautious opinion, which echoes other voices in the abortion debate, unwittingly invites a more nuanced discussion of eugenics’ legacies.

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Time To Kill the Rabbit?

Stringer / Getty, Collage by Homestead

Lily Meyer | Longreads | June 2019 | 10 minutes (2,725 words)

Jordan Peele’s second horror movie, Us, is full of rabbits. They twitch and hop through his underground world, their innocence a strange affront. Both Us and its predecessor, Get Out, are interested in innocence; Peele is expert at skewering the American habit, particularly present and noxious among liberal white Americans, of pretending to be blameless. The rabbits in Us serve as reminders of what true blamelessness looks like: animal, unknowing, and helpless, which is to say extremely vulnerable.

John Updike may have had a similar idea when he named his most famous protagonist Rabbit Angstrom. Rabbit — real name Harry — clings hard to the idea of innocence. Rabbit is an adult man, and not an especially kind or wise one, but in his head, he’s a high school basketball star, praised and beloved no matter how he behaves. Throughout his four-book life, Rabbit remains averse to adulthood. He wants to be a good boy.

Given his habit of sexualizing women, it’s easy to imagine Rabbit as an early reader of Playboy, that icon of male misbehavior. Where Peele’s rabbits signify goodness, the Playboy Bunny represents a certain kind of bad — though Hugh Hefner claimed not to think so. In a 1967 interview, he told Oriana Fallaci that “the rabbit, the bunny, in America has a sexual meaning, and I chose it because it’s a fresh animal, shy, vivacious, jumping — sexy… Consider the kind of girl that we made popular: the Playmate of the Month. She is never sophisticated, a girl you cannot really have. She is a young, healthy, simple girl.” Innocence was key to Playboy’s version of sexiness, and yet everyone knew — you only had to look at the centerfold — that innocence was feigned. Read more…

Murder in the Name of Drug Prevention

AP Photo/Bullit Marquez

Under Philippine president Rodrigo Duterte, drug dealers routinely get assassinated on Manila’s busy streets. Dead bodies get dumped in the bay and on city sidewalks, with signs reading, “I’m a pusher” hanging from the deceased’s necks. Those who resist, including clergy, have been shot in broad daylight. For Virginia Quarterly Review, Adam Willis examines the president’s brutal war on drugs, and how this Catholic nation seems torn between support and outrage. Many Filipinos applaud Duterte’s efforts to curtail the drug trade, while many Catholics have actively started resisting them and his violent, dictatorial rhetoric, risking their own lives in the process.

In the Philippines, the church has emerged as the most prominent voice of dissent against a drug war that has claimed, by some estimates, more than twenty thousand lives. It is also under perpetual assault from a president intent on contesting the very essence of Philippine Catholicism. Having framed his 2015 campaign as a referendum on the legitimacy of the church, Duterte has forced religious leaders to choose between coveted political capital and their moral mandates. It is a familiar dilemma, exacerbated by deep historical fissures between conservative and liberal clerics, and it has heightened pressure on the church’s most prominent prelates. In particular, Cardinal Luis Antonio Tagle, the country’s most influential church authority, who splits his time between duties on behalf of the Vatican and leading packed services in the cathedral of Intramuros—the Catholic heart of the Philippine capital—has been criticized by activists and clerics alike for his deferential approach to dealing with Duterte. Such soft-pedaling, they argue, seems blind to the country’s suffering and risks degrading the moral integrity of the church. Meanwhile, Jun and a small crop of the church opposition have reoriented their lives around a mission to document the drug war while helping to seek accountability for those responsible.

In a country where vigilante executions have become commonplace, this work is perilous at best; Catholic leaders who speak out are often inundated with death threats, sometimes from Duterte himself. In the last year and a half, three Filipino priests have been killed under mysterious circumstances. One was ambushed in his car after negotiating the release of a political prisoner; another, while saying blessings on a group of children, was shot dead by a motorcyclist; a third was murdered at the altar in front of parishioners just before Mass. In 2017 and 2018, such violence against clergymen prompted more than two hundred priests and religious leaders to petition for licenses to carry firearms.

