>> on "america tonight," it was the moment sunny brownmiller had been waiting for. a chance to tell hugh hefner on national television. >> women are not bunnies. >> still calling it as she sees it. this feminist pioneer shoots straight with young women. >> i always stress the warning women are still in denial. >> for obsessive compulsive

disorder had taken control of her life. she had worn gloves all the time 24/7. she decided to undergo radical surgery. a groundbreaking procedure called deep brain stimulation. >> thanks for joining us. i'm joie chen. think about all the miracles science has wrought us, lives that were thought to be doomed. restoring health. and now there is thought that surgery can change our minds. we look at deep brain stimulation as a way to treat psychiatric disorders. we followed a woman who thought she had lost her life. now we look at unanticipated questions and consequences. >> you're okay. you're okay with that? >> i need a hug.

>> a simple hug. six months ago this would have been impossible for jennifer. >> baby steps right? >> her obsessive/compulsive disorder had taken controlled of her life. she wore gloves all the time, 24/7 and no one could touch her. she feared what she called contamination. >> even my own mom would--she would sometimes she would cry because she couldn't hug me, and she's like, i just love you so much. it made me feel so very guilty. some of my family members made it even more guilty. they're like, do you have any idea how i feel? yeah, i understand, and believe me i want to hug you just as much as you want to hug me. >> we first met jennifer last august. she had suffered from ocd since childhood. the severe psychological disorder cutting her off from other people and the outside world.

[music] as a last resort she decided to undergo radical surgery. >> how are you doing? we're almost done. >> you're going to hear just a little bit of noise drilling sound, but this should not hurt. >> a groundbreaking procedure called deep brain stimulation. six months later the gloves came off. >> i can take them off now. it feels like i'm not protected so i mean if someone came to poke my hand, i would hit them. that's a warning. >> you don't want me to shake your hand right now? >> not going to happen. i would shake your hand with the gloves but not without the gloves. >> the fact that she could do this without paralyzing fear is a dramatic change. and until now countless therapy

sessions have mostly failed. that's why she enrolled in this clinical trial at the renown mayo clinic in rochester minnesota. at the time desperate for help. >> it's just like i'm looking forward to it, like a kid on christmas morning. you just want to get there right now. >> doctors drilled two holes in her skull and placed electrodes deep inside her brain. then they rapidly adjusted the volume stage voltage which changed her mood instantly. jennifer was wide awake the entire time describing how she felt. >> this feels bad. >> it makes me very depressed. >> depressed. >> i just want to crawl up in a ball and die. >> after the surgery jennifer

continued to have the electricity levels adjusted every two weeks as doctors tried to find the right balance. >> it was super high or super low. it was good or bad good or bad. >> those lows were really deep. >> yes, i was shutting down completely. then he would turn it back up, i would be giggling and laughing and making jokes and i would have this weird half smile on my face constantly. it was just like giggles. completely different person. >> at least she's not crazy. >> at this animal shelter where she volunteers she's visibly happier since the surgery. and doing this without gloves a few months ago would have been unthinkable. she says she has a much greater lust for life. in fact, jennifer revealed an unexpected side affect of her rewired brain. >> i'm more sexual. i'm more sexually interested.

there were times in my life where i literally thought i think i'm asexual. i couldn't imagine being intimate with anyone without it being an uncomfortable hug with your great aunt. nothing intimate was desirable. >> you can think about intimacy now? >> yes, it's a curse and a blessing. now i have this desire to be intimate but it's so instant that i want to be--i'm not saying sexually intimate with everybody, but i just want to be with people and i don't care how well we know each other. i want to put my head in someone's lap and be touchy-feely. >> hitting just the right voltage is an inexact science. after one adjustment jennifer hit an all-time low. it put her in a psychiatric

facility. >> i was at the airport. the lady, she was talking to me about my seat and everything. i heard nothing she said. all i could see was the scissors that she used to cut off the old luggage tags. all i could think is if i distract her would she notice if i took those and slit my wrists? >> do we fully understand what we're aiming at? do we fully understand the circuitry of the brain? absolutely notten it's experimental. >> despite all the unknowns, he still supports dbs if done. >> right i think it's an interesting area for medical research. a lot of people just hear about deep brain simulation and they think of psycho surgery. we've had a horrific history in medicine of taking the brain apart. think lobotomies. there are plenty of people who remember that era and they don't trust what doctors are

saying hey why don't i put a wire in your head and stimulate a different part of your brain. >> is this different? >> it is different. you can reverse. if you don't like this or you don't think it's working we'll end it. this is the hallmarks that makes dbs different from all prior work in the brain. >> depending on the results of this clinical study, doctors at the mayo believe that dbs could be used to treat other psychological disorders and maybe even addictions. and kaplan warns that it could be a pandora's box. >> where do you see it going in ten years from now. >> this is for many that it will be helpful but you can see it going in the different direction. i never read that fast. can you trigger a a better memory. it's not going to happen tomorrow they're going to be

