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Workers at a thermometer factory in the south Indian town of Kodaikanal are demanding compensation for illnesses and a better clean-up effort from Hindustan Unilever Ltd., multinational giant Unilever’s Indian subsidiary. They say their illnesses are the result of the company unsafely dumping mercury waste from the factory. The factory was shut down in 2001, soon after complaints about the handling of waste began to surface and workers began to protest.

This week, Indian rapper Sofia Ashraf set the workers’ demands to Nicki Minaj’s “Anaconda”:

Your cleanup was a sham

There’s poison in the air

You ain’t done

Kodaikanal won’t step down til you make amends now

Unilever clean up your mess

“HUL has acted in an absolutely transparent and responsible manner since the issue was first brought to our notice in March 2001 by local NGOs. The company immediately closed the factory on its own and launched an investigation. There were no adverse impacts on the health of employees or the environment,” a spokesperson for Hindustan Unilever Ltd. told the Hindu newspaper.

But workers and their families say they’re still suffering the consequences of dealing with mercury in the factory and the surrounding area. Workers protesting outside Hindustan Unilever Ltd.’s offices in Mumbai last month told New Indian Express that they had neurological and gynecological problems, and that their children had health issues ranging from heart problems to epilepsy. They claim that these problems are directly related to the mercury they were in contact with while working at the factory.

Since the factory shut down, several former workers have died of kidney failure, which could be linked to mercury poisoning, the Deccan Chronicle reports–but there is no official confirmation or count. Greenpeace claims the death toll from mercury exposure in the town is at around 27 workers and their children.

In a statement on their website, the company says internal and external health audits were conducted at the factory while it was open, and further health studies have been completed since it closed. They say the studies all found that there were no adverse health effects on employees during or after their time at the factory.

Unilever did not respond to a request for additional comment. The company has acknowledged, however, that contaminated scrap glass sold to a third party was unsafely disposed. From their statement:

Hindustan Unilever Limited (HUL)1 , did not dump glass waste contaminated with mercury on land behind its factory. Scrap glass containing mercury had been sold to a scrap dealer about three kilometres away from the factory, in breach of our guidelines. HUL immediately closed the factory and launched an investigation.

The Hindu cites a study done in 2005 that found elevated levels of mercury in water, sediment, and fish in the local area, four years after the factory closed. The company’s statement says they are waiting for approval from the state’s Pollution Control Board to do soil remediation work.

Quotes from Myth and Sexuality by Jamake Highwater.

Given the fact that the best minds of our time have entirely abandoned the seventeenth-century mechanistic world view, why have we retained its antiquated fallacy of “universal man” in matters of sexuality.

Since the time of its inception, sexual research has been obsessed with anatomy. When we think about sex, nearly our entire attention is given to the mechanical operation of genitalia. Rarely do we turn our attention away from the sex organs themselves to the subtle sources of meaning that are associated with them. Many socoiologists see this trend as the result of the masculinization of sexual attitudes: the inclination to focus sexuality entirely in the groin. In the long view, however, sex is not so narrowly focused. Quite the contrary, sex is a vehicle for a variety of feelings and needs. But for most men it is difficult to grasp the possibility of such variety because of the emotional illiteracy which is an implicit aspect of male socialization.

Sexuality is shaped by social forces. Far from being the most natural force of our lives, it is, in fact, the most susceptible to cultural influences. This viewpoint does not attempt to deny the importance of biology, for the physiology and morphology of the body certainly does provide the preconditions for human sexuality. But biology does not cause the patterns of our sexual lives. It simply conditions and limits what is likely and what is possible.

It is unreasonable to continue to set up an antagonism between sex and society as if they were biologically dissociated elements arising from separate domains of Nature. We must recognize that sex is highly socialized and that each culture designates various practices as appropriate or inappropriate, moral or immoral, healthy or unhealthy. We constantly construct boundaries that have no basis in “nature.” Yet we continue to indulge the fantasy that our sexuality is the most innate and natural aspect of being human, and that sexual conduct between men and women is predestined by biology forevermore by the dictates of our inborn “human nature.”

Because Western ideology insists that sexual activity is wholly instinctual, that it is natural and innate, we are reluctant to recognize that sexuality has a history. Instead, we are convinced that sexuality is impervious to change, and therefore exists outside of time. Research, however, indicates that there have been many major changes in both sexual behaviour and the significance we attached to it. Social historians have provided countless examples of such shifts of meaning, making it clear that sexuality does possess a history.