Reconstrucción del himen en mujeres islámicas

Desperate to hide taboo sex
Unmarried Islamic women have surgery to fake their virginity

Hugh Naylor, Chronicle Foreign Service

Sunday, May 20, 2007

(05-20) 04:00 PDT Damascus, Syria — It began as a summer fling.

Ahmad, 23, a smooth-talking student from Damascus, was instantly taken with the 20-year-old beauty with flowing black hair from the coastal town of Lattakia. “I thought she looked so beautiful, so nice,” said Ahmad, who asked that only his first named be used.

He recalled their first encounter: Casual conversation quickly led to kissing. And then one afternoon, kissing led to sex, turning the love-struck couple’s story into a nightmare. Premarital sex is a sin in Islam.

They spent the following weeks desperately searching for a physician who would secretly perform an illegal operation: the surgical reattachment of her hymen. Known as hymenoplasty, or takhit in Arabic, the surgery involves the suturing of the hymen, a mucous membrane that covers the vagina and symbolizes virginity.

No country tracks the number of hymen reconstruction procedures, but anecdotal evidence suggests the surgery is becoming increasingly popular among unmarried women in the Middle East. In Egypt, for example, it has become so widespread that in February Egypt’s top cleric, Grand Mufti Ali Gomaa, publicly condoned a religious edict allowing reconstructive hymen surgery.

Vuelven los implantes

May 24, 2007
Skin Deep
Implants Are Back, and So Is Debate
By NATASHA SINGER

WITH silicone breast implants back on the market, a debate over follow-up care is roiling the plastic surgery community, even as more women are choosing to have their breasts surgically enlarged.

When the Food and Drug Administration decided last November to again allow the use of silicone for breast augmentation, it did so provided that manufacturers instruct doctors to advise patients they will need biannual M.R.I.’s to check for ruptures and should remove the implants if a rupture is detected.

But some surgeons are criticizing the recommendations, saying they are bureaucratic and unscientific and that they interfere with their ability to tailor diagnosis and treatment to each patient. Some said they would not recommend the M.R.I.’s, while others said they would follow the recommendations, albeit unenthusiastically.

“The majority of plastic surgeons, even 99 percent of surgeons, would say there are problems with the directions,” said Dr. Scott L. Spear, chairman of plastic surgery at Georgetown University Hospital. “They bring a lot of red tape and expense.”

As evidence of the recommendations’ unpopularity, he reported that on Tuesday most of about 150 doctors surveyed at a meeting in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, of the American Association of Plastic Surgeons, a group of leading physicians, said they disagreed with the F.D.A.’s directives.

Other surgeons said that doctors should follow the directions because much remains unknown about the durability and rate of rupture of silicone implants, which were the subject of intense and controversial class action suits in the 1990s.

El DSM-IV y las parafilias

EL DSM-IV Y LAS PARAFILIAS: UN ARGUMENTO PARA SU RETIRADA

Charles Moser, Ph.D., M.D.

Instituto en Estudios Avanzados de Sexualidad Humana

San Francisco, California

Peggy J. Kleinplatz, Ph.D.

Universidad de Ottawa

Ottawa, Ontario, Canadá
Originally published in: Revista de Terapia Sexual y de Pareja, Número 19, Agosto 2.004, paginas 31-56
Resumen: El DSM-IV-TR (2000) establece sus propios estándares para la inclusión de diagnósticos y para los cambios en su texto. La sección de las parafilias se analiza desde la perspectiva de en qué medida el DSM cumple tales estándares. El concepto de parafilia como psicopatología se analizó y evaluó críticamente para determinar si cumple la definición de trastorno mental que aparece en el DSM; no lo hace. La categoría diagnóstica de parafilia fue criticada en su lógica, consistencia, claridad y en si constituye un trastorno mental diferenciado. El DSM presenta “hechos” para sostener diversos puntos del texto. Se escrutó la veracidad de tales “hechos”. Se encontró poca evidencia que los apoyara. Se resaltaron los problemas con la tradición de equiparar los intereses sexuales particulares con la psicopatoiogía. Se concluyó que la sección de las parafilias tiene fallos tan graves que se propone su retirada del DSM.

