In honor of OBOS’s 40th anniversary, we are collecting people’s stories about their first experiences with Our Bodies, Ourselves. Did you secretly read the book as a teenager? Or did your mom or cool aunt give you a copy? Did it inspire you to learn more about your own body or to get involved in women’s health advocacy? We want to hear your stories, and hope you’ll help us celebrate this milestone by sharing them with us!

To submit your own story of how OBOS has touched your life, visit http://www.ourbodiesourblog.org/story-submission.

Stories will be posted to the blog; you can remain anonymous if you prefer. Check out the great stories others are sharing.

At the recent Consumers United for Evidence-based Healthcare Advocacy Summit and joint colloquium of the Cochrane and Campbell Collaborations (#ccckeystone), I met many interesting people with fond memories of their first experiences with the “Our Bodies, Ourselves” book. I loved hearing these stories, about how a small group of friends used the book to perform self-exams, how it motivated women to advocate for themselves or become active in women’s health and rights, and the many other ways in which the landmark book has inspired so many people.

Believe it or not, 2011 is the 40th anniversary of the first edition of the book. As part of the celebration, OBOS is releasing a new edition of the book and hosting a symposium that will bring together women who are culturally adapting and transforming “Our Bodies, Ourselves” into different formats for use in their own countries.

We’ ll be writing more about these events over the course of the next year, but for now, we invite you to share your own stories. If you have an OBOS story – however brief, or however “small” it may seem to you – please share it with us. We love to hear it, and plan to use the stories in conjunction with our 40th anniversary celebration and book release next year.

For more information on the upcoming anniversary and book, including how to support the new edition, check out our anniversary page.  Also check out our history section for lots of cool and interesting information about how the book came to be and the impact it has had over the years.

Earlier this week, I had the privilege of attending a talk by Rebecca Skloot, author of recently published book, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks.

Henrietta Lacks was a poor, Black woman whose cervical cancer cells were taken in the course of her treatment for cervical cancer at Johns Hopkins in the 1950s. Her cells were the first “immortal” cells — cells kept alive in culture – and went on to be widely used in medical research.

Henrietta’s cells were used in the development of the polio vaccine, were sent up in early space missions, and are mentioned in tens of thousands of research papers.

Rebecca Skloot’s book chronicles the history of Henrietta Lacks and her cells (dubbed “HeLa” cells), as well as Skloot’s  journey uncovering the story.

Lacks and her family never knew about the vast body of research that was being conducted using the cells, or even that the cells had been taken and used for research at all.  She and her family never benefited financially from the selling of HeLa cells. While Henrietta is long dead, her children and grandchildren still struggle to get medical care, and do not have health insurance.

In the course of her talk, Skloot read snippets of the book and discussed questions of ethics, race and class raised by the story. She talked about whether the family should be compensated, the kind of medical care Henrietta received in John Hopkins’s “colored” ward,  and the past and current use of cells and tissue from people’s biopsies and other procedures for later medical research (which may make money for biotechnology corporations). It was really interesting, and I highly recommend the book to anyone interested in these issues.

Skloot has established the Henrietta Lacks Foundation to fund scholarships and medical care for members of the Lacks family. She also blogs about her work. The text of an interview earlier this year with Skloot on NPR’s Fresh Air is available here.

Over the years, the book “Our Bodies, Ourselves” has inspired more than simply an enlightened perspective on women’s health — it  has also inspired many title adaptations. To wit: “Our Bodies, Our Cars,” “Our Bodies, Our Quantified Selves,” “Our Bodies, Our Stilettos” … the list goes on.

More poignantly, Jaclyn Friedman recently broke the silence around women’s sexual freedom with a must-read post at Feministe titled “My Sluthood, Myself.”

Now comes a new sexual guidebook for the 21st century entitled (are you sitting down?) “Sex: Our Bodies, Our Junk.”

The satire comes to us from The Association for the Betterment of Sex, a male collective of sorts that includes comedy writers from “The Daily Show with Jon Stewart” and the publications McSweeney’s, The Onion and Esquire.

I’ll qualify this by noting I haven’t read it (review copy, hello?), but a few compelling topics include everything from outmoded masturbation slang (“Going on tour with Midnight Oil” is apparently out) to the top five pastry-related euphemisms for female genitalia. The book also lists “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” dry-cleaning services “for freshening up your vinyl fetishwear or adult-sized Tigger costume.”

