Jessica Lee Jernigan: Work

Female Trouble: Barbara Seaman Tells the Truth About Estrogen

Marketing has always had a role in hormone-replacement therapy for menopausal women. Some of the ads you describe in your book are shockingly misogynistic—aging doesn't just make a woman unwell, they suggest, but actually unwomanly. The tone of this message changed over the years, certainly, but did the content?

Barbara Seaman: By 1947, estrogen products were among the leading advertisers in gynecology journals. At first the ads depicted happy and stylish mid-life women waltzing the night away with their adoring husbands or beaux. The simple message was that patients no longer needed to suffer from hot flashes and sweats at menopause. Now they could enjoy a good quality of life during this transition. As time passed, the manufacturers changed their tune. They came up with profit-boosting slogans such as "Keep her on Premarin." They switched to scare tactics, depicting troubles that presumably called for long-term treatments. Now the models were shriveled and bent. They were losing their tempers, losing their minds, losing their urine, even losing their sex drive and their husbands—all because they had "outlived their ovaries," and were suffering from a "deficiency disease like diabetes." Read more…

Of Monkeys and Men: Steve Jones on the Science of Maleness

Did you find out anything in researching this book that particularly surprised you?

Steve Jones: [Sighs.] The general wimpishness of men, the rather pathetic nature of manhood, is what surprised me most, I think.

[Laughs.] Well, I'm sorry. Was that a particularly upsetting discovery?

SJ: Well, no. Almost all of us—myself, most of your male acquaintances, I'm sure—fail, thank God, to live up to the conventional pictures of manhood. I mean, I've never been to a sports event in my life and I have no plans of going. I've never hit anybody—well, almost never, only when I've been hit myself. The realization of how little biology says about being a man was startling, but it was also the most comforting thing I discovered.

I spend most of my time with beta males myself.

SJ: Yeah, well, that's for the best, really. Although I don't talk about it much in the book, if you look even at things like gorillas, when you've got an alpha male, this guy goes around being a goddamn nuisance and banging his chest and so on, and—so we assume—passing on his genes. But if you do paternity tests it turns out he does no better than all these wimpish little gorillas who are going to the library and all that kind of stuff. As it turns out, there is an alternative strategy in all kinds of animals. There's the alpha-male strategy, but this other strategy—named the "sneaky fucker" strategy by John Maynard Smith—that is much more quiet and surreptitious, but just as effective. It's actually very comforting to know that we sneaky fuckers do just as well as the alpha males, if not better. Read more…

Can I Supersize That for You? Ellen Ruppel Shell on the Obesity Industry

One of the things I found rather eye-opening in your book was in your profile of Nancy, the woman getting weight-reduction surgery. You make it very clear that this woman is not obese because she's lazy or weak; you point out that in other areas of her life—in her job, with her family—this woman demonstrates considerable strength of will.

Ellen Ruppel Shell: If we think about it, we've probably all seen examples of this in our life. We've seen ourselves or our friends, people we know and love, radically change their eating habits after a significant event. For example, a friend of mine just went through a very difficult divorce. She had been really thin for her entire life, but she put on about a hundred pounds in less than a year during this difficult period. Nothing changed that person's character; her weight gain wasn't an issue of willpower or morality. The suggestion is that severe shocks and stress can affect the way our brains work, and scientists feel now that these changes in brain chemistry can affect, among other things, appetite regulation. I mean, we've never found the locus of willpower in the brain; it's a kind of philosophical construct. It's a useful construct—it's nice semantically, but it doesn't have any real scientific meaning. If I can do anything with this book, I would like to set the record straight about the role of willpower in weight gain or weight loss. To assign blame in this area—to make obesity a moral or character issue—is distinctly unhelpful. Read more...

Intimacy, Viagra, and the Vaginal Orgasm: Sex with Dr. Berman

I was surprised to read a reference to vaginal orgasm in your book. I totally thought that the vaginal orgasm, as opposed to the clitoral orgasm, was a Freudian myth. That's the second-wave feminist line, anyway.

Jennifer Berman: There are definitely two types of orgasm, the clitoral orgasm being the more genitally localized response. The vaginal orgasm results from direct pressure on the anterior vaginal wall, which leads to a more profound, sort of all-body, response—usually more intense with more pelvic contractions.

Damn. I've been missing out, apparently. That totally sucks.

JB: Well, you could try one of those devices Laura talks about in the book…

Yes, I suppose I could… But enough about me. Let's talk about the work you're doing to develop a nerve-sparing hysterectomy… Read more…