Brent Arehart // Every day, American viewers of television and streaming services alike are targeted by direct-to-consumer ads for pharmaceuticals. We are all too familiar with them. Chances are you already know something about Prozac, Lipitor, and myriads of other drugs even if you can’t recall off the top of your head what they are…
Author: Brent Arehart
The Science of Judging a Book by its Cover
Brent Arehart // There is a famous anecdote about Hippocrates told by Arabic authors. One day, Hippocrates’ students gathered to discuss whether anyone else was more virtuous than their master. When they could not think of any obvious candidates, one student got a clever idea. He proposed that they acquire a picture of Hippocrates and…
Those Other Sexual Diseases
Brent Arehart // These are strange times that we are living in. Politicians joking about the “beer virus,” social media encouraging social distancing, polls closing in the middle of a primary, dogs being walked by drones—very strange indeed. But it might not be all bad. Self-quarantining means more time at home. More time at home…
(Re-)Producing Sexperimental Knowledge
Brent Arehart // Everybody knows where babies come from. When two people love each other, a stork brings them a child. Where does the stork pick up the baby for distribution? Why, the baby factory, of course. How does the baby factory make babies? Well, they just make them, you know, like a car factory…
Mid-Century Satyrs: Another Dead End in the Pathologization of Sexual Behavior
Brent Arehart // “The ‘stud’ suffers from a pathological need for excessive sexual intercourse, which can only be satisfied by one or more willing partners.” So wrote Dr. Franklin Klaf in 1966 in the opening pages of Satyriasis: A Study of Male Nymphomania. He then went on to make a case for the severity of…
The Ancient History of “Gonorrhea”
Brent Arehart // Did the Greeks and Romans have gonorrhea? If you do some light Googling and read the introduction to a few articles on PubMed, then the answer appears to be yes. After all, the word gonorrhea itself is a Latinized loanword from Greek (gonos “seed” + rhein “to flow”). We can also find…