For a bit of a preview, the Huffington Post has posted a slide show of favorite info-graphics from the book. You can also enjoy short bits of wisdom from the book’s Twitter feed. Most recent tweet: “Ever made love in a cranberry bog? Sound off!” (Where’s the hashtag?)

For a another satirical perspective, check out “The Sexy Book of Sexy Sex,” written by “Daily Show” correspondent Kristen Schaal and her boyfriend, “Daily Show” staff writer Rich Blomquist.

“Given the couple’s impeccable comic credentials and the evident affection they showed during a joint interview at a Midtown bar not far from the Daily Show studios, it’s no surprise that The Sexy Book Of Sexy Sex is a charming comedy love-child, mixing The Daily Show’s textbook parodies with extended prose pieces that riff on romance novels and pornographic science fiction,” writes Sam Adams in the intro to The Onion’s Q&A with the authors.

We’re used to the appropriation of OBOS for satirical purposes. It wasn’t too long ago that Steven Colbert was throwing the latest edition of “Our Bodies, Ourselves” on the yule log as part of the book-burning extras on his “A Colbert Christmas” DVD. And Colbert has long used a skeleton reading OBOS for his “Cheating Death” segment.

You know what they say: A sense of humor is really sexy.

Plus: Speaking of the “Our Bodies, Ourselves” book, we’re in the midst of writing a new edition — the 40th anniversary edition (!) — due out in fall 2011. Watch this space for more info on how to submit personal stories for revised chapters. You can also share your story about reading OBOS for the first time and the impact it had on you and your friends. And if you’d like to support these endeavors, you or someone you’d like to honor can be listed in the book. No kidding!

Last week, Christine blogged about a New York Times article, “The New Abortion Providers,” that provides a detailed look at “the struggles of individual medical students and doctors to make abortion an accepted, integrated part of healthcare.”

For those interested in an even more thorough exploration of this topic, Lori Freedman’s “Willing and Unable: Doctors’ Constraints in Abortion Care” is a great resource. In fact, the Times piece mentions Freedman, in the context of a study she co-authored.

In the study, researchers interviewed 30 OB/GYNs with abortion training who said they wanted to provide abortions after residency. Once they were in practice, though, most of the OB/GYNs were not providing abortions, and the study examines the professional, personal and social reasons why they weren’t.

“Willing and Unable” provides more detail on these discussions with providers, focusing on the providers who are trained to provide abortion and not opposed to the practice — the willing — but who for various personal and structural reasons are unable to do so.

Freedman discusses the isolation of abortion into freestanding clinics, and the physicians she interviews describe the barriers to integrating abortion into normal medical care in group practices and hospitals, including group practice owners, personal attitudes, fear of stigma, financial and professional vulnerability early in their careers, HMO referral rules, and Catholic hospital networks that have made them unable to provide abortion to patients.

Ninety-seven percent of non-metropolitan U.S. counties lack abortion providers, and dedicated abortion clinics currently provide 93 percent of abortion procedures. Looking at these statistics, Freedman concludes that “threats, overt abortion prohibitions, and a medical culture of practice that distances itself from abortion” results in a “multilevel, institutionalized buck-passing that marginalizes abortion practice.”

She explains that “ultimately, willing and even highly motivated physicians find the current organization of health care all but prohibits abortion practice within mainstream medicine.”

In some cases, providers were more ambivalent and simply did not feel a degree of personal responsibility for providing abortions that would lead them to tackle certain barriers and inconveniences that could be overcome. In other cases, however, the providers would have liked to provide abortion but were prevented from doing so by strict policies and conditions of their employment or other structural barriers.

Freedman examines not only the reasons for but the outcomes of these barriers — such as cases encountered by interviewees who currently work in Catholic hospital networks and have been frustrated by their inability to provide abortions, even to women whose pregnancies were clearly unsuccessful and, in some cases, life-threatening.

Freedman makes the following recommendations for advocates to move beyond increasing access to abortion training (a key focus in previous decades):

• Target physicians later in their careers, as they may experience less financial and professional vulnerability;
• Work to increase the number of advanced practice clinicians (such as nurse practitioners and CNMs) who provide abortion services;
• Call on HMOs and private physician practices to stop outsourcing abortion care to dedicated clinics and reduce the segregation of this service from mainstream medicine.

