Brief comments and notes on QEDCON day 1 (sat 13 Apr 2013)
Talks:
3) The Sex Myth: Why everything we're told is wrong (Dr. Brooke Magnanti)
The speaker for this talk caused quite a storm a few years ago when she revealed her alter ego as a sex worker called "Belle De Jour". This story was turned into a dramatised TV series starring Billie Piper (Why didn't I watch that again? Damn...damn).
But Brooke Magnanti is a remarkable woman and this was an excellent and informative talk. There are many harmful myths about sex work which are perpetuated largely in the media. Such things are the kind of headline you might read in the Daily Fail (sorry, Mail) IF you were foolish enough to ever look at it. For example, stories about how rates of rape are going up, or how the amount of money involved in porn is dominating other forms of entertainment, or how sex addiction is becoming a more serious problem these days.
Dr. Magnanti showed that not only were such cliches actually falsehoods, but they were dangerous because they suggested reversions were the answer, increasing the feeling that purity and sexual conservatism were the cures for all our ills. In fact, a liberal attitude to sexual matters is best, where topics can be discussed in the open and people are free to express themselves, and proper sexual education is taught in schools, leads to healthier outcomes.
My own take on this - Legalise and regulate sex work (like we should do with drugs); and men urgently need to be taught that they must properly respect women at all times.
She explained the positive feedback model which seems to act as a entryway into this process: Someone spots a shock "statistic" and fits it to a predetermined message they want to put across. No critical thinking goes into rationalising this statistic. Then someone else sees and writes about the story, reinforcing the meme. An example was the sex addiction myth.
The "International Institute for Sex Addiction" was exposed as the ridiculous sham it is - its rude and insulting questionnaire that you fill in to determine if you are a sex addict, would suggest that almost anyone is qualified as such, so long as they'd ever had a relationship, or seen anyone else having one.
The issue of licensing new strip clubs and lap-dancing clubs to open was discussed in detail. Previous poorly designed studies appeared to show that rates of rape increased in a London area (Camden) following the opening of such establishments. However, when the trend is viewed compared to other national trends, it is not statistically significant. Other areas with no such clubs had similar rates of rape. All that one could actually conclude from the study was the truism that cities were more dangerous for women than the countryside.
Glasgow Council were singled out in using dodgy research like this to justify not approving new sex establishments to open in their area. However, they still welcomed applications and charged £1000s for the privilege even when the negative outcome was a forgone conclusion.
In fact evidence was presented to suggest that these clubs can help reduce sexual assaults in problem areas. The council's stereotyped and reductive views on sexuality are actually quite damaging. This matters because it deflects attention away from the real issues at hand.
You can follow Dr. Magnanti on Twitter if you want (@bmagnanti), I advise it actually as she always makes a lot of sense.
4) Rose Shapiro Interviewed by Brian Thompson
This informal discussion was very helpful in understanding more details about AltMed and the devious tricks it uses to promote itself. Rose Shapiro is author of the book "Suckers: How Alternative Medicine makes fools of us all" and here she was interviewed by JREF's Brian Thompson who was entertaining as always but also contributed well to the discussion.
AltMed is prominently featured in women's magazines. Here it tries to emphasize its empowering elements, helping the stereotypical "housewife" break free from normality and engage with its nebulous concepts. The Pharma industry is portrayed as the bad guy, more interested in profits than cures, but it was strongly suggested that such as idea actually mirrored AltMed itself, so it was ironic to use that charicature. In actuality, AltMed is the rip-off with ineffective treatments.
Other trope trotted out by AltMed practitioners is the notion that "Natural remedies" are best, having been brought through the ages, unchanged by time and are now sometimes described as "Ancient cures". However, natural remedies are not a cohesive discipline brought through hundreds or thousands of years intact - they have changed much and many of the m are actually quite modern re-imaginings of old ideas that simply didn't work. China is a large culprit in the natural remedies scam. After the Iron Curtain came down, Richard Nixon visited China and brought back many ideas for alternative medicines to the USA. Of course China had over hundreds of years previously sustained itself using these ineffective treatments for its people, because that was all it could afford.
AltMed creates a "parallel universe" wherein the "Brave Maverick" or "Lone Genius" researcher can come up with better cures than the rest of science, which is of course a giant network of intelligent peers all exchanging ideas. This is a myth. Lone geniuses simply do not come up with effective answers because there is no-one to check their work. For example the Burzynski Clinic.
Ways for spotting dodgy AltMed were discussed- these included any mention of a "universal diagnosis", that a patient should "get worse before they get better" (i.e. reversion to the mean -not a treatment), and "individually tailored" medicine that is actually very similar for anyone.
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