Píldora postcoital

Con prisas y sin receta

Mayka Sánchez
EL PAIS SEMANAL - 25-05-2007

La también llamada píldora del día después es, según subrayan los expertos, un método anticonceptivo de urgencia “para prevenir un embarazo no deseado tras el fallo del método anticonceptivo habitual o de un coito desprotegido”. Está compuesta de dosis altas de la hormona levonorgestrel, que actúa por distintas vías: inhibiendo la ovulación, dificultando la fecundación del óvulo por los espermatozoides y evitando la implantación del óvulo en el útero.
Como aclara el doctor Ezequiel García Campos, presidente de la Sociedad Española de Contracepción (SEC), la píldora poscoital evita el embarazo antes de que se produzca: “En ningún caso actuaría si ya existiese gestación, ni tampoco sería dañina para el feto en desarrollo”.

La Organización Mundial de la Salud (OMS) la considera un medicamento esencial, al que debe tener acceso libre toda mujer que la requiera. Las sociedades científicas españolas de Ginecología (SEGO) y de Contracepción (SEC) solicitaron en 2005 al Ministerio de Sanidad y Consumo (todavía esperan la respuesta) la dispensación sin receta médica a partir de los criterios establecidos por la Agencia de Evaluación Estadounidense para Medicamentos y Alimentos (FDA) y la Agencia Europea para la Evaluación de Medicamentos (EMEA). Se trata de un producto seguro, fácil de usar y que no presenta efectos secundarios perjudiciales para la salud.

El mito del porno

The Porn Myth

October 20, 2003

In the end, porn doesn’t whet men’s appetites—it turns them off the real thing.

* By Naomi Wolf

At a benefit the other night, I saw Andrea Dworkin, the anti-porn activist most famous in the eighties for her conviction that opening the floodgates of pornography would lead men to see real women in sexually debased ways. If we did not limit pornography, she argued—before Internet technology made that prospect a technical impossibility—most men would come to objectify women as they objectified porn stars, and treat them accordingly. In a kind of domino theory, she predicted, rape and other kinds of sexual mayhem would surely follow.

The feminist warrior looked gentle and almost frail. The world she had, Cassandra-like, warned us about so passionately was truly here: Porn is, as David Amsden says, the “wallpaper” of our lives now. So was she right or wrong?
She was right about the warning, wrong about the outcome. As she foretold, pornography did breach the dike that separated a marginal, adult, private pursuit from the mainstream public arena. The whole world, post-Internet, did become pornographized. Young men and women are indeed being taught what sex is, how it looks, what its etiquette and expectations are, by pornographic training—and this is having a huge effect on how they interact.

But the effect is not making men into raving beasts. On the contrary: The onslaught of porn is responsible for deadening male libido in relation to real women, and leading men to see fewer and fewer women as “porn-worthy.” Far from having to fend off porn-crazed young men, young women are worrying that as mere flesh and blood, they can scarcely get, let alone hold, their attention.

Ceremonia del porno (II)

«Porno ergo sum»
Por F. Castro Flórez.

La primera frase de este magnífico ensayo escrito a cuatro manos es reveladora: «Hablar de pornografía sigue siendo difícil». Como estos jóvenes y lúcidos ensayistas añaden, lo complicado es encontrar el tono sin entrar a tomar postura, esto es, sin caer en los «vicios» de los pornófobos o de aquellos para los que el material «excitante» lo es todo.

Barba y Montes, un novelista y un crítico de arte, no entran, afortunamente, en disquisiciones etimológicas o metafísicas en torno al origen del término pornografía, ni escriben un texto al uso plagado de anécdotas (tamaños de los miembros viriles, cantidas de polvos, proezas felatrices, etc.), sino que adoptan una serie de perspectivas interpretativas que destacan por su sobriedad.