Overall, I found “Willing and Unable” to be a nuanced and fascinating exploration of the reasons why providers who are trained in and willing to provide abortions may not be doing so, which in turn contributes to the high percentage of U.S. areas with no local abortion provider.

While I have personally been more attuned to the issue of medical student training with regards to the provider portion of the access equation, Freedman’s work was quite informative in pointing out other important ways in which trained and willing physicians are currently prevented from reducing the provider shortage in the United States.

Readers may also be interested in this RHRealityCheck podcast discussion with Freedman, and two articles in the June 2010 issue of the journal Contraception by Freedman and her colleagues.

Note: “Willing and Unable” is published by my larger workplace’s university press, and I know the press’s marketing and new media staff.

New York Times columnist Gail Collins appeared on The Colbert Report earlier this week to discuss her new book, “When Everything Changed: The Amazing Journey of American Women from 1960 to the Present.”

in 1960, women were prohibited from serving on juries and it was perfectly legal to not hire women because of their sex. The book opens with the story of a woman who was kicked out of traffic court for daring to wear pants (and she was there to pay her boss’s ticket).

One of today’s biggest problems, said Collins, is that “half the workforce is female now, and we still haven’t figured out who’s supposed to take care of the kids.”

Colbert appeared shocked. “The women take care of the kids,” he said.

The reason, he added, is simply biological.

“I cannot produce milk. I’ve tried. It’s painful and it doesn’t work.”

Enjoy.

Following up on the battle over funding for comprehensive sex education, here’s a list of 40 books and articles about sexuality that are well worth a look at any age.

Compiled by Anna Clark, who blogs at Isak, these texts cover not only the basics, but the complex policies and politics surrounding birth control, gender, race, abortion, adoption and more. From the introduction:

If we can agree that few teens learn about sexuality in an accurate, age-appropriate, and comprehensive way, then where does that leave adults who came through the same school systems they did? Many of us are still full of questions that we aren’t quite sure how to articulate. Few can claim that they’ve figured sex — and its social influence — out.

If you want to graduate to the next level of sexual health, pleasure, and social awareness, now’s your chance. Get yourself schooled with a crash course in sex ed for adults. From orgasms to organs, from contraceptives to court decisions, look to the reading list below for the can’t-miss books and articles about sex.

There are a number of titles here that I’ve been meaning to read, including such recent releases as “The Girl Who Went Away: Hidden History of Women Who Surrendered Children for Adoption in the Decades Before Roe v. Wade,” by Ann Fessler, and “The Means of Reproduction: Sex, Power, and the Future of the World,” by Michelle Goldberg. Any books on the list that you’d highly recommend, or other titles you would add?

If you tried taking the survey about emergency contraception and found it closed this weekend, it’s because the limit for the basic plan was reached.  The survey site has been upgraded, so please give it another try. Thanks!

And if this is the first you’re hearing of it, read our previous post about the book that Heather Munro Prescott, a history professor at Central Connecticut State University, is writing on the history of emergency contraception and how she could use your input.

Have a few moments to take a survey about emergency contraception?

Heather Munro Prescott, a history professor at Central Connecticut State University, is writing a book on the history of emergency contraception, and she’s looking for input from women who have used EC — as well as input from their partners, health care providers and activists. Prescott is especially interested in hearing from women who used EC in the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s.

Yes, emergency contraception has been around for decades, though most of what we know about EC is connected to the FDA’s recent approval of over-the-counter access to Plan B, a progestin-only pill available to women as young as 17 without a prescription. It reduces a woman’s risk of pregnancy by up to 89 percent when taken within 72 hours of unprotected sex (research indicates Plan B can be taken up to 120 hours after, but the pill is more effective the sooner it’s taken).

Other types of EC are described at the Emergency Contraception website, an independent, peer-reviewed resource operated by the Office of Population Research at Princeton University and the Association of Reproductive Health Professionals. The website also links to Prescott’s survey.

Prescott, who  blogs at Knitting Clio – where you’ll find posts on medical history, disability studies and numerous other topics — outlined her project in an email to Our Bodies Ourselves:

This book will describe the history of emergency contraception from the 1960s until the present and place this story within the larger context of women’s health activism in the second half of the twentieth century. A major focus of the book will be the role women patients played in the dissemination of this technology. This project will show women not only as test subjects for this new method of birth control but also as active health care consumers.