enhancing people's brains by connecting them to deep brain probe. ten years out absolutely. we'll have to decide is this something for diseases and to relief them or are we going to make a better brain. >> jennifer's future is unclear. she sees a psychiatric at the university of chicago twice a week and she's undergoing additional behavioral therapies hoping eventually that the gloves come off for good. >> there is no ocd remission. it's not like cancer and it goes away, and you wait to see if tumors come back. it's more like you get--you manage t and it's more like diabetes where you have to have your insulin shots and something where you have to maintain it, and it can recuperate back up any day. >> even though there is not a cure you're happy that you had

it done? >> oh god yes, i couldn't remember what happiness was like. when i did feel it, it was very motivating because i'm like, it's possible. it's physically possible for me to be happy. it can happen. >> america tonight's.adam may is with us. this seems like a life-changing experience for jennifer. >> it has been such a dramatic turn around, joie. you look back at what she was like when we met her last year, and how she is today. one of the biggest changes we've seen in her is she wants to be around people. the first time we met her she was reluctant to talk to us for any period of time. >> now she wants to hug. >> you yes she takes the gloss off, and she's so much happier. odometer thing that struck me about her the first time we met her, she didn't talk about her future. now we think maybe she'll go to college, she's thinking beyond the next day beyond her illness, and she's thinking about what she can do in her

life to make herself happy. >> for some folks deep brain simulation could be a life-changing process. they're also using it in different areas as well. >> clinical trials all over the country for dbs. they've been looking at parkinson's and movement disorder and that has shown to be quite promising. there are parkinson's patients who are having wonderful affects. the new realm is psychiatric disorders. the ocd and it is happening at a handful of clinics right now. we should have the findings march of next year as to whether or not it is effective. >> so remarkable. thanks. next, new death toll for ebola. fast forward to find out if the outbreak is over. and speaking her mind for more than four decades an

outspoken feminist, now she's getting tough with women. >> women have a false sense of empowerment because the fact is they can't do everything that men can do. >> and on our website now meet the suburban mom who post intimate shots of other women online. could your relationship be just clicks away from being revenge porn? find out at www.aljazeera.com/america tonight.

>> in our fast forward segment what's happened in the battle against ebola. though we've seen some signs the spread of the virus is slowing, it has stubbornly refused to leave west africa, especially sierra leone. on the front lines last fall, journalists found patients there who had been left to die. >> patients were coming in on a daily basis and they were having to pile them into ambulances and send them into treatment centers which are 8- to 16-hours drive away. there were fluids on the floor pills strewn around, rags, clearly people had been vomiting defecating, and potentially bleeding on all of the surfaces everywhere. the worst thing that i saw was a toddler, a baby who had fallen

off one of the beds and was lying sprawled on the floor on some rag and his mother was next to him and she was too sick to lean down and pick the baby up off the floor. so as far as i could see the three days of lockdown were turning up suspected and confirm confirmed ebola cases, new cases cases, which is an important and and certainly these patients had nowhere to be looked after safely. >> fast forward now to the latest from the hot zone, the virus has now killed 10,000 people, most of them in west africa. liberia, once the hardest hit is now seeing progress. but guinea is struggling, and in

sierra leone 58 new cases were just identified. and the healthcare worker who contracted the virus will be treated at the national institute of health just outside of washington, d.c. next, long on the front lines of feminism, now she's writing a new chapter in the conversation about women rape, and what is against our will. so what... >> dangerous... >> we have shackles with spit bag... >> they're still having nightmares >> if you can't straighten out your kids... >> they're mine >> al jazeera america presents camp last resort on al jazeera america >> this is the true definition of tough love

>> on this program we have focus created attention on sexual violence on campus, and we've been moved by the strong young women who have come forward to report rape. but that very likely would not have been possible without the work of ground-breaking feminist

susan brown miller. her landmark book "against our will" fueled over rape and radical makeover of how sexual violence is viewed in our country. 40 years after that book was first published she spoke with america tonight's christof. >> the role you have selected for women is degrading because you choose to see women as sex objects, not human beings. >> it was the moment that susan brown miller was waiting for. >> the day you were willing to come out here with a cotton tail attached to your rear end. >> a chance to tell hugh hefner what they she thought about his empire. >> women are not bunnies. they're human beings. >> with that a feminist icon was born. >> my shining moment. >> he has made women a condition of employment in the playboy club. >> how was that for you? >> things were happen something fast in the movement that nothing was surprising.