Lo más interesante. Tiene algo este texto de aproximación antropológica al fenómeno pornográfico como algo que tendría una dimensión «institucional» en un cauce análogo al que formularon Danto o Dickie al abordar el arte. Lejos de la jerga, particularmente del cóctel lacaniano-heideggeriano que emplea Zizek, por ejemplo, en Mirando al sesgo, revisan lo más interesante de la bibliografía, deteniéndose en los planteamientos de Linda Williams o Walter Kendrick.

Ciencia y ficción de la vagina

BMJ 2005;330:970 (23 April), doi:10.1136/bmj.330.7497.970
reviews
Book
Origin of the World: Science and the Fiction of the Vagina. Jelto Trenth

The vagina—and here I follow the title of the book by using this term as lay shorthand for women’s genitalia—is a paradoxical part of women’s bodies. Reviled but also revered, it has been received in different historical and cultural contexts with revulsion, awe, fascination, denial, violence, and even entrepreneurialism.

In recent years in the West the academy and popular culture have focused attention on the vagina. This fascinating and lively account of the “science and fiction of the vagina,” which takes its main title from Gustave Courbet’s 1866 painting, is part of this shift in interest. It covers an incredibly diverse range of issues, from historical, anthropological, sociological, psychological, sexological, physiological, and other perspectives. In so doing Drenth urges us to think beyond the idea of flesh as just flesh and describes the enormous—and changing—influence of culture and context on how we understand, perceive, and experience anatomy and physiology. Even our “parts” are (much) more than the sum of their parts.

El matrimonio en Estados Unidos

Marriage in America

The frayed knot
May 24th 2007 | MORGANTOWN, WEST VIRGINIA
From The Economist print edition

As the divorce rate plummets at the top of American society and rises at the bottom, the widening “marriage gap” is breeding inequality

THE students at West Virginia University don’t want you to think they take life too seriously. It is the third-best “party school” in America, according to the Princeton Review’s annual ranking of such things, and comes a creditable fifth in the “lots of beer” category. Booze sometimes causes students’ clothes to fall off. Those who wake up garmentless after a hook-up endure the “walk of shame”, trudging back to their own dormitories in an obviously borrowed football shirt, stirring up gossip with every step.

And yet, for all their protestations of wildness, the students are a serious-minded bunch. Yes, they have pre-marital sex. “I don’t see how it’s a bad thing,” says Ashley, an 18-year-old studying criminology. But they are careful not to fall pregnant. It would be “a major disaster,” says Ashley. She has plans. She wants to finish her degree, go to the FBI academy in Virginia and then start a career as a “profiler” helping to catch dangerous criminals. She wants to get married when she is about 24, and have children perhaps at 26. She thinks having children out of wedlock is not wrong, but unwise.

A few blocks away, in a soup kitchen attached to a church, another 18-year-old balances a baby on her knee. Laura has a less planned approach to parenthood. “It just happened,” she says. The father and she were “never really together”, merely “friends with benefits, I guess”. He is now gone. “I didn’t want to put up with his stuff,” she says. “Drugs and stuff,” she adds, by way of explanation.

There is a widening gulf between how the best- and least-educated Americans approach marriage and child-rearing. Among the elite (excluding film stars), the nuclear family is holding up quite well. Only 4% of the children of mothers with college degrees are born out of wedlock. And the divorce rate among college-educated women has plummeted. Of those who first tied the knot between 1975 and 1979, 29% were divorced within ten years. Among those who first married between 1990 and 1994, only 16.5% were.

