Wear Clean Draws  (because there’s 5 million ways to kill a ceo)

pfizer, the company that was found to be illegally promoting neurontin a few years back, which I wrote about as part of my ramblings about Melody Petersen’s book, _Our Daily Meds_, is in the news again. Pfizer was hit with the largest fine ever for, once again, using illegal tactics to promote drugs — in […]

wow. i picked up the book, _Our Daily Meds_, because it was one of three books reviews in the New York Times and recommended by someone at LBO. There was another book I am about 1/3 of the way through. It’s about how shyness became social anxiety disorder. I just finished the chapter on all […]

i finished Melody Petersen’s book, Our Daily Meds, which is an absolute must-read — though as I mentioned before, it will probably be more information than someone wants if they are on medications and just don’t want to hear the bad news.
I brought the book up at LBO, asking people about Petersen’s argument that […]

when i asked lbo-talk members what their criticisms of Weather Underground were about, Dennis Perrin chose not to actually elaborate his ideas but, instead, pointed to the Web site of Mark Rudd. Perrin didn’t explain if he agreed with everything Rudd said or just part of it. So, it was a little irritating, that response. […]

last week, i had to work an early morning release: get up at 3 a.m. to be to work by 4 a.m. to help make sure a big software release goes out correctly during our maintenance hours. I was doing this twice a week, to help out an understaffed QA department. After months, they cut […]

went to see Observe and Report over the weekend, on the strength of Lauren’s (Faux Real Tho) comments about the director’s previous work. I have had The Foot Fist Way on my list of must-sees for awhile…
Meanwhile, I ordered my book for my feminist book reading group last week and it finally arrived. While logged […]

Posting about Angela Davis sparked a debate about prisons, crime, etc. All the stupid crap you’d expect to see because, for the most part, people didn’t want to actually have a discussion about what Davis said, since she addresses their objections. Instead, they were more interested in trotting out whatever tried and true hate ons […]

So, yesterday, I related Agustin’s discussion of her fieldwork with the Progresistas, an organization that advocates for the rights of sex workers, mostly by handing out condoms. They believe that solidarity — among sex workers and between all women — is the method for obtaining women’s rights. As a consequence, they have a tendency to […]

So, why the title of the earlier post, pt 1 of a discussion of Agustin’s Chapter, ‘From Charity to Solidarity,’ from her book, _Sex on the Margins? I entitled that post, “Did you hear the one about a sex club owner and some nuns?”
Agustin draws on her fieldnotes, which she sets of in sans serif […]

I’m going to skip ahead to the chapter I’d mentioned was most interesting in Augustin’ book, _Sex on the Margins_, which comes toward the end of the book. This is partly because I figure I won’t have time to get to the rest of the book before it’s due back from interlibrary loan. But it’s […]

as I mentioned in an earlier post, Agustin’s second chapter, “Working to Travel; Traveling to Work,” in her book, Sex at the Margins, intervenes into a set of binary oppositions we hold about traveling, work, migrancy, agency, autonomy, and victims.
The discourse around migrancy, Agustin argues, too often views women as having no agency. They are, […]

there’s this guy on lbo who spend 99% of the time pulling stuff out of his ass and flinging it around so everyone else can enjoy the stench. which is to say, he’s almost always writing from the cuff, asking questions that would have been answered had he actually bothered to read the post or […]

while this is out of order, I couldn’t resist writing a bit about Agustin’s ethnographically thick description of attending a conference on prostitution, one led by what we typically call abolitionists — activists who are opposed to prostitution and want to abolish it.
Agustin calls them moral entrepreneurs, which tickled me because it’s an old term […]

a few years ago, in some one or other of the various instantiations of some sex war over prostitution, I pointed out at punkass blog that I knew of at least two women who had migrated from a rural area to an urban area and that they did so wanting to be sex workers. This […]

if you have any interest at all in sex work, sex positive feminism, migrants, migrant workers, the prostitution wars then you really must read Laura Maria Augstin’s _Sex on the Margins_. I’ve mentioned her work before, quoting her articles and blog, and posting an interview with her on Doug Henwood’s radio program, Behind the News.
I […]

I heard Clay Shirkey on NPR a couple of days ago, so I’ve been reading up on his latest book, “Here Comes Everybody.” I’m probably going to use some of his stuff in a presentation I have to do for work. At Amazon, I read this in one of the reviews:
Writing in sharp contrast […]

at lbo, there are frequent discussions of talk therapy vs. drug therapy when it comes to depression, etc. for some reason, the topic sets people off. there is also some strong opposition to freud by those convinced that the only thing that matters is that depression is a chemical disorder. and yet, a couple of […]