Sojewtastic

On Wednesday, Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius overruled FDA findings showing that Plan B One Step is safe to be sold to all females of childbearing age without a prescription. As we’ve already mentioned, there are some hefty problems with this ruling, including that now the emergency contraceptive will be kept behind pharmacy counters instead of on store shelves, where women will have to present either a prescription or identification proving they are older than 17 in order to purchase it. Yesterday, the president announced his support for the HHS decision.

The reproductive rights community has reacted strongly against the decision, wondering whether it really has to do with data. “When it comes to FDA drug approvals, contraceptives are being held to a different and non-scientific standard—in a word, politics,” Center for Reproductive Rights President Nancy Northup said in a press release from the group.

Meanwhile, a less likely voice has entered the mix: that of the scientific community. The Union of Concerned Scientists published a statement yesterday on their website decrying the HHS decision—and Obama’s support of it—as an attack not only on reproductive rights but also on sound science.

The UCS points out that this is the first time an HHS secretary has overruled the FDA on a drug approval. But as Erin Matson, action vice president of the National Organization of Women, noted on Twitter, the administration rarely disagrees with the FDA—drugs or no drugs. She tweeted: “Perhaps the last time the FDA was overruled: A cranberry recall in 1959. Now Obama admin after emergency contraception in 2011. OUTRAGE.”

As such, yesterday’s decision sets an ugly precedent for scientific assessment of drug safety. “The agency needs to be able to do its job without fearing that the integrity of its work will be compromised,” says Francesca Grifo, director of the UCS’s Scientific Integrity Program.

The UCS also points out that this decision flies in the face of Obama’s commitment to scientific integrity in government. A few months after his 2009 inauguration, the president called for the Office of Science and Technology Policy to craft better protections for scientific research in government. “Political officials should not suppress or alter scientific or technological findings and conclusions,” the memo says.

But as Mother Jones’ Kate Sheppard has written about extensively, those new scientific integrity standards took a year and a half to publish—and when they finally appeared, they were too little, too late. The government standard, she explains, is flawed because it simply sets minimum requirements, instructing individual agencies to then do the rest of the legwork to craft airtight safeguards for the use of science in government decision making.

Well, this is upsetting. According to a new study, people can’t tell the difference between quotes from British “lad mags” and interviews with convicted rapists. And given the choice, men are actually more likely to agree with the rapists.

The University of Surrey reports on the study, to be published in the British Journal of Psychology. Researchers gave a group of men and women quotes from the British lad mags FHM, Loaded, Nuts and Zoo, as well as excerpts from interviews with actual convicted rapists originally published in the book The Rapist Files. The participants couldn’t reliably identify which statements came from magazines and which from rapists — what’s more, they rated the magazine quotes as slightly more derogatory than the statements made by men serving time for raping women. The researchers also showed both sets of quotes to a separate group of men — the men were more likely to identify with the rapists’ statements than the lad mag excerpts. The only slightly bright spot in the study: when researchers randomly (and sometimes incorrectly) labelled the quotes as coming from either rapists or magazines, the men were more likely to identify with the ones allegedly drawn from mags. At least they didn’t want to agree with rapists.

 … Many of the rapists quoted in the study talked about coercing women or having sex with them even though they were initially unwilling. However, so did the lad mags. Horvath says, “Rapists try to justify their actions, suggesting that women lead men on, or want sex even when they say no, and there is clearly something wrong when people feel the sort of language used in a lads’ mag could have come from a convicted rapist.” A lot of these stereotypes — that women say no when they really mean yes, or are “asking for it” by going out with a man or wearing a short skirt — have indeed been normalized, and it’s sad but not surprising that they appear in a lot of lad mags. Defenders of such statements like to frame them as innocent, or even helpful, observations. But perhaps the news that they sound just like rapists will make people — and magazines — rethink their words.