In order to capture women’s experiences with emergency contraception, this project will use data from a survey administered through Survey Monkey: http://www.surveymonkey.com/s.aspx?sm=JNOZJvreEmADWmzx7I1wGg_3d_3d

While I’m covering the entire history of emergency contraception, my replies thus far have mostly been from women and men whose experience with ECP has been very recent. Therefore, I’m especially interested in getting responses from the earlier history of emergency contraception (aka the ”morning-after-pill”) in the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s.

Sounds like a great project, so if you have experience with EC, take the survey, or share the link.

Demeter Press, the publishing division of the Association for Research on Mothering, is seeking submissions for an edited collection on mothering and hip hop to be published in 2011. The editors are Maki Motapanyane and Shana Calixte.

Previously published anthologies by Demeter Press include “Mothering and Blogging: The Radical Act of the MommyBlog,” and “Mother Knows Best: Talking Back to the “Experts.”

Additional upcoming titles focus on intersections of mothering and disability, adoption and identifying as Latina/Chicana. One collection due out in 2010 that I definitely won’t miss: “The Palin Factor: Political Mothers and Public Motherhood in the 21st Century.”

Here’s the call for papers for the new book on mothering and hip hop. Contact information is at the bottom:

Motherhood is an experience that has been ever‑present yet invisible in the global music genre of Hip-Hop. Yet this aspect of women’s experiences within the movement has garnered little or no interest from journalists, writers and scholars of Hip-Hop culture. Nor do we have any understanding of how mothers who remain Hip-Hop enthusiasts negotiate their relationship to the culture of Hip‑Hop and its music with their children.

What are the spaces that motherhood occupies in Hip-Hop? Are there ways of understanding mothering in Hip-Hop along a historical continuum? What are some of the ways that motherhood complicates the very masculinist discourses around hip hop? How can we create an empowered and feminist Hip-Hop mothering, what would it look like and how would it challenge the status quo? How are mothers engaging with Hip-Hop, both locally and globally?

The aim of this collection is to give motherhood within Hip-Hop culture an intellectual point of entry into an existing field of academic debates. Themes that submitted proposals engage may include:

* Hip-Hop histories
* Masculinity
* Misogyny and violence
* Consumerism and capitalism
* The globalization and/or transnationality of Hip-Hop
* Cultural appropriation
* Political subversion
* Cultural diversity
* Feminist mothering
* Heterosexualities
* Queer identities and sexuality
* Aesthetic continuity and change
* Representation and the marketing of identities
* Other themes not mentioned here

We seek both creative and academic submissions that tackle the complex ways in which motherhood and Hip-Hop frame these and other discussions. Abstracts are welcome from a variety of academic disciplines and perspectives.

SUBMISSION GUIDELINES:
Abstracts: 250 words in length.
Deadline for Abstracts: August 1, 2009
Papers: 15-18 pages
Deadline for Papers: January 7, 2010

Please submit proposals to: Maki Motapanyane (maki AT yorku.ca) and Shana Calixte (scalixte AT laurentian.ca).

NOW’s Future: The 2009 National NOW Conference kicks off June 19 in Indianapolis. At issue is who will replace current NOW President Kim Gandy, who is stepping down after eight years: Latifa Lyles, a 33-year-old black woman who has been one of Gandy’s three vice presidents, or Terry O’Neill, 56, a white activist who was NOW’s vice president for membership from 2001 to 2005.

Feministing’s Jessica Valenti is quoted in this Associated Press story on the election and NOW’s generational divide.

Plus: I don’t think I’ve linked yet to Katha Pollitt’s excellent piece in The Nation on feminism’s false waves. It begins:

Can we please stop talking about feminism as if it is mothers and daughters fighting about clothes? Second wave: you’re going out in that? Third wave: just drink your herbal tea and leave me alone! Media commentators love to reduce everything about women to catfights about sex, so it’s not surprising that this belittling and historically inaccurate way of looking at the women’s movement — angry prudes versus drunken sluts — has recently taken on new life, including among feminists.

Losing Celebrity Weight Battles: When famous dieters like Kirstie Alley or Oprah Winfrey talk about being “disgusted” with their bodies, the comments have an effect beyond selling magazines.

