You can sell anything with sex in the United States except responsibility and life. A Specimen Of Ignorance of the Champions of Sciency Stuff

See major Update below

 As loathe as I am to pay attention to hecklers, I found this in comment moderation this morning.

This is great, Sparky.

Still using the generic "irresponsible and promiscuous sex leads to death" weasel words? Typical.

Here's a clue, numbnuts The AIDS epidemic of the 70s and 80s wasn't caused by generic promiscuity, however YOU personally define that -- and it seems to be be "PROMISCUITY: Any sexual fantasy or practice that I, Sparky, personally find icky" -- but rather the gay bathouse culture of the era, which was promiscuity on stilts, steroids, and shot into the center of the galaxy. Which I might add was not a surprise to anybody, i.e. it was obviously a gigantic Petri dish for all sorts of nasty bugs and a public health disaster waiting to happen.
There hadn't been a heterosexual equivalent of that milieu since the fall of Rome, and there isn't one currently. So the idea that the average normally sexually active 20 or 30 something today is just a one night stand away from death is, frankly, bullshit. As you well know.

Let me say again -- HIV is a really tough bug to acquire; you have to REALLY be working at it.

Who am I to pass up the chance to let one of these people demonstrate so many of my contentions about the failure of the play-left?    This is an example of so much that is wrong with the American media - the dolt is considered to be a sort of journalist - with the so-called left - the dolt is considered to be a sort of leftist - and the pretensions of the play-left, that it, unlike its opponents, respects science and rationality and such things as the scientific management of public health.   All of those and the idea that the play-left isn't thoroughly centered on and in affluent, white, straight men are so well shown by this heckling that I'm going to use it for a post or more.

That, 32 years after AIDS was first identified as a discrete syndrome, someone could be so entirely ignorant of the most basic nature of who contracts the virus leading to it, how they contract it, the fact that, in the United States, about 50,000 new infections happen every year - the large majority of those through either promiscuous sexual intercourse or intercourse with those who engage in promiscuous sex, is appalling.

The same people who write stuff like that comment would be the first to condemn someone who demonstrated ignorance of evolution on a level with this or with the anti-vaxxers whose denial isn't much different in effect.   But their ignorance is unremarkable on blog threads full of people who would slam creationists and anti-vaxx people at the drop of an implication.  Anyone who denies the relationship of the AIDS pandemic with promiscuous sex is too stupid to put one and two together.

I wrote my first blog posts on this topic in June of 2006.  I don't see that the eight years of internet use has done much to improve the state of ignorance among the self-congratulating intelligentsia, no more than it has among those who are more obviously seen to be in a benighted state of disinformation about it.   Here's what I said then.  I will note that I had a far more optimistic and innocent view of what I would come to consider the play-left within a few months.

Tuesday, June 06, 2006

SILVER ANNIVERSARY

You have heard the announcements, it was 25 years ago that they figured out that a new health disaster was beginning. With time they would name it AIDS and learn that it was caused by HIV but in the beginning they just knew that a uniformly fatal disease had emerged. Twenty-five years is long enough for the anniversary to seem downright nostalgic with old names and faces appearing on TV. Researchers and doctors who haven't been seen since Donahue was on day time. Progress is reported on many fronts though at best some of the worst symptoms can be kept down for a while. I won't go into the details of the side effects and expense of the drugs required. Even "Secrets of the Dead" had an interesting piece about genetic immunity to the virus. I won't watch cable anymore so am not sure if the maudlin parade of name victims has been a staple of the coverage.

Twenty-five years into a pandemic with effective uniform mortality and there are still 40,000 people contracting HIV infections in the United States every year. For the love of God, there are still babies being born here with HIV infection. Teenagers are often mentioned as a group at major risk of new infection.

Twenty-five years and there isn't real condom education on TV. The medium that uses a third of every hour to sell everything else in the world with sex with programs to reinforce the ads for the other two thirds. You can sell anything with sex in the United States except responsibility and life.

In the same years that health scientists were begging the United States to begin comprehensive promotion of effective condom use, there has been an effective veto on condom advertisements and education by the clergy, their allies in the conservative movement and the Republican Party. They have kept condom education out of TV in the United States. And while they were doing that they made Rupert Murdoch a citizen of the United States. The "dirty digger" of the infamous "Sun" tabloid, the Aussie T&A peddler was put on fast track for citizenship in the Reagan years so he could start buying media companies and plying his trade in low grade smut and right wing politics. I've got to eat breakfast or I'd go into his being installed as a Papal Knight of St. Gregory during the same period. So it's not the sex they won't let on TV. Mr. Page Three, yes. Condom education? You willing to bet your life on seeing it here?

