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AIDS: Challenging penetration

In these killing days of AIDS pandemia, Montreal men against sexism challenges penetration as a cultural icon

Beyond a merely prophylactic discourse and a silence enforced uunder libertarian and humanist pretexts, this logo, created in accountability to women by Montreal men against sexism, looks to problematize the issue of penetration of/by the Other as a culturally induced, sexist obsession.

* Of new infections among men in the United States, CDC estimates that approximately 60 percent of men were infected through homosexual sex, 25 percent through injection drug use, and 15 percent through heterosexual sex. Of newly infected men, approximately 50 percent are black, 30 percent are white, 20 percent are Hispanic, and a small percentage are members of other racial/ethnic groups.(1)
* Of new infections among women in the United States, CDC estimates that approximately 75 percent of women were infected through heterosexual sex and 25 percent through injection drug use. Of newly infected women, approximately 64 percent are black, 18 percent are white, 18 percent are Hispanic, and a small percentage are members of other racial/ethnic groups.(1)
* Of the estimated 16,371 AIDS-related deaths in the United States in 2002, approximately 52 percent were among blacks, 28 percent among whites, 19 percent among Hispanics, and less than 1 percent among Asians/Pacific Islanders and American Indians/Alaska Natives.(2)

1. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). HIV Prevention Strategic Plan Through 2005. January 2001.
2. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). HIV/AIDS Surveillance Report 2002;14:1-40.

(

http://www.niaid.nih.gov/factsheets/aidsstat.htm)

Martin Dufresne
e-mail: martin@laurentides.net

Comments

Hide the following 7 comments

Don't understand

02.12.2003 09:33

Not sure exactly what you are on about mate. who is "the Other", presumably you mean your partner?

confused

also confused

02.12.2003 09:38

You might be making a valid point, but how about some plain English.

Words like

"merely prophylactic discourse"
"libertarian and humanist pretexts"
"in accountability to women"

hide your meaning. And as for "problematize", that isn't even a proper word.

If all you are trying to say is that safer sex needn't always include penetration and there are a lot of other things people can enjoy, then tell us something we don't know

Eugenics

02.12.2003 09:52

AIDS is a laboritory engineered 'race-specific' virus. The notion that is transmitted through sexual intercourse is, in my opinion, the biggest hoax perpetrated on mankind since the moon landing, and is intended to force people to stop procreating by using condoms.

Twenty years ago, we were told it would be an epidemic amongst heterosexuals within a decade but I've never met, seen or know a single person with AIDS. The disease is transmitted through vaccination programmes in countries targeted for genocide.

The drugs which are said to "control" it, exacerbate the condition.

What part of "the NWO hates us" don't you understand?

Dr Who

Dangerous idiot

02.12.2003 12:02

Your paranoid rantings risk putting people at risk. Yes the Pathology of AIDS is complicated and it is not an exageration to call the effect that HIV is having on some African countries Genocide. Despite the complicating factors, HIV is transmitted by sex and shared needles this is incontravertable fact.

Don't wait until you see your friends dying before you take care.

Bob

Plain english

04.12.2003 15:56

Dear Confused 1 and 2,

Actually, I was trying to get something else across so you are right, plain English will do better.

“merely prophylactic discourse” - The talk about safer sex obscures the fact that what people call “sex” is still mostly about fucking, usually without condoms.

“silence enforced under libertarian and humanist pretexts” - There is a taboo about acknowledging this, because people want to think of sex as Freedom and Essentially Good. Many people know better but are silenced about it.

“accountability to women” - We ran various versions of this logo past women because they seem to be most of these latter people. They (and dominated gays) are disproportionately infected in male-defined sex.

“problematize the issue of penetration” - raise and challenge it

“the Other” - the person penetrated (by penis or needle) isn’t always treated as a partner. S/he is often thought of as Other, disrespected, consciously put at risk in a common view of sex as “power over”, wity no concessions. This may explain escalating AIDS transmission despite decades of reassuring talk about respect, responsibility and “safe(r) sex”. Maybe we ought to understand sex less as what OUGHT to be (normative "good sex") and more as what actually IS going on in men’s lives.

Martin Dufresne

Mkaing myself clear

Simplistic

08.12.2003 16:26

High rates of HIV transmission from men to women and men to men in North America may be solved by ending insertive intercourse, but it also means that people stop having sex. This campaign does nothing to educate about transmission risk levels or about the "culture of the closet" and the "down low" that stigmatize gay and bi men in a number of regional, cultural and ethnic communities. Within some of those communities, that ignorance of HIV and homo/biphobia creates a climate that puts both women and men at risk

Ian McLeod
mail e-mail: ianwmcleod@yahoo.com

There is more to sex than...

16.12.2003 06:58

...insertive intercourse, isn't there?
And when the alternative is death, people CAN use their imagination or, failing that, condoms.

Martin Dufresne