Let me make one thing perfectly clear: I am not anti-sex. Not only am I not anti-sex, but I whole-heartedly support the frank and open discussion of sex and sexuality. At Dartmouth especially, I believe this to be crucial.

I also want make it plain that feminism is not anti-sex. Despite what the propaganda of the feminist backlash and the extremely well-funded and powerful forces of reactionary politics on this campus would have you believe, feminism does not entail a disavowal of sex or pleasure. Indeed, feminism has been in large part responsible for breaking down the taboos against speaking about sex, especially women’s sexuality. To see evidence of this at Dartmouth, we need only look to the Women’s Resource Center’s Sex Series, one of the few opportunities for women and men here to engage in open and safe conversation about sex.

What feminism actually opposes is the sexual (and physical, and political, and emotional) exploitation of women. Thus, one can understand feminists’ opposition of domestic violence, sexual assault and, sometimes, and more controversially, pornography. The fact of the matter is pornography oftentimes is explicitly misogynist, deeply heterosexist, and just plain anti-woman. Pornography that portrays violence being performed against women is not about sexual pleasure. It is about hatred of women.

But why discuss pornography at Dartmouth? Because this past Friday, the Dartmouth Asian Organization and Korean-American Students Association, funded by COSO, intended to co-sponsor a "Playboy Mansion" party complete with "bunnies." Not only did the College agree to sponsor this event, but female Dartmouth students agreed to dress up as "bunnies" to service the party-attendees. I would never dream of denying anyone the right to dress as they please, to act as they wish and to speak as they choose. But I will noisily protest the glaringly obvious chauvinism inherent to the concept of the "Playboy Mansion" party.

While Playboy is not in the same league as other pornographic magazines, which include much more degrading and exploitative images of women, it still clearly supports the heterosexist and misogynist power structure that has oppressed women for thousands of years. Very clearly, that power structure, which privileges straight white males, is still very much a part of our society. At Dartmouth in the past few weeks, we have discovered that some Psi U brothers consider it perfectly acceptable to scream sexual and racial slurs at women in the middle of campus, and that some men consider it just as acceptable to accost women in the shower.

It is absolute nonsense to consider events like these isolated, given their clear recurrence in our small community. While conservatives and other anti-feminists like to diminish the ramifications such events have, the fact is that these occurrences point to a larger problem, a problem that feminist scholars and activists have pointed to for years. The power of the patriarchy is alive and well here in Hanover, just as it is throughout the rest of the world. Not only does it provide a basis from which misogynist, racist and heterosexist acts to be perpetrated, but it also creates a culture in which those acts are considered harmless, unavoidable, and useless protesting. That culture sanctions rape and anti-gay hate crimes.

A common argument in defense of racist, homophobic and sexist behaviors claims that if those responsible for the action are members of the harmed group itself (they are female or queer) then the actions are somehow validated. The fact that two organizers behind the Playboy Mansion party were women, for instance, was used as a justification for the event. (An unsigned e-mail message from the DAO claims, "our two ‘female’ social chairs came up with it and they were really psyched about [the theme] and had been working hard to put it together, so we decided to support them.") It seems, according to this line of thinking, that since women participate in their own and other women’s oppression, that oppression is somehow excusable. The argument is illogical.

Just because the institutions of patriarchy have been internalized to such a degree that women themselves support their own objectification does not make those institutions in any way legitimate. In fact, that internalization only speaks to the incredible power the patriarchy still holds over women and men.

It is possible for organizations to make mistakes. The fact that the DAO and KASA changed the name of the Playboy Mansion party in response to Dartmouth students’ outrage, points to their sensitivity to peer criticism. Yet the fact that such an event was conceived in the first place indicates that the objectification and exploitation of women’s sexuality is still considered acceptable in our male-dominated culture. To realize that may be unpleasant and disheartening. But to ignore it is to doom ourselves to repeating the mistakes of the past.

The mantra of capitalism is that you have to spend money to make money. Must the same be true about human life? The exploitation of human beings for drug testing in developing countries is becoming an increasingly common practice. Major drug companies make experiments on people in the developing world in unregulated tests that are often carried out without full patient consent and beyond the reach of United States law. Ethical guidelines for drug testing dictate the benefits of research must be tempered by a respect for the welfare of the research subject. That is, unless those being injured and killed are from the "Third World" and the lives being saved are American.