“Kirstie looks the same as me, to the inch, height and weight,” Emily Schaibly Greene, 29, recently told The New York Times. “It took me a long time to get there, but I’m feeling good with how I look. But it’s difficult to keep liking the way I look when I’m reading that it’s gross.”

Lesley Kinzel, who writes for the blog Fatshionista, said, “When you have famous people turning their weight tribulations into mass-media extravaganzas, they’re contributing to a culture where passing comments on strangers’ bodies is considered O.K.”

Plus: Nia Vardalos, who rose to fame after starring in “My Big Fat Greek Wedding,” says her recent weight loss is all people want to talk about these days, pushing aside her personal and professional achievements. Her column is awesome.

And if you haven’t yet bought “Lessons From the Fat-O-Sphere,” go. Author Kate Harding – founder of Shapely Prose and contributor to Broadsheet — is still on the book tour this month and is looking forward to speaking at colleges in the fall. 

Summer Reading List: From Women’s eNews: From sensational memoirs to serious sociology, check out what women are writing about and the prizes they’ve been snapping up so far in 2009. Sarah Seltzer has the goods.

Women’s Health Clinic to Close: The University of Chicago Medical Center is closing its women’s health clinic, an essential community health resource, at the end of the month. Ironically, this is being done under the Medical Center’s Urban Health Initiative; U.S. Rep. Bobby Rush has called for a congressional investigation into whether the Medical Center has engaged in “patient dumping” by steering the poor to other health facilities.

“Medical center executives have said the steep downturn in the economy has forced them to trim $100 million from the hospital’s budget to maintain running a prestigious hospital, research center and medical school. They also have said the Women’s Health Center, which cares for thousands of Medicaid patients, is a money loser,” reported the Chicago Tribune last month, in a story on protests against the closing.

Plus: While looking up information about the closing, I came across a 2008 New York Times story on Michelle Obama, who at that time was on leave from her job as vice president of community affairs at the University of Chicago Medical Center. Stories like this made me wonder what she could/would have done about the closing:

When the human papillomavirus vaccine, which can prevent cervical cancer, became available, researchers proposed approaching local school principals about enlisting black teenage girls as research subjects.

Obama stopped that. The prospect of white doctors performing a trial with black teenage girls summoned the specter of the Tuskegee syphilis experiment of the mid-20th century, when white doctors let hundreds of black men go untreated to study the disease.

Too Poor to Make the News: Over on The New York Times op-ed page, Barbara Ehrenreich has written the first in a series on how the recession affects people who don’t neatly fit the downwardly mobile narrative: the already poor.

“This demographic, the working poor, have already been living in an economic depression of their own,” writes Ehrenreich. “From their point of view ‘the economy,’ as a shared condition, is a fiction.” She continues:

The deprivations of the formerly affluent Nouveau Poor are real enough, but the situation of the already poor suggests that they do not necessarily presage a greener, more harmonious future with a flatter distribution of wealth. There are no data yet on the effects of the recession on measures of inequality, but historically the effect of downturns is to increase, not decrease, class polarization.

The recession of the ’80s transformed the working class into the working poor, as manufacturing jobs fled to the third world, forcing American workers into the low-paying service and retail sector. The current recession is knocking the working poor down another notch — from low-wage employment and inadequate housing toward erratic employment and no housing at all. Comfortable people have long imagined that American poverty is far more luxurious than the third world variety, but the difference is rapidly narrowing.

Health Care & the Arts: NPR interviews Anna Deveare Smith about her show “Let Me Down Easy,” which is based on interviews with doctors and patients (previously discussed here). Her newest role: artist in residence at the Center for American Progress, which Smith will use as a perch for studying changes in Washington. Smith also plays a doctor in the new Showtime series “Nurse Jackie.”

Speaking of “Nurse Jackie,” David Bauder of the Associated Press notes that the ethically challenged nurse at the head of the show (wonderfully played by Edie Falco) has appalled some nurses — but is that a bad thing for Showtime? Well, no.

Apologies from California: I meant to post this next one when it first came out, but I still think it’s amusing — San Francisco Chronicle columnist Mark Morford would like you to know California is really, really sorry about the whole Prop 8 thing.

Meanwhile, tony Greenwich, Conn., has become wedding central for same-sex New York couples who no longer have to drive as far as Massachussetts. California sure could have used money spent on wedding bliss.

Last month, a marathon in Tel Aviv drew runners raising money for a number of different causes — including an adaptation of “Our Bodies, Ourselves.”

