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Monday, February 19, 2007

Sketchy Sex Science: Pills, Chills, and No More Thrills

filed under: Do It for Science by Melissa Gira

Yet another “no, it’s not a female Viagra” study to find a pill to “boost women’s sex drives,” this time in Seattle, and with hot-looking PDA-driven surveys. Scientists on the project say “Sexual dysfunction is not responsive to pharmacologic intervention alone… When we try to intervene, it’s really important to look at the whole picture,” sure, but still, until holistic sex therapy is covered by insurance, what do you think most women will end up with a “doctor recommendation” for? Provided this drug’s manufacturer even has the clout of Viagra’s makers, Pfizer, who have lobbied for it to be covered. (Frequently not covered, you ask? Birth control pills. Plan B. Condoms, even. Honestly, isn’t it a little crazy that we even talk about paying for condoms out-of-pocket?)

In Connecticut, a pastor convenes his flock to sermonize over the evils of (wait for it) MySpace. “The devil is prowling, and he has found a great place to prowl on the Internet,” says Rev. Mark Gomez, and gosh darn it, the Devil’s works are apparently measurable with quantative research these days. According to Rev. Gomez’s statistics, approximately 50,000 sex predators are online at any given time. How did he get those numbers? We’ll never know, as the local news covering the story, the Norwich Bulletin, only saw it fit to print the “study’s” citation as from the “Research of Pastor Mark Gomez of Calvary Church Wasatch Front, Utah” — apparently he has taken his SNS oil show on the road. I beg a reader to try this one out on your Internal Review Board next time you want to do a human subjects study of social networking sites.

Merck is conducting a study of a possible HIV vaccine in the Dominican Republic, Haiti, United States, Australia, Brazil, Canada, Jamaica and Peru, using sex workers as participants. The trial, funded by the HIV Vaccine Trial Network, “pays the women’s meals, transportation and $30 for a lost day’s work,” according to the press. As money to run the study comes from the U.S. government, who currently mandates that NGO’s & CBO’s outside the U.S. recieving U.S. funds state that as an organizational policy, they oppose prostitution (U.S. groups are protected, for now, based on a Free Speech ruling), we wonder what else the sex workers, who are literally putting their bodies on the line for this important research, are leaving the clinic with.

And finally, a former IBM worker, fired over chatroom sex, has brought a discrimination suit against his employer, citing in his complaint that reasonable accomodations under the Americans with Disabilities Act should have been made for his internet addiction, rather than terminating him. This has prompted IBM to respond that sexual disorders are not covered by the ADA, and prompted me to ask, okay, sure, but why then is “erectile dysfunction” covered by insurance?

Fuck science, kids. Let’s lobby.

good news update! This just in via the Boston Globe, young people feel better after sex. Full text, full-on, feel-good quote:

Dr. Lydia A. Shrier, a Children’s Hospital Boston researcher and lead author of a study that reached that conclusion, understands why you’d react that way, but hear her out. She says that until we know what adolescents really think about sex, anyone trying to help them have safer sex — or no sex — might be wasting their time.

To assess young people’s emotions, Shrier’s team gave hand-held computers to 67 adolescents and young adults, 15 to 21 years old, and randomly beeped them at least every three waking hours for a week. A message would then pop up on the participants’ PDAs asking them how they were feeling and whether they had had sex since the previous page.

That’s different from asking people specifically what they think about sex or to remember later what they felt like at the time, Shrier emphasized. This nearly real-time report of how they felt makes the study, published in the Journal of Adolescent Health, different from previous work, including her own, she said.

Sex study of people under 21? Not about disease or abuse? Using technology put into the participants’ own hands? Gold star to Dr. Shrier! It’s safe to love again.

good news update #2! Sexerati hears from a member of the HIV Vaccine Trial Network that each site at which the HIV vaccine will be tested is mandated to form a community advisory board, and sex workers and sex worker health care providers have been invited to be join these advisory boards. As the funding for the trials is intended for research and not advocacy or outreach, USAID regulations on anti-prositution oaths may not apply. We’ll be watching the wires feeds for more. Could this be a sign that community-centered health care for sex workers is getting a leg up?

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