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Church vs. State

Longreads Pick

Even though many Filipinos are pleased with their controversial president’s openly violent war on drugs, many in the Philippine Catholic Church are waging a campaign of resistance at great personal cost.

Published: Jun 1, 2019
Length: 28 minutes (7,137 words)

Father’s Little Helper

Illustration by Eric Peterson

Scott Korb | Longreads | June 2019 | 14 minutes (3,467 words)

I.

Some of what you’re reading I was writing a few hours after taking half a Valium, prescribed by my doctor, partly for anxiety and partly for general neck and shoulder pain, and also a tingle and numbness that I was then feeling down my left arm into my fingers. It began with a yoga pose. It’s hard to know now what exactly I wrote while under the drug’s influence, such as it was. When I took the Valium I was 39; now I’m 41.

These 40-odd years, if Schopenhauer is right, have given me the text of my life. “The next 30,” he says, will “supply the commentary,” of which this, I hope, is an early part.

The pharmacist, who was younger than me, with slick hair, and whom I’d gotten to know a little over the years since my wife was treated for breast cancer, used the word spasm when referring to the orders faxed over from my doctor’s office. I nodded, yes, muscle spasms, even though that didn’t seem right; maybe I don’t know what spasm means. I said nothing about the low-grade anxiety I’ve felt for much of my life, which has gotten worse since my wife’s treatments finished up. “Low and slow,” he recommended. So I took half a pill. I’d never taken one before, and I’m cautious.

While discussing the pain in my neck and shoulder, the facial tics I’ve had my whole life, I also told the doctor I’m reluctant to take drugs, even Ibuprofen, though my wife has told me Valium can be fun. She recalls a day just before Father’s Day, 2014, wandering through New York City’s West Village, buying me expensive t-shirts in the late-spring heat, a week after major surgery, without a worry in the world.

I decided to take the Valium in advance of an MRI my doctor had prescribed to capture images of my cervical spine, hunting for disease. The pill would help get me through the test.
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William S. Burroughs and the Cult of Rock ‘n’ Roll

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Casey Rae | William S. Burroughs and the Cult of Rock ‘n’ Roll | University of Texas Press | June 2019 | 28 minutes (4,637 words)

 

Naked Lunch is inseparable from its author William S. Burroughs, which tends to happen with certain major works. The book may be the only Burroughs title many literature buffs can name. In terms of name recognition, Naked Lunch is a bit like Miles Davis’ Kind of Blue, which also arrived in 1959. Radical for its time, Kind of Blue now sounds quaint, though it is undeniably a masterwork.

Burroughs wrote the bulk of his famous novel Naked Lunch in Tan­gier, Morocco between 1954 and 1957. During those years, Burroughs was strung out and unhappy, living off of his parents’ allowance and getting deeper and deeper into addiction. He had friends but rarely saw them, preferring to spend days at a time staring at his shoes while ensorcelled in a narcotic haze.

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Peers in Healing

Photo by The Tonik

Livia Gershon | Longreads | June 2019 | 8 minutes (1,883 words)

On a Tuesday morning in May, Priscilla Matos was at Revive Recovery Center, an art gallery-turned substance use recovery hub on Main Street in Nashua, New Hampshire, organizing supplies and filling out paperwork. Around her, hand-lettered signs offered advice: “Find Your Purpose,” “Love Yourself Everyday.” On a nearby bulletin board, flyers advertised support groups that borrowed wisdom from Christianity and Buddhism. A man with tattoos wearing a New England Patriots shirt came by; Matos showed him how to make tea with a plug-in pot and congratulated him on landing in a sober housing program. Matos, who is 28, with dark-rimmed glasses and a warm smile, helps visitors at Revive find whatever resources they need—food pantries, treatment centers, places where they can take a shower and wash their clothes. She’s good at it in part because, for much of the past decade, she’s needed those kinds of things herself.

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