"Is sexual desire a human right?"

"And are women entitled to a little pink pill to help them feel it?"

Those questions are being raised in a campaign that is pressing the Food and Drug Administration to approve a pill aimed at restoring lost libido in women. The campaign, backed by the drug�s developer and some women�s groups, accuses the F.D.A. of gender bias for approving Viagra and 25 other drugs to help men have sex, but none for women....

The drug, flibanserin, has been rejected twice by the F.D.A. on the grounds that its very modest effectiveness was outweighed by side effects like sleepiness, dizziness and nausea....

I don't see how women are "entitled" to a drug in the general area of Viagra as some kind of gender equity proposition. The standard for approval of all drugs should be the same � some balance of effectiveness and unwanted effects. And obviously, there's a big difference between wanting to have sex and the capacity to physically carry out the act. Why is not wanting to have sex even regarded as a dysfunction? I want to want what I don't want. What the hell kind of problem is that? Or is it that my partner wants me to want what I don't want and I want to satisfy him? Drugging women so we'll be able to do what men want? How did that get turned into a women's rights issue? I guess you could say that it's for women to decide � don't take away our choice! � whether we want to want what he wants when we don't want it.

�Our usual patient is someone who is fearful of losing the relationship they have been in for years,� said Dr. Irwin Goldstein, director of sexual medicine at Alvarado Hospital in San Diego and a consultant to many drug companies. �It�s tragedy after tragedy after tragedy.�

One of his patients, Jodi Cole, 33, of Porter, Okla., said her lack of desire �tends to cloud my thoughts of everything related to my husband.� She said that �replacing the dread I have for intimacy with desire would be life-changing.�

Meanwhile, on college campuses, Cole's frame of mind � needing to have sex out of fear of losing the man � would be enough to brand her husband as a rapist if he proceeded to have sex with her knowing that's how she felt. And yet we're asked to think a drug that causes sleepiness, dizziness and nausea should be approved � in the name of women's rights � so she can blot out her lack of true consent.

This flibanserin is like those rape drugs frat boys are said to put in the unguarded drink. Oh, but if the woman chooses to take the drug? Well, isn't that like choosing to get drunk at the party? The man isn't supposed to exploit the opportunity of a drunken and seemingly willing sexual partner. Why is it okay to have sex with a woman who's taken the flibanserin?

"Drunken falls cause more deaths than drunken driving in Wisconsin."

"The most recent figures available show 349 deaths in Wisconsin from alcohol-related falls in 2012. That compares to 223 alcohol-related traffic deaths that year."

The article (in the Capital Times) does not mention the (comforting?) thought that, unlike drunken driving, drunken falling is only killing the drunk. Or so I presume. Another annoying thing in this article is that it takes a gratuitous swipe at old people:

Julia Sherman, coordinator of the Wisconsin Alcohol Policy Project... said older people are already at risk from falls and adding alcohol or alcohol in combination with drugs or medications only adds to the problems. �When I hear about happy hours in retirement communities I get worried,� said Sherman. �With the population aging, it�s an area we haven�t looked closely enough at.�

But we're given no statistics about the ages of the the falling-down-dead drunks and the only anecdotal evidence is of a 32-year-old woman who fell off a fire escape.

Another thing about falling is that it's a standard type of accident, drunk or sober. Some of the people who fall are going to have had something to drink. It doesn't mean the person was falling-down drunk. For all I know, there are falls that are avoided because those who have had something to drink are walking more slowly and paying more attention to where they are stepping or they are just not walking that much. Whatever, people need to walk from one place to another, and drinking and walking isn't morally wrong, like drinking and driving.

Back in 2011, there was a lot of talk about drinking and walking. The Freakonomics guys popularized the topic:

Steven Levitt: For every mile walked drunk, turns out to be eight times more dangerous than the mile driven drunk. So just to put it simply, if you need to walk a mile from a party to your home, you�re eight times more likely to die doing that than if you jump behind the wheel and drive your car that same mile...  For 20 years, we�ve been told you should never, ever drive drunk. We should have been told you should never, ever walk drunk and you should never, ever drive drunk. And because nobody thought about it when we were coming up with what was moral and immoral, somehow now, drunk walking just can�t find its way into the immoral box.

Oh, I'm sure some folks are working on that.

ALSO: The use of the word "drunken" is unsupported by the text of the article, which only speaks of "alcohol-related" accidents. 

"It was as if people secretly wished we could stow our child in cargo so that we would not disrupt their game of Candy Crush.'"

Writes the novelist Reif Larsen in a NYT op-ed about traveling with a little baby. That prompts what is most-favorited comment over there:

No, it is because everyone on that plane knows your child will be screaming for the next seven hours, because you decided that you must continue your pre-child life, at any expense to others. Small children like to be around familiar surroundings and get nothing whatsoever from their parents endless traveling.

Parents used to understand that having children came with sacrifices and did not entitle you to ruin the days of every person you came in contact with, whether in a confined space or at a pub or restaurant.

Just stop thinking you and your child are the center of the universe.

FYI: I say this as a mother of two.

The title of the op-ed is deceptive: "How Doing Nothing Became the Ultimate Family Vacation." Doing nothing would be staying at home and not working. Hang around. Take some walks. Read. Cook some food.

