Muriel Dimen Interviewed by Andrew Samuels in the Context of the Publication of Her Book Sexuality,Intimacy, Power

Samuels interviewed Dimen in lieu of a book review for her Sexuality, Intimacy, Power. The interview was unstructured and dialogical and covered the following main topics: (a) professional issues in the field of psychoanalysis such as the relation of theory to practice and reflections on the nature and content of trainings in psychoanalysis; (b) issues in the broad areas of sexuality and gender including the question of moral relativism with respect to sexual behaviors historically designated as “perverse” and considerations of masculinity, femininity, and patriarchy; (c) intellectual considerations such as the relations between anthropology and psychoanalysis and the as yet indeterminate nature of the discipline of psychoanalysis, neither art nor science and not a hybrid of the two; and (d) the political, social, and cultural contexts within which psychoanalytic endeavors including the interview itself are taking place.     

‘You Get More Respect,’ Reasons for Sex Among African American High School Youth: A Qualitative Study

ABSTRACT

African American adolescents continue to be disproportionately impacted by HIV, sexually transmitted infections (STIs), and unanticipated pregnancies. In-depth, face-to-face interviews among a convenience sample of 32 African American adolescents (16 male and 16 female) were used to explore the reasons why some adolescents decided to engage in sex while others chose to delay sexual debut. Data were analyzed using a thematic analysis. Among the overall sample, psychological motivations, external pressure, physical pleasure seeking, and relationship-related motivations were the major themes cited for engaging in sex by participants and their friends. External support, motivation to avoid negative consequences, not feeling ready or lacking interest in sex, and having negative views about sex were among the major reasons for delaying sex. Several of the emergent themes showed gender differences. Suggestions for future research include the need for sexual education, and STI/HIV prevention programs that are gender sensitive and flexible enough to accommodate multiple factors related to sexual debut.     

Woman and Desire Why Women May Not Want to Want

Questioning why it is that female genitalia and desire are viewed in psychoanalytic theory as hidden, inaccessible, and lacking, the author examines 1) female genital representation, 2) girls' erotically desirous relationships to their mothers, and 3) the nature of women's experience in sexuality. The author proposes that the marker “absent” regarding female genitalia and desire may be a particular female form or protection against “castration” of sexual desire; males inflate whereas females may deflate their genital representation and desire. The author suggests that the female body lends itself-and, abetted by culture and psychoanalytic theory, is unconsciously used by females—to a specific form or protection of female desire.     

Screen Images and Concepts of Sexual Agency in Science and Social Science

This article contributes to studies of how inequities of power are naturalized in culture through the idea of “screen images,” a form of shared projective thinking. Screen images develop when socioeconomic reality contradicts shared cultural values and thus produces moral anxiety. The screen images we trace are those of the Lady and the Whore in bourgeois Victorian cultures, which we believe represented compromised versions of female sexual agency. Although these images originated in Victorian models of sexual difference, we show that they continue to shape models in 20th-century medicine, primatology, and evolutionary social science. These screen images reveal a historically persistent denial of agentive sexuality in women and have served as a defense through which people have avoided confronting the socioeconomic bases of gender inequality.     

Efficacy of Statistical Outlier Analysis for Monitoring Quality of Care

Researchers have proposed that hospitals with excessive statistically unexplained mortality rates are more likely to have quality-of-care problems. The U.S. Health Care Financing Administration currently uses this statistical “outlier” approach to screen for poor quality in hospitals. Little is known, however, about the validity of this technique, since direct measures of quality are difficult to obtain. We use Monte Carlo methods to evaluate the performance of the outlier technique as parameters of the true mortality process are varied. Results indicate that the screening ability of the technique may be very sensitive to how widespread quality-related mortality is among hospitals but insensitive to other factors generally thought to be important.     

The Ghosts of Knowing Commentary on Janice Haaken's Pillar of Salt

In Pillar of Salt, Janice Haaken makes an ambitious attempt to examine what has become a passionate, contentious debate about recovered memories of childhood abuse. Haaken examines several—sometimes conflicting—perspectives on recovered memory syndrome, which themselves yield diverse interpretations of the status of knowledge and the implications of multiple, even oppositional positionalities. The least ambiguous aspect of Haaken's argument is that women have found their voices and identities in the cultural Zeitgeist of sex abuse discourse. Although Haaken's social constructionist view is broad, I am concerned about the ways in which the therapeutic structure of retrieval misrepresents and flattens the epistemological complexities that shape these discussions, while remaining largely unacknowledged.     

Lifting the Veil: African American Images and the European American Gaze

Patricia Hill Collins presents and discusses gender and gender role norms, behaviors, and ideologies among African Americans in an interdisciplinary diagnostic endeavor that calls attention to health, economic, behavioral, and psychosocial patterns related to social injustice and inequality. Collins presents several popular culture, mass media, and social science literature topics that call for a progressive Black sexual politics necessary for African American empowerment. A most crucial and apparent point of Collins's discussion is that improvement in the lives of African Americans requires inspection and analysis of gender and sexuality related intragroup variation and diversity. I situate this discussion primarily within a post-civil rights ideological revolution related to the European American “gaze,” multiculturalism, and European American emotional ambivalence toward the Black body. It is proposed that Collins's analysis of the intersectionality of race, gender, and sexuality among African Americans occurs within an American context that reciprocally impacts African American intragroup dynamics.     

Contraceptive Responsibility among Male University Students

Abstract

This paper assesses the male contribution to contraceptive mismanagement and unwanted pregnancy. The subjects were 109 students at the University of Melbourne. A high incidence of risk-taking was reported, and almost one-fifth of the sexually experienced men stated that they had been involved in an unwanted pregnancy. A small group of these reported more than one such incident. The underlying reasons for poor contraceptive technique seemed to be related to two beliefs: that contraception is a female responsibility, and that sexual intercourse should be entirely spontaneous and unplanned.     

Students' Attitudes Toward Religion

A study of the value structure of students investigates correlations of value hierarchies with religious/secular orientations and exposure to school curricula incorporating a course in Orthodox culture.