Sophie Walsh, a clinical psychologist who moved from London to Tel Aviv in 1994, ran in support of Women and Their Bodies: The Women’s Association for Health Action and Responsibility. Founded in Israel in 2005, Women and Their Bodies (WTB) is an Israeli-Palestinian initiative that is adapting “Our Bodies, Ourselves” into Hebrew and Arabic.

“This version will be up-to-date for this decade, making it available to all women in Israel regardless of their native tongue,” Walsh told the Haaretz newspaper.

The OBOS global translation/adaptation program was recently featured in On the Issues magazine. The story explains how each international project is specific to the community’s health needs and social and political conditions.

We haven’t discussed the Israeli-Palestinian project in detail here before, so here’s some news about the effort.

WTB has more than 40 Hebrew and Arabic chapters in progress, and the goal is to publish the Hebrew edition in 2010. The Arabic edition will appear first online and as booklets — two of which will be published by the end of the year — with a book publication date to be announced soon.

The organization is working with Jewish and Arab groups to localize the material and has collaborated with numerous women’s and human rights organizations. WTB has also recruited teams of volunteers, Hebrew and/or Arabic-speaking, between the ages of 21 and 65, to conduct interviews for the personal narratives present in every chapter.

A graphics committee is charged with making sure that the book’s images are representative of women’s bodies in the Middle East and include women of varied religious and ethnic backgrounds. According to WTB’s 2008 annual report, dozens of women have already volunteered images, including those shown here.

In addition to the Arabic and Hebrew publications, WTB is creating an online action and resource center, with links to women’s organizations and blogs providing updates on health legislation.

The organization also runs community outreach workshops on women’s health rights and sexuality. Facilitator Suzaan Abu-Waasel led a workshop on women’s body image and empowerment for the older women’s club at the Arab Jewish Community Center in Jaffa. Here’s what she said at the end of the session:

Asking the women aged 45-60 to put their social commitments aside and focus on their own bodies and wellbeing, was an extremely challenging task. Much patience is needed to raise taboo topics.

Many of the participants focused on good parenting, or their relationships with their in-laws; the concept of taking care of ones’ self was rather alien at first … I am thrilled to tell you that their group coordinator now reports an overflow of critical discussions.

It costs approximately $5,000 to produce each chapter. If you and a group of friends or an organization want to sponsor a chapter in the Hebrew or Arabic adaptation, you can make a secure electronic donation, or write a check to “Women and Their Bodies,” and mail it to 34 Kfar Etzion St. Jerusalem, Israel 93392.

Smaller sums go directly to support sections of chapters, such as the narrative collection, or the linguistic editing in the chapter of your choice.

For a U.S. tax deduction (minimum $100), make out a check to “New Israel Fund.” Write in the memo line that it is a donor advised contribution to Women and Their Bodies – Fund ID #5459, and mail it to NIF, 1101 14th St, 6th Floor, Washington D.C. 20005-5639.

Let us know if you want additional information about this or other OBOS adaptations. Projects are currently also underway in China, India, Nepal, Nigeria, Russia, Tanzania and Turkey.

You may have heard this weekend that books on Amazon.com had been labeled “adult” and de-ranked — and, not coincidentally, the books affected happened to deal with LGBTQ themes and feminist health and sexuality topics. Twitter hasn’t stopped buzzing.

Books without rankings as of Sunday night included Gore  Vidal’s “The City and the Pillar” and Jeanette Winterson’s “Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit,” as well as titles by our colleagues and friends: Jessica Valenti’s “Full Frontal Feminism”; “Yes Means Yes,” which Valenti co-edited with Jaclyn Friedman; and “S.E.X.: The All-You-Need-To-Know Progressive Sexuality Guide to Get You Through High School and College” by Heather Corrina, who writes about the Amazon debacle here.

Deanna Zandt wrote a piece for Women’s Media Center today explaining that this was probably not a homophobic, misogynist campaign dreamed up by Amazon. Rather:

It’s far more likely that a group of tech “enthusiasts,” let’s call them, organized some sort of campaign over a holiday weekend (when Amazon was likely operating with a shoestring staff) to delist books they found objectionable. When I say enthusiasts, I’m referring to loosely associated hacker-types who enjoy wreaking havoc purely for the sake of the havoc. Rarely do they have a formal political agenda. Often women, particularly feminists, and queer folk are the targets (though recently, one notorious group called 4chan targeted and found a teenager who had posted a video of himself torturing a cat).