It is twenty-five years past the time when the United States should have ditched the faith based tire biters and put real education about condoms in the mass media. And mass media is the only effective means of mass education we have. How many people can tell you who this fifteen minutes' American Idol is as compared to the number who can tell you where Athens has been for the past 2,500 years? Every week that clergymen or Concerned Bottle Blonds of America delay the airing of real, effective, science based AIDS education thousands will die. They are the angels of preventable death. Completely informed and totally unconcerned, they are worse than the ignorant Muslim clergy who are responsible for polio outbreaks in Nigeria. There is no question that their veto of condom education and the full index of lies and distortions they replace it with are responsible for many times more dead Americans than the attacks of Sept. 11th. And that's just here. The bodies they've left lie around the world.

Condoms are the most effective way to prevent new HIV infections. They are safe, inexpensive, simple to use and when used consistently, people live. But they will not be used without a massive education and public relations campaign. They have to be made acceptable, even fashionable. Their use has to be made as every day and habitual as brushing your teeth and using deodorant before you go out on a date. Our media could do that. They can sell anything. If they can get Americans to try sushi they can get them to save their lives. Think of the possibilities, think of what those geniuses behind the Geico ads could do on the subject.

Will it ever be done? Will it be done in time for your children or grand children to learn how to save their lives? Twenty-five years and they're still talking in generalities and nice words that Michael Powell would have approved. The TV discussion I've heard is worse than it was during the Reagan years. Clearly, the conservative establishment and their corporate media are going for gold.

Update:  Apparently, within thirty minutes of posting this piece, this morning, Duncan Black, at his blog posted a link to this New York Times op-ed by one of the current, up and coming promoters of the sex industry,  Melissa Gira Grant.  Her theme would seem to be that any attempt to rescue girls who are trafficked in prostitution is definitively discredited by the exposure of Somaly Mam as a fraud and the ham-handed, strong-arm tactics in a raid on a brothel.   Apparently those who have approved of Grant's piece agree with those standards of judgement.  But, even if the Newsweek story about Somaly Mam is accurate how does that discredit the fact that girls (and boys, for that matter) are trafficked by the sex industry and that they need protection any more than that girls need education and protection from those who would exploit  them by the similar exposure of Greg Mortenson, the author of Three Cups of Tea and former head of a charity for girl's education?    And if the police abusing their power or doing things badly is supposed to serve the purpose Grant makes of it, then any area of law enforcement is equally discredited.

As I said, when it comes to sex, the thinking apparatus of even someone as intelligent and well educated as Duncan Black and the editors of the New York Times ceases to operate.   The desire to try to be fashionable and up to date might account for some of it, but, if it were someone else, questions about their own arousal by young girls kept in brothels might be raised.   Similar issues of the "agency" of very young girls seems to be a cause for these middle agers, most of them men, as well.

Here's what the World Health Organization has to say about the conditions and consequences of brothels in Cambodia.

Since the first HIV infections were detected and diagnosed in 1991, and the first AIDS cases in 1993, Cambodia has faced the rapid spread of HIV. The major route of HIV transmission in the country is heterosexual contact, especially through the use of brothels or entertainment places by males away from their families, without the protection of always using a condom in every sexual act. Starting among high-risk groups, such as brothel based and entertainment-based sex workers, the virus has been passed to low-risk groups, such as housewives, with married clients of sex workers acting as the bridge group for HIV transmission.

There are many factors contributing to the rapid spread of HIV in Cambodia, but them major ones are poverty (around 36% of the Cambodian population lives below the poverty line), and low literacy rates, especially among girls. Only 30% of girls aged between 15-49 years attend school, which means there are few opportunities for them to look for professional, skilled jobs. The risks for young women of starting to work in entertainment places or brothels if their virginity is destroyed by their boyfriends, by sexual violence, or they are sold by their parents or relatives are increasing.

Sexual trafficking, exploitation, violence, high illiteracy rates, drug use (for the time being, yaba) and sexual tourism are all also contributing to the rapid spread of HIV in Cambodia. Recent changes in social norms regarding male behavior are growing up around party celebrations (including wedding parties, religious parties, national and international holidays, birthday parties etc.) in today’s Cambodia, increasing their vulnerability to HIV/STI transmission. At these parties young men meet their friends and then, as a group, go on either directly to a brothel or to entertainment places to have fun or sex before returning home.

I have to say that anyone who promotes the affluent and educated Melissa Gira Grant's promotion of prostitution for such girls as those described above, and especially that NYT op-ed, goes down in my opinion as, at the very least, a vicarious sex tourist with fantasies about having sex with young girls, and or boys, in third world countries.   Yes, even those at the august NYT.   I don't think anything less could account for their critical faculties shutting down so catastrophically.  I would expect it also accounts for why so many men in brothels are willing to bribe or force even very young children into sex without a condom when their fellow johns are so much more likely to have already infected them with deadly pathogens.