Drug researchers seeking approval from the United States Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for medicines for illnesses as diverse as AIDS and schizophrenia turn to developing nations in Africa, Asia, Latin America and Eastern Europe. There they find great numbers of afflicted people with few medical alternatives and, too often, little understanding of the dangers accompanying the tests they undergo. Because of the lack of alternatives and the poverty of the people involved, the costs of holding experiments are much lower. Additionally, in the developing world, the time required to perform the tests is generally much less, since often there are little to no regulations in place in these countries regarding human drug research. The result is that unsuccessful drugs are quickly discovered and abandoned and successful ones are pursued. While it is important to acknowledge that the increased speed of the testing process can make life-saving drugs available sooner, we cannot disregard the lives lost because of uninformed patient consent, shoddy medical practices and drug companies’ insistence on high profits. The bottom line is that experimenting with human life is cheaper for drug companies in developing nations, and the pursuit of the bottom line often results in inexcusable breaches of basic medical ethics.

According to the Washington Post, in October of ’98 in Estonia, a clinic run by Van Tx Research Ltd. attracted recruits in the city of Parnu by advertising the trial as a spa retreat of sorts. After flying the recruits to Switzerland, participants were given consent forms to sign in German, making it nearly impossible for non-German speaking participants to ascertain the conditions to which they were consenting. Eventually, Swiss authorities shut down the clinic when it was discovered to be recruiting drug addicts, those who were unaware that they were in a drug study, and refugees seeking political asylum in Switzerland. Before it closed, however, this clinic performed 161 research experiments for several global drug companies. While no lives were lost in this particular instance, the blatant dishonesty of the clinic’s practices indicates the existence of a serious problem.

An especially challenging ethical question concerns AIDS drug testing in the Third World. Thailand, especially, has become a popular country amongst researchers, because of its incredibly high HIV-positive population and because of its increasingly open policies regarding Western researchers. However, that openness has not resulted in the same amount of protection and care that Western patients enjoy. Instead, passive studies that simply map the growth of the epidemic, instead of providing any medical assistance, are prevalent. Additionally, placebos are used with much greater frequency than in the West, meaning that much fewer participants actually have a chance of receiving real medicine. For instance, in two maternity wards in Bangkok, an American drug test in which half the participants (HIV-positive pregnant women) were given placebos resulted in 37 babies being infected with HIV, when they might have been spared.

While the FDA has established stringent requirements for drug research in the United States, its regulatory powers only apply within American borders. The FDA may examine results from tests performed outside the U.S. when the safety of the drug is at issue, but this process of investigation often begins years after the tests have been performed ? if at all. Furthermore, efforts to determine informed consent and adherence to ethical standards are nearly always unsuccessful. By conducting their tests in developing nations, drug companies can shield themselves from FDA regulation, saving money and time; the often-injurious consequences of these unchecked trials are inexcusable.

The central precept that individuals give their informed consent before participating in drug tests is one that, while widely upheld by international guidelines, presents the most difficulty to drug companies and research universities when they seek to perform tests in the developing world. Sometimes, test leaders simply ignore the requirements, while other times the ethical question is not so unambiguous: can an individual with no other health care options and unable to read a consent form, make an informed consent regarding a drug test? Many would say no. Still, tests are carried out that are contingent on such an individual’s consent. To complicate the problem, drug researchers themselves often decide what information the patients receive about a specific drug. Thus, a drug that has been found to have harmful side effects in one country may be tested in another without the requirement that the patients be made aware of this.

Perhaps because of the economically advantageous results of overseas drug tests, the number of these tests is growing at an alarming rate. In ’99, 27% of new drug applications to the FDA included a foreign test result, a number three times that in ’95. A mammoth drug company, Eli Lilly and Co., experimented on 590 patients in Africa, the Middle East, and Eastern and Central Europe in ’94. This year, the company’s expectation was to experiment on 7,309 patients in those regions. While these available numbers illustrate a disturbing trend, statistics regarding drug testing in developing countries are otherwise almost completely unavailable in the United States. This lack of information allows for greater exploitation of developing nations’ citizens without arousing American outrage, or even suspicion. While overseas drug testing is not inherently harmful, the lack of regulation for this testing clearly is.