it seemed reasonable. that i would get a chance to confront hugh hefner. >> and it didn't stop there. from a march outside of the misamerica pageant to a sit-in at the lady's home journal. the founders of the women's liberation movement saw the media as a target and a tool. >> i said we really ought to do something against these women's magazines that are promoting such a false concept of who women are and what they want, what they want. you know, 12 ways to make jell-o. >> did you realize at the time how big of a deal it was to do something like that? >> i realized at the time how nervy was to do something like that. it was scary. it was scary on 18 different levels. my biggest fear that morning was that not enough people would show up. it was a slow news day i guess but we sure had a lot of journalists there. >> but it was one event in

particular that would change brown miller's life forever. a rape speak out in 1971. a time when people did not talk about sexual violence, and it was still legal for husbands to rape their wives. >> my job at speak out was to take the tickets at the door, but everybody there was stunned by the spectrum of rape and sexual assault that 12 brave women got up and testified about from their own experience. the politics of rape indeed, unfolded before us. i knew with certainty that i was going to write a book about rape. not just about present-day rape but it's history. >> living off small grants and a loan from a friend, brown miller spent years in a new york public library, which had more entries in the word rape seed than the

word rape. "begins our will"against our will" won her a place on the cover. over time it became easier to prosecute rapists, and rape within a marijuana became marriage became a crime in every state. >> what were you hoping to achieve with the book? >> i was hoping to change everybody's mind about rape, the way that my mind had been changed. >> do you feel that you have achieved that? >> the new york library honored it by calling it one of the 100 most significant books of the 20th century. i'll go with that. >> brown miller turned her attention to pornography speaking out begins adult films and magazines, blurring the line between sex and violence. >> we were trying to establish a

feminist tradition saying what if our young daughters see this? our position was what if our young sons see this. >> today anyone would argue that pornography is more prevalent than ever. >> yeah, we lost that one. we lost it big time. >> okay, we have single rape. >> now 80 years old sue an susan brown miller teaches at university. >> when women talk about issues that men have controlled the dialogue on for centuries a very different story emerges. >> a lot of attention is on college campuses when we talk about rape. are we at a turning point? >> i think it could be called the fourth wave of feminism. it's heart warming to me to see college students organizing now. >> do you think that drinking

play as role with rape on college campuses? >> yes, i always stressed the warning signs about rape. don't get yourself into a situation. women are still in denial. they don't want to feel that special restrictions apply to them. they're also imbued with the view of a hook-up culture. women have trouble with that, quite frankly. >> i'm sure that there are women today who might be surprised to hear you say that because they want to feel very empowered and feel like they can do whatever they want to do. >> then i would say that women have a false sense of empowerment. because the truth is they can't do everything that men can do because there are predators out there. >> of course, one of the most famous cases was a case depicted in "rolling stone." when that story began to fall apart, what was your reaction? >> my reaction to that story falling apart has been the same as other celebrity cases and

highly publicized cases falling apart. we have a tendency in this country to get most of our news about an issue through a celebrity case of some sort or another. that's not good for the anti-rape movement. we can talk about bill cosby. there are people who keep saying alleged rape, alleged rape. 30 women? are they a satanic cult who are accusing sweet bill cosby? 30 women. women don't gain anything talking about a rape years later, especially if the accused person is a celebrity. that's tough. that's tough. we live in a culture where we like our celebrities. >> it's also a culture that still enjoys seeing sex on the big screen with the erotic drama

"fifty shades of gray." >> what is your reaction? >> it's the worst kind of female propaganda. >> how so? >> because it promotes a good sexual experience through bondage, i mean no. it's frightening to me. >> we did it! >> but there are signs of progress. in january, for the first time in history more than 100 women were sworn into congress. and the momentum is building for hillary clinton to run for president in 2016. >> i do remember that when i was a kid in public school the boys used to say to me, i can grow up to be president, but you can't. >> they actually would say that? >> yes. >> when you look back, do you feel satisfied with everything that the movement was able to accomplish? >> we accomplished more than any other movement in my lifetime. i think we've changed more lives for the good positively, yes.

>> but more than 40 years after susan brown miller began agitate forgive change, she said there is still much more work to be done. >> women get so many conflicting messages beamed at them every day. it's not enough to be an achiever. it's not enough to be a mother. you also have to look like a babe. abortion rights are currently being threatened. equal pay is a continual battle. men have not stopped using their fists against their intimate partners. there are parts of the world where rape is not yet an issue. they don't see it. it's part of the way that men function. >> what is it going to take to empower women? >> in those countries? they'll have to start it themselves. you can't export feminism. it has to be a movement that

comes from women from within those cultures, from within those societies. >> what is one piece of advice that you would give today's young female. >> i hope you're in if for the long haul. i hope that you can see that the issues that you're raising now that we raised then are eterrible. they have not gone away yet. there are always going to be people out there who want to take away your rights. . >> and she hopes there will always be those who fight to keep them. al jazeera, new york. >> a fighter for the future. that's "america tonight." friday on the program a special report over medicating patients and under monitoring prescriptions. "america tonight" investigates the drugging of america. it's killing the elderly and our veterans as well. our report friday on america tonight. tell us what you think on www.aljazeera.com/"america tonight." talk to us on twitter and facebook. come back, we'll have more "america tonight" tomorrow.

>> flash point ferguson ground zeer who is right, who is on. it's in the eye of the beholder. from the police ricking their life. >> every single person there was a weapon my weapon and