Wendy McElroy

Big Pharma, Women and the Labour of Love by Thea Cacchioni is a timely and acutely disappointing book that makes some excellent side points. Cacchioni, a sociologist at the University of Victoria, begins with an important question: is human sexuality being reduced to a medical problem by “disease mongers” who want to peddle expensive…

Sex, Lies and Pharmaceuticals: How Drug Companies Plan to Profit from Female Sexual Dysfunction is proof that investigative journalism still exists. In recent decades, the medical establishment has dramatically expanded the definition of disease and dysfunction to include everything from sexual disinterest to obesity, from shyness to “hyperactivity” in children, with laziness now being discussed as “a neuro-developmental dysfunction.” Studies of new medical dysfunctions are repeated rather than reported upon by a mainstream media who does not seem to read beyond press releases in order to announce sensational…

Thirteen-year-old girls are being pimped as whores on the streets of Canada! (Or are the accounts more sensation than substance?) Johns are the engine driving the sexual terrorism of women and children around the globe! (Or, maybe, most johns are sad, disconnected men who are more often exploited than they are exploiters.) The media are too busy dishing out the sizzle and sex of prostitution to provide objective…