At the bottom of the education scale, the picture is reversed. Among high-school dropouts, the divorce rate rose from 38% for those who first married in 1975-79 to 46% for those who first married in 1990-94. Among those with a high school diploma but no college, it rose from 35% to 38%. And these figures are only part of the story. Many mothers avoid divorce by never marrying in the first place. The out-of-wedlock birth rate among women who drop out of high school is 15%. Among African-Americans, it is a staggering 67%.

Aprobada la píldora antimenstruación

Luz verde a la píldora antimenstruación

EE UU aprueba la primera pastilla anticonceptiva que elimina completamente el periodo

AGENCIAS  -  Washington
ELPAIS.com  -  Sociedad - 23-05-2007

Tomada a diario, la píldora, llamada Lybrel, administra contínuamente ligeras dosis de las mismas hormonas que muchas píldoras anticonceptivas para spurimir la menstruación. Está diseñada para mujeres que consideran sus periodos demasiado dolorosos, desagradables o molestos y quieren liberarse del ritual mensual. La Administración de Alimentación y Medicamentos (FDA) de Estados Unidos (la agencia del departamendo de Sanidad que regula los alimentos, los suplementos dietéticos y las medicinas biológias, entre otros) ha aprobado la píldora este martes. “Será el primer y único anticonceptivo oral diseñado para tomarlo 365 días al año, y que permitirá que las mujeres controlen sus periodos”, sostiene Amy Marren, de Wyeth Pharmaceuticals, que preveé que Lybrel estará disponible, con prescripción médica, en julio. “Hay un montón de mujeres que consideran que es una gran opción”.
Estudios de varias empresas con más de 2.400 mujeres, con edades comprendidas entre los 18 y los 49 años, señalan que Lybrel es un contraceptivo tan eficaz como las píldoras anticonceptivas corrientes y además suprime completamente la menstruación en muchas mujeres en el primer año, aunque algunas han tenido hemorragias esporádicas.

Chicas a las que les gusta el porno

El Mundo, Viernes, 18 de mayo de 2007. Año: XVIII. Numero: 6361.
CATALUNYA, suplement de cultura Tendències núm 116

‘Girls who like porno’

En la red cabe de todo, incluso relatos de mujeres que cuentan secretos de cama inconfesables. El ‘blog’ de agueda y maria ha bajado la persiana, pero sus historias han despertado reflexiones para la posteridad.

ROGER BERNAT

Han decidido cerrar y, sin embargo, era uno de los centros de discusión sobre posporno, queer y nuevo feminismo más emocionantes de la Red. Durante dos años estuve leyendo sus posts en www.girlswholikeporno.com (todavía en la Red) y, poco a poco, sin darme cuenta, como realmente ocurren las cosas, adentrándome en un ámbito del pensamiento que se me ha acabado revelando indispensable.

Al principio me conectaba con la ilusión de que fuera un blog ideado para levantar los espíritus, esperaba encontrar links de páginas de culos y tetas tomados desde ángulos inimaginables, pero con el tiempo fui acostumbrándome a leer y olvidarme de los links. Leía apasionado porque la sola idea de que unas mujeres se plantearan que otro universo sexual era posible me animaba a repensar el mío propio.

Anorexia nerviosa y sexualidad femenina

Journal of Sex Education and Therapy, 25, 80-88.

Anorexia nervosa and sexuality in women: A review. Ghizzani, A., & Montomoli, M. (2000).

Patients affected by anorexia nervosa (AN) have difficulties expressing themselves both emotionally and sexually. Relational problems seem to have a multifactorial origin similar in its complexity to that of the pervasive eating disorder. Endocrine disorders, neurological disease, and genetic factors may cause anorexia, but psychological factors are believed to play the prominent role. Data in the literature do not support the evidence of psychopathology associated with AN so severe as to warrant the primary diagnosis, but psychopathological traits are almost always present. Anorectic patients show repetitive behaviors and perfectionism, leading to rigidity and social introversion that may worsen the cohort of clinical symptoms of AN. Problems in maintaining interpersonal relationships are part of a generalized emotional disturbance, where inadequate sexual functioning and conservative attitudes are only additional elements. Most patients develop anorexia during adolescence. Those who became anorectic in adulthood report that their sexual functioning was normal before the illness. Therefore, most scientists believe that the altered balance of ovarian steroids and central nervous system neurotransmitters explains the lack of sexual interest. In fact, endocrine and neuroendocrine alterations can be found in depressed patients and are associated with loss of sex drive; in addition, according to some reports, these alterations seem to precede malnutrition, apparently assuming a causative role that is not yet explained. These findings support the hypothesis that difficulties in sexual functioning seen in AN patients have an origin as complex as that of the eating disorders.
–JSET 25:80-88, 2000

Cuerpos insumisos

Cuerpos insumisos 

Por Beatriz Preciado, profesora en la Universidad París VIII -Saint-Denis, y autora del Manifiesto contra-sexual (LA VANGUARDIA, 20/05/07):

He aquí tres momentos de la historia política del cuerpo: la ascesis mística, el suplicio del condenado, Cambio radical. La modernidad podría ser entendida como un proceso de secularización del cuerpo. Si el cuerpo premoderno era un organismo cerrado habitado por la divinidad cuyo destino y significación estaba regido por los las leyes teológicas, el cuerpo moderno se caracterizará por expulsar progresivamente a Dios, aceptando al Estado y sus instituciones disciplinarias como nuevos inquilinos de la corporalidad. En los últimos dos siglos, el cuerpo progresivamente desalojado por lo sagrado, lo metafísico y lo estatal, cuerpo libre al riesgo de verse desencantado, se deja okupar por las fuerzas del capitalismo global.
Para complicar las cosas, este cuerpo no tiene sus límites en la envoltura carnal que la piel bordea, ni puede entenderse como un sustrato biológico fuera de los entramados de producción y cultivo propios de la tecnociencia. Dicho con Donna Haraway, el cuerpo contemporáneo es una entidad tecnoviva multiconectada que incorpora tecnología. Ni organismo, ni máquina, ni naturaleza, ni cultura: tecnocuerpo. La nuevas técnicas quirúrgicas y farmacológicas ponen en marcha procesos de construcción tectónica que combinan modos de representación figurativos que provienen del cine y de la arquitectura, como el montaje, el modeling en 3D o el diseño de personalidad, según los cuales los órganos, tejidos, fluidos y moléculas se transforman en materias primas a partir de las que se fabrica nuestra corporalidad.

Deseos dispares

Coitus Interrupt Us

Couples with mismatched libidos have few resources to address their issues

by Tristan Taormino

May 15th, 2007 6:27 PM

When people come to me for advice about their sex lives, much of the time they believe that everyone else around them is having great sex and they’re not.

One of the most common things that couples struggle with is the issue of mismatched libidos: when one person’s sexual desires don’t gel with his or her partner’s. The complaints vary: She wants sex all the time; he doesn’t. He wishes she’d be more sexually adventurous; she thinks he’s a freak. She wants sex to last more than five minutes; he’s happy being a quick shooter. Sexual incompatibility is a problem facing lots of people, yet there is surprisingly little dialogue about it in self-help books or other media. Popular magazines instruct women to “Thrill Every Inch of Him” and men to “Keep Her Coming Back for More,” and Dr. Phil says, “Forget about the dishes, forget about the kids, and just do it.” All this reinforces the idea that something called “perfect sex” exists and if we’re not achieving that as often as possible then there’s a problem and someone has to take the blame. Even sex therapists can feed into the myths, by making one partner the problem (she’s frigid or he’s oversexed). The lack of honest, helpful information has led to misunderstanding and judgment about our sex drives and our sex lives.

