Commonly referred to as “cougars,” women who date younger men are often imagined as sexually assertive women who actively seek out and seduce younger men, therefore challenging major pillars of the traditional heterosexual dating script. Drawing on 55 semi-structured interviews with women aged 30-60 who date younger men, I explore the relationship formation process women experienced with younger men with the intent of shedding light on women’s behavior in that context. I found that, contrary to common cultural representations of “cougars,” (...) very few women depicted themselves as seductresses who pursued younger men, with younger men passively waiting to be courted. However, the tendency to present oneself as having played a rather passive role during the relationship formation process was more pronounced among participants over 40 than among 30-something women. I argue that in the context of age-hypogamous dating, women’s ability/desire to renegotiate the gendered script for relationship formation is constrained by the common cultural discourse indicating that a woman’s worth declines with age, as well as by the cultural discomfort toward older women’s sexuality. (shrink)

Anouck Alary | : La transformation du sang placentaire en une précieuse source de cellules souches a donné naissance à partir des années 1990 à une industrie globale de conservation de sang de cordon ombilical faisant désormais concurrence à un large réseau de banques publiques de sang de cordon. Cet article explore les soubassements socioculturels liés à l’émergence de cette industrie et tente d’élucider les enjeux éthiques et politiques qu’elle pose. Si les banques publiques de sang de cordon sont porteuses (...) des valeurs d’altruisme et de solidarité nationale traditionnellement liées au modèle redistributif d’échange de sang et d’organes né après la Seconde Guerre mondiale, les banques privées renvoient, elles, à des formes de solidarité bien différentes. C’est effectivement sous couvert de la solidarité familiale et de la responsabilité morale des mères de protéger leurs enfants qu’elles définissent la conservation privée comme une forme d’ « assurance biologique » contre les risques à la santé de l’enfant. En permettant aux mères d’investir leurs tissus corporels à la fois dans le futur incertain de leurs enfants et dans des thérapies cellulaires expérimentales, ces banques promeuvent un nouveau modèle de participation du/de la patient.e à la coconstitution de futures innovations thérapeutiques. Nous inscrivons ce modèle de participation dans les reconfigurations contemporaines du biopolitique que le sociologue britannique Nikolas Rose voit s’incarner dans l’émergence d’une nouvelle forme de biocitoyenneté. L’article critique finalement ces services personnalisés en soulignant qu’ils ont le potentiel d’opérer de nouvelles formes de coercition sur les mères, dans un contexte sociopolitique caractérisé par une responsabilisation accrue des individus au regard de la « bonne gestion » de leurs risques à la santé. Ces services sont aussi jugés problématiques sur le plan éthique, au vu de leur incohérence avec un principe de justice distributive défendant l’accès égal pour chaque citoyen.ne à des soins de santé de base. | : Since the 1990s, the transformation of cord blood into a precious source of stem cells has given rise to a global cord blood bank industry, which is now competing with a large network of public cord blood banks. This article explores the sociocultural context surrounding the emergence of this industry and aims at elucidating the ethical and political concerns that this industry raises. Whereas public cord blood banks are purveyors of values such as altruism and national solidarity traditionally linked to the redistributive model of human blood and organ donation that emerged after World War Two, private banks engage very different forms of solidarity. It is indeed under the guise of family solidarity and mothers’ moral responsibility to do their best to protect their children that they come to define private preservation as a form of “biological insurance” against potential risks to their children’s health. By allowing mothers to invest their bodily tissues simultaneously in their children’s uncertain future and in experimental cell therapies, these banks promote a new model of patient participation in the development of future therapeutic innovations. This article analyzes this model as embedded in the contemporary reconfiguration of biopolitics that sociologist Nikolas Rose envisions as constituting a new form of biocitizenship. The paper finally casts a critical eye on these personalized services, in particular because of the new forms of social coercion on mothers that are brought about in a social and political context characterized by an increasing moral accountability of individuals with regard to the “good management” of their own health risks. These services also appear ethically problematic in relation to political demands of distributive justice—e.g., the ideal of equal access to basic health care for every citizen. (shrink)

Bidirectional deep brain stimulation (DBS) platforms have enabled a surge in hours of recordings in naturalistic environments, allowing further insight into neurological and psychiatric disease states. However, high amplitude, high frequency stimulation generates artifacts that contaminate neural signals and hinder our ability to interpret the data. This is especially true in psychiatric disorders, for which high amplitude stimulation is commonly applied to deep brain structures where the native neural activity is miniscule in comparison. Here, we characterized artifact sources in recordings (...) from a bidirectional DBS platform, the Medtronic Summit RC + S, with the goal of optimizing recording configurations to improve signal to noise ratio (SNR). Data were collected from three subjects in a clinical trial of DBS for obsessive-compulsive disorder. Stimulation was provided bilaterally to the ventral capsule/ventral striatum (VC/VS) using two independent implantable neurostimulators. We first manipulated DBS amplitude within safe limits (2–5.3 mA) to characterize the impact of stimulation artifacts on neural recordings. We found that high amplitude stimulation produces slew overflow, defined as exceeding the rate of change that the analog to digital converter can accurately measure. Overflow led to expanded spectral distortion of the stimulation artifact, with a six fold increase in the bandwidth of the 150.6 Hz stimulation artifact from 147–153 to 140–180 Hz. By increasing sense blank values during high amplitude stimulation, we reduced overflow by as much as 30% and improved artifact distortion, reducing the bandwidth from 140–180 Hz artifact to 147–153 Hz. We also identified artifacts that shifted in frequency through modulation of telemetry parameters. We found that telemetry ratio changes led to predictable shifts in the center-frequencies of the associated artifacts, allowing us to proactively shift the artifacts outside of our frequency range of interest. Overall, the artifact characterization methods and results described here enable increased data interpretability and unconstrained biomarker exploration using data collected from bidirectional DBS devices. (shrink)