Harmful and life-threatening consequences can ensue when pure capitalist practices are unregulated by domestic governments or international agencies. It is time to make the drug companies conform to regulations that protect the rights of individuals; regardless of nationality or economic class.

decade after the approval of RU486 in France, and characteristically well behind most of Europe, the United States’ Federal Drug Adminstration (FDA) finally approved the medical abortion drug this September. This is, without a doubt, a victory for the pro-choice movement. In the face of conservative opposition and the possibility of an anti-choice Supreme Court, reproductive rights advocates have reaffirmed women’s sovereignty over their bodies.

According to Kate Michelman, president of the National Abortion and Reproductive Rights Action League, "It may be the most important advance in reproductive technology since the birth control pill." Surely to the chagrin of abortion rights opponents, such as Governor George W. Bush, mifepristone (the name given to RU486 by its U.S. manufacturer) will make abortion safer and more widely available.

Contrary to the extreme right’s claim that mifepristone will make abortion more common, France and other European countries where the drug is already available have had no increase in the number of abortions performed. In fact, in France, where the drug has been legalized the longest, the abortion rate has actually dropped by 7 percent since RU486’s introduction. In the United States, the abortion pill’s arrival comes at a time when the number of abortions being performed has dropped to its lowest level in 20 years.

Feminist Majority Foundation President Eleanor Smeal called the FDA’s approval of mifepristone "a total victory for the U.S. women. At long last, science trumps anti-abortion politics and medical McCarthyism. If this medication was primarily for men, the French developers would already have received a Nobel Prize in medicine." Smeal identifies an interesting manifestation of sexism in the scientific and medical professions. Characteristically, drugs that directly impact women but not men are often ignored or downplayed. One of the last bastions of androcentric thought is the medical establishment, which makes the development of this drug even more remarkable and commendable.

It seems especially odd that the FDA would need ten years to approve a drug that is legal and easily accessible in the United Kingdom, Germany, Switzerland, Russia, China, and an expanding list of countries. The more than 10 million women who have used the medication have proven the pill safe. And tests have proven mifepristone to be 92 percent successful for women who have been pregnant 49 days or less. Perhaps the real reason for the delay was not concern for women’s safety, but rather the United States’ powerful and well-funded conservative and fundamentalist religious establishment.

Not only is medical abortion with mifepristone safe, but it also allows a woman to have an abortion very early into the pregnancy, unlike surgical abortions, which often cannot be performed until several weeks after a woman learns she is pregnant. Mifepristone, in contrast, is more effective the earlier in the pregnancy it is used. Mifepristone also offers the comfort of not leaving home for the majority of the process, although it does entail several visits to a doctor in order to ensure the health of the woman.

Yet another advantage of the pill is that it lowers the stigma of getting an abortion, and allows the process to be more private. Women do not have to brave fanatical, hostile and sometimes lethal anti-abortion protests when they exercise their legal rights. In addition, women who have used mifepristone speak of the greater psychological control they enjoyed throughout the abortion. Finally, the harassment and intimidation tactics of reactionary religious crusaders will be impossible. There are some on the far right who wish to suppress any sense of control women may have over themselves, their bodies, and their futures. In this instance, at least, women have won control.

Mifepristone blocks the action of progesterone, a hormone necessary to sustain pregnancy. The drug doesn’t just make abortion more accessible, but has also been shown to fight fibroid tumors, ovarian cancer, endometriosis, and some types of breast cancer, HIV, and meningioma. Breast cancer, which killed over 43,000 women in the U.S. in ’99, has been treated with Mifepristone. The drug was found to alleviate the pain of metastasizing cancer cells in bones, and is estimated to be effective in treating 40% of breast cancers.

The fact that the United States has been slow in legalizing a drug that could have helped save untold female lives is simply another indicator that American women are subject to the political concerns and conservative beliefs of a government dominated by men.

Abortion politics will play a pivotal role in this election. Al Gore has an impressive record concerning all women’s issues, but especially on RU486. This was demonstrated by his early and unpopular support of the abortion pill as far back as ’92 when he said that RU-486 "ought to be available in the United States." However, it is important to note that Gore has endorsed a ban on partial-birth abortions, with exceptions for health concerns or woman’s life.

Unfortunately, restrictions regarding parental consent and mandatory waiting periods will still apply to Mifepristone. There is also the specter of an anti-abortion Supreme Court, which could have dire consequences for women’s right to any abortion, medical or otherwise. For now, pro-choice supporters can rejoice, but there are battles still to be fought. As long as the extremists on the right refuse to see women as human beings, the debate will continue.