There is a bit about liking one trip to an all-inclusive hotel in Florida when the baby was 3 months old.

A part of me felt bad that he was coming into consciousness poolside, surrounded by overweight and sunburned Americans lightly drooling to Jimmy Buffett tunes, but hey � the world ain�t all pretty, kid.

I guess that's funny writing, but all I could think was: You can't expose a little baby to sun. What the hell were you doing?

I found myself desperate to feel like an adult again, even if only for an hour. Strange that adulthood equated to collecting about three towels too many from the towel boy, then elbowing my way to a prime spot on the deck so that I could slurp an overpriced pi�a colada and roast my pasty flesh while staring at the same page of a book for 20 minutes. And you know what? It was awesome.

You're drinking, avoiding the baby, avoiding your spouse, and getting sunburned. And this is presented as something that was done because of the baby, his usual preference being for the sort of vacation that enables you to claim to be "travelers and not tourists."

Yes, he rolls out that old trip tripe the first sentence. (For my extended discussion of the traveler/tourism clich�, see "What do you think the difference is between a tourist and a traveler?")

"One of the joys of being working class is that you get to bypass that traumatic bottle/half-bottle/wine the next day dilemma."

"Box wine just keeps on giving. I imbibe my cardBordeaux while doing counted cross stitch. I figure as long as I can still count, I've not gone over-bordeaux."

Comment on a Wall Street Journal article titled "Drinking Alone: A Bad Idea or a Toast to Oneself? Is imbibing solo pathetic? Antisocial? A sign of �a problem�? Lettie Teague talks to some experts, tips her glass to all the wine drinkers who decline to drink alone and concludes: nope." That title fails to include Teague's main concern: A full bottle of wine is too much for one person to drink, and opened wine supposedly gets significantly worse by the next day.

One friend, a middle-aged single male, will open (almost) any wine in his cellar for friends but not a single bottle for just himself. An unshared bottle is a waste of money, he said, likening the act to buying �an entire ham� when he just wanted a sandwich....

As for the notion that an open bottle isn�t quite as good on day two or three, I�ve found this to be both true and false. Many wines will flatten, and the fruit may fade, after the bottle has been opened. But some wines�reds that are big and tannic and/or young�get softer and more accessible with a bit of time and air....

I always drink wine with dinner, even if I�m dining alone.... And I don�t necessarily drink something cheap just because I�m dining alone. I�ll open a good bottle as readily for myself as I would for anyone else. A good wine is likely to be better than a cheap wine on the second day anyway....

Teague considers the alternative of buying half bottles but never mentions box wine. "Cardbordeaux," by the way, it old slang. I'd never heard it before, but the Urban Dictionary definition goes back almost 10 years. It's replete with "Simpsons" jokes about a woman who drinks too much. A working-class woman. And that's a hint of how the culture has prevented the better technology from reaching higher-class women like Lettie Teague, women who will spend a lot of money on wine but only want one glass a day. The method of effectively delivering less got associated with drinking more, with lame jokes like Ralph Wiggum saying "You look like my Mommy after her box of wine." That's like something dispensed from a box labeled "Jokes."

"By glamorizing a limited budget in a piously frugal 'look what you can do with it' sort of way, it suggests that people who aren�t eating as beautifully are doing it wrong and deserving of additional scorn."

"This isn�t an exercise in actually eating what SNAP recipients can eat, and it creates false impressions of what this lived reality actually is, making it easier for people to make false comparisons to their own situation."

A former nutritionist named Stephanie Jolly told Darlena Cunha, a home-based parent and former television producer. Cunha has an article in WaPo titled "How Gwyneth Paltrow hurt America�s poor and hungry/Her uber-privileged food stamp challenge obscures the many obstacles low income people face."

We were just talking about Paltrow's food-stamp challenge here. There are lots of good comments in there. And Dan from Madison has his own blog post, here:

I decided to go to my local grocery store to see if I could get enough food to live on for one week for $29.... Vegetables, frozen, are a great deal.... The chicken thighs were an easy choice for protein.... The mayo cost us $1.59 - but that will help stretch all of that tuna that only cost us .625 per can (there was a deal at 4 for $2.50).  I would plan on tuna fish sandwiches or that PB and J for lunches at my job, and would bring an apple or banana along.  The bread was only .89 for the loaf.  For breakfast I could imagine a fried egg atop toast with a little yogurt and/or fruit on the side.  The cans of chicken noodle soup were an astounding .49 each.  For dinners, I imagined rice (.99 for the bag - and that is a lot of rice), and chicken with vegetables.... So the total for all of this food above was $23.99...

To that, Dan added a "flask of Shellback Spiced rum... $4.19." He declares: "I think I pretty conclusively proved that one person could easily eat for $29 for a week and still have money left over for bad habits like drinking."

Does that count as the "scorn" Stephanie Jolly was talking about? And, more importantly, will Dan be "eating beautifully"?

"The debate over the efficacy of 12-step programs has been quietly bubbling for decades among addiction specialists."

"But it has taken on new urgency with the passage of the Affordable Care Act, which requires all insurers and state Medicaid programs to pay for alcohol- and substance-abuse treatment, extending coverage to 32 million Americans who did not previously have it and providing a higher level of coverage for an additional 30 million," writes Gabrielle Glaser in The Atlantic.
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