iLiza's eyes

I really loved the combination of Opinion and Editorials in today's New York Times. The subtle way that they're twisted together sends a really profound message about the outrageousness of our society.

The first one is the Editorial on the rate of HIV/AIDS and the new research that has recently come out as the disease turns 25. Countries around the world were supposed to be reporting to the United Nations about how they've succeeded in meeting their goals and drafting a new action plan.

The best part reads as follows:
"The word "condom" has also gone missing [from the draft]. Depressingly, nations have been debating whether they can make any reference at all to 'empowering girls' or 'vulnerable populations,' itself a euphemism for sex workers, drug injectors and gay men. Tellingly, the United States has insisted on taking out all references to 'evidence-based prevention strategies' — strategies scientifically proven to work. Instead, Washington wants to use the phrase 'evidence-informed prevention strategies.'"

Sometimes when I tell people that abstinence only education programs lie, they don't believe me. But it's true. They either lie, or they fail to provide critical information because of a conservative-Christian moral standard surrounding the ever taboo and dirty subject of sex. Finally, now, we're seeing that such an absense of education and resources does take a real toll: it allows AIDS to spread to populations that are the most at-risk: the whores, the druggies and the queers. You know how it goes, those nasty people ought to find God so that they don't have sex or do drugs and therefore don't contract the disease. Happy Birthday AIDS.

And then there was Bob Herbert's Article that began with the story of Kika Cerpa who had sex with 19 men the first night of her forced prostitution career and held her dying friend in her arms after the girl was shot when she refused to have sex with a client. Herbert notes an interesting new piece of information that I didn't know until this morning: "It may seem peculiar, but there is no law against sex trafficking in the state of New York — