This may offend some of you because it's about people. If it does,
please pretend I'm talking about bulls or boars.
According to the Nobel Prize Web site, the 1998 Nobel Prize in
Physiology or Medicine was awarded jointly to Robert F Furchgott,
Louis J Ignarro and Ferid Murad for their discoveries concerning
"nitric oxide as a signalling molecule in the cardiovascular system."
Weren't these guys the inventors or discoverers or whatever you'd
call it of Viagra? I mean, that's the mechanism by which it works,
innit?
Why is this a sustag question?
Pharmaceutical companies are increasingly consolidating their hold on
the food system. It says something about their prevailing value
structure, doesn't it?, that this particular notion of male
"virility" is normatized, celebrated, and marketed (hyped) to the
exclusion of others. And given a Nobel Prize? And its implications,
particularly the food system ones, aren't apparently taken into
consideration by the Nobel folks. Yeah, I know that Alfred Nobel
invented dynamite (also an NO-related compound), and that a systems
view of inventions is not exactly the Nobel Foundation's strong suit.
Anyone tracking this issue who could clarify this for me, I'd really
appreciate. I did a Web search on "Viagra" to try to find the names
of its inventors, but quickly grew so slack-jawed by the hype around
it (such as users of the drug bragging about their number of scores
in a night), I had to stop. It was painful seeing men's sexuality
reduced and commodified in this way to sell a drug.
It's always seemed to me that a sustainable ethic of responsible
sexuality has got to be part of sustainable ag, since the
relationship of sexuality to reproduction has considerable impacts
on food issues and communities. And men's sexuality in
particular--Stephen Jay Gould pointed out some 15 years ago that
while women's bodies have evolved past the point where sexuality and
reproduction are connected, men's bodies still conjoin the two
functions. Alone of all the primates, human women's reproductive
cycle is independent of sexual pleasure.
And say for a moment I buy the Viagra hype and the pathetic image of
menfolk it presents ("well you know, they only want one thing, har
har har"), it seems to me that the last thing that an overpopulated,
industrially polluted, community-weakened, food-insecure world needs
is men aged 20-70 "who feel like 16 again," which is Code for one
particular type of physical functioning, but has other implications
too. Seems to me that what we really need are menfolk who feel
exactly their age, and carry the full diverse wisdom of it.
Womenfolk too.
I kinda thought that Mama Earth was sending us all a message around
this with low sperm counts, et cetera, and the renaissance of the
understanding that there's more to love, relating, family, and
community, for men as well as women, than Har Har Har Wham Bam.
Just another part of Vertical Integration, I guess--you synthesize
and sell people fractionated, denatured food, you might as well sell
them a vision of fractionated, denatured sexuality that fits with
that. I wonder when men are going to wake up and stop letting
themselves be used like this to sell products that don't necessarily
represent or honor their full selves. (Not just Viagra--guns, cars,
beer, sports, tools, and huge agricultural implements.)
If I'm wrong about the connection between these Nobelistas and
Viagra, somebody please let me know.
peace
misha
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Michele Gale-Sinex, communications manager
Center for Integrated Ag Systems
UW-Madison College of Ag and Life Sciences
Voice: (608) 262-8018 FAX: (608) 265-3020
http://www.wisc.edu/cias
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