De la homosexualidad

La ruta de los matices -la de los heteros y homos- tiene una serie de atractivos igualmente intrigantes. Por ejemplo éste: por qué se ha odiado y rechazado de tal forma ese matiz homosexual. Cómo una cultura puede ser tan descomunal que elogie el hecho mismo de ese rechazo y lo constituya en un ideal moral. Los sexólogos de la primera generación plantearon una afirmación inmensa que nos atrapa: si la homosexualidad no existiera, habría que inventarla. No es posible construir diversidad con piezas sin variantes.

Efigenio Amezúa

[La cita pertenece a su libro Sexologemas. (Cuando los genitales no dejan ver el sexo). Nº 135-136, de la revista española de sexología, 2006, p. 62.]

Abusos sexuales infantiles

Abusos sexuales infantiles: orígenes y contornos de un peligro Agustín Malón Marco.

Abusos sexuales infantiles: orígenes y contornos de un peligro.

Anuario de Sexología, 2004,

8. AEPS. p. 7-55.

Resumen.
En las últimas décadas hemos asistido a la emergencia de un nuevo peligro que ha transformado en gran medida nuestra consideración y tratamiento de la infancia, la sexualidad y los riesgos que enlazan ambas realidades. Dicho peligro, propio de nuestra época, ha sido construido fundamentalmente desde un discurso ideológico y pretendidamente científico cuyos orígenes y contornos es preciso rastrear. En este sentido el presente artículo cuenta con un doble objetivo. En primer lugar trata de analizar el contexto social en que situar los más recientes y destacados orígenes de este nuevo objeto de inquietud. En segundo lugar pretende señalar lo que en opinión de su autor son los principales rasgos que ha ido adoptando este fenómeno.

En el primer caso observaremos que el problema de los abusos surge en un entorno social donde diversos movimientos ideológicos, que irían desde la nueva derecha cristiana hasta el feminismo antipornografía, coincidirían en señalar la sexualidad como privilegiada fuente de peligro. En ese momento se elaboraría un irracional discurso sobre los abusos sexuales infantiles que acabaría convirtiéndose en magnífico símbolo del horror que se quería denunciar. En la segunda parte se defenderá que los promotores de este nueva amenaza, a menudo desde un discutible discurso científico, han construido el fenómeno en torno a tres ejes: la terrible verdad antes escondida, su inevitable gravedad y la dramática extensión del mismo.

Estudiando el porno

Unstable boundaries: sex, academic research and conceptions of normalcy

by Susan Ericsson

Williams, Linda, ed. Porn Studies. Durham, NC: Duke UP. 2004.

Church Gibson, Pamela, ed. More Dirty Looks: Gender, Pornography and Power. London: British Film Institute. 2004.

It seems academic tectonics may be moving once again, this time shifting around conceptions of sexuality studies. Just as women’s studies programs around the country began changing their name to gender studies in order to place emphasis on systemic and interrelated aspect of gender relations rather than focusing on a particular group (woman) and reifying notions of (wo)man as a fixed category, so too the scholarly intersections of sexuality may soon be realigning. Several recent scholarly publications are continuing the challenge of how we partition the discourses of sexuality and confront what we think of as normative and non-normative sexual practice.

One such example of realignment comes from Michael Warner in his book The Trouble with Normal (1999) where he argues that queer politics should move away from defining its borders by LGBT issues to include marginalized heterosexual practices that are similarly de-legitimated and regulated by the state, such as sex work and other forms of non-marital, non-monogamous sex. Another example is Laura Kipnis’ Against Love (2003) in which she debunks the myth of heterosexual marital monogamy through a combination of statistical and ideological proofs of sexual dissatisfaction with current socially defined ideals. Together, such works as these push at standard ways that categories of sex have been divvyed up and congealed.

Practices of consuming pornography and the understanding of such behavior are also being further reconceived. As Jane Juffer argues in the anthology More Dirty Looks,

“Pornography consumption, it would seem, is becoming a ‘normal’ practice in the US, an accepted part of home entertainment, a domestic technology” (45).