Not that we should feel much better about it:

It would be easy to dismiss this, and other cases, as Internet-gone-wild making the world unsafe for women and LGBT folk. Somewhat harder to discern, and admit to ourselves, is that the anonymity and freedom that the Internet provides pulls back the curtain on our culture: at work are the illusive mores of misogyny and homophobia that continue to shape our culture and lives.

Wired has more.

Update: Jessica is hearing this was no glitch.

Update #2: Deanna posted a follow-up. And another.

A “Too-Tall” Medical Tale: Christine Cosgrove, co-author with Susan Cohen of the new book “Normal at Any Cost: Tall Girls, Short Boys, and the Medical Industry’s Quest to Manipulate Height,” wrote a great piece in the L.A. Times about the history of doctors prescribing DES, a synthetic drug that acts like estrogen, to girls to stunt their growth.

Why? Because decades ago, “if a girl were heading toward 5 feet 8 inches, or, horrors, 5 feet 10 inches, not only would she have trouble finding clothes that fit, she’d have a hard time finding a husband. And in the days when there were few options besides marriage and children for women, well, that left an old maid.”

Thousands of girls, including Cosgrove, took the pills. Some have experienced myriad health problems, and an Australian study found a significant decrease in fertility among those who were treated.

Check out more about the book. Here’s an interview with the authors.

America’s Back — Now What?: Linda Hirshman and Gloria Feldt wrote a commentary on the significance of the U.N Cairo + 15 meeting:

On March 31, State Department Acting Assistant Secretary for Population, Refugees, and Migration, Margaret Pollack, told delegates to the United Nations Commission on Population and Development, meeting in New York, that America was back.

Marking a 180 degree turnaround from Bush administration policies that fought international efforts to enable people to control their own reproductive fate, the U.S. will once again defend the “human rights and fundamental freedoms of women” and support “universal access to sexual and reproductive health.” [...]

The global sigh of relief was palpable. For with all its money and diplomatic resources, the U.S. is the 10,000 gorilla in international reproductive policy. Now the question is, while this is certainly change we can believe in, is it all the change we need?

Film Critics Write Off Rape: Tiger Beatdown has a great analysis of the new Seth Rogen film, “Observe & Report,” and the reviews that give a pass to the rape scene. At least New York Times film critic Manohla Dargis will restore your faith. Rachel points to more links.

Why Women Stay: Hilzoy at Obsidian Wings has written the must-read post of all must-read posts about why women stay in abusive relationships. As one commenter put it, “If I always had a hilzoy around to explain it, I think I could understand every human phenomenon in the world.”

Johns Hopkins Bans Free Drug Samples, Gifts to Doctors: “Johns Hopkins is the latest big name in health care to try to restrict doctors’ ties to the drug and device industries,” reports the Wall Street Journal. “Its new policy ‘on interaction with industry’ bans free drug samples and says doctors can’t participate in consulting gigs in which they’re essentially paid for not doing anything.”

Plus: Iowa Republican Sen. Charles Grassley asked a nonprofit mental health organization about its funding as part of his investigation into drug company influence, reports Bloomberg.

Everybody Hurts Sometimes: “Long lines come up frequently in the American healthcare discussion, the symbol of all that is to be feared about a government-run system,” writes Ezra Klein on the L.A. Times op-ed page.

And it’s true that in Canada and Britain, the two countries most often cited in discussions of what nationalized healthcare might mean, some patients report having to wait months for some elective treatments. Sometimes.

But we’ve got waiting lines too — along with 50 million uninsured and a system that costs more than twice as much per person as that of any other country. We’ve just managed to hide our lines through clever statistical gimmickry.

Debate Over Digital Health Records: The Obama administration maintains health information technology is as an essential, cost-savings component of health care reform and has set a goal for every American to have an electronic health record by 2014. But critics fear the money to implement the system will be wasted if doctors and hospitals can’t share information, reports USA Today.

“We could head for a techno-Katrina,” said Sen. Barbara Mikulski, D-Md. “I do not want to do that, where we do a dollar dump, and at the end of the day, we have a lot of microchips floating around.”

Plus: Writing in the New England Journal of Medicine, National Coordinator for Health Information Technology David Blumenthal discusses the health IT provisions of the federal economic stimulus package — collectively called HITECH in the law. Read “Stimulating the Adoption of Health Information Technology.”

Vitamin Sales Up as Economy Falters: “Sales of vitamins and nutritional supplements, which have grown consistently for years, have surged in recent months, rising as the stock market has fallen,” writes Alex Williams in The New York Times. “People are clearly cutting back on many items, from bread and milk to designer jeans and flat-screen televisions, but they are stocking up on pills that they think can spare them expensive doctor visits.”

My Peeps: We end on a colorful note — Tis the season of the peeps. The Washington Post displays its 40 finalists here; don’t miss Peep/Tuck and Thelma and Louise: Peeps on the Run.

Here, first place winner Melissa Harvey discusses her gorgeous interpretation of Edward Hopper’s “Nighthawks” painting.

The winner of the Chicago Tribune contest created an imaginative Wizard of Peeps. And for political junkies, check out this portrayal, at TwinCities.com, of the Minnesota U.S. Senate Trial between Al Franken and Norm Coleman.

Reading List: Anna Clark interviews Michelle Goldberg, author of “The Means of Reproduction: Sex, Power, and the Future of the World,” at Bitch magazine (and happy birthday to Anna’s blog, Isak!).

Kathryn Joyce, author of “Quiverfull: Inside the Christian Patriarchy Movement,”  talks with Religion Dispatches. An excerpt of her book can be read here.

Planting a Future: Melissa Harris Lacewell digs through the meaning of Michelle Obama planting the new White House vegetable garden. More historians, authors and gardeners weigh in at the Washington Post.

Plus: Sharkfu on nutrition, cost and Alice Waters; Mark Bittman on eating healthy, organic or not.

Dealing with the Recession: Over at Writes Like She Talks, Jill Miller Zimon put together a list of articles that provide perspective on the recession, job loss and the economic impact on women. At Women’s eNews, Mimi Abramovitz explains three new rules about jobless benefits in the stimulus package that will help women and correct a major gender bias.

Pregnant? Here’s a Pink Slip: “Last year the number of pregnancy-based discrimination charges filed with the E.E.O.C. was up nearly 50 percent from a decade earlier, to a total of 6,285. That number seems likely to rise even higher this year,” writes Lesley Alerman in The New York Times.

“Some employers are using the economy as a pretense for laying off just one person,” said Elizabeth Grossman, a lawyer for the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. “And very often that person is pregnant or the oldest employee on staff. The economy may be the legitimate cause — or there may be discrimination.”

Tenn. Senate Passes Abortion Amendment: The Tennessee Senate passed a constitutional amendment that states in part, “nothing in Constitution of Tennessee secures or protects right to abortion or requires the funding of an abortion.”

Rachel writes: “Supporters keep insisting that the bill does not make abortion illegal, while not addressing the fact that if this ultimately succeeds (there are several more steps for this Constitutional amendment), it makes room for the numerous restrictions often supported by anti-choice folks — such as waiting periods, forced ultrasounds, required ‘informed consent’ scripts that are not medically accurate, and so on. It also makes room for an abortion ban in the event that national protections vanish.”

Meanwhile, “Illinois could be on the verge of passing one of the most progressive reproductive health bills, the Reproductive Health and Access Act, any state has seen in a long time,” writes Veronica Arreoloa. Here are the groups supporting  the bill. If you’re a resident of Illinois, contact your legislator and voice your support.

Cost of Domestic Abuse: Women who are abused by their partners spent 42 percent more on healthcare per year than non-abused women, according to a long-term study of more than 3,000 women published online in the journal Health Services Research.  The study, summarized in this press release, also found that the increased costs don’t end when the abuse does. Women who suffered physical abuse five or more years earlier still spent 19 percent more per year on health care than women who were never abused.

Recognition for the Rights of Persons with Disabilities: “We are living in a new era for persons with disabilities,’ writes Myra Kovary at On the Issues Magazine. The story details the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, which was adopted by the General Assembly of the United Nations and has been signed by 50 nations so far.  The U.S. has yet to sign it, but President Barack Obama has said he will do so.

Facts of Life: Sarah Seltzer praises “the sex talk” on one of my favorite television shows, “Friday Night Lights,” and compares it to a conversation from over a decade ago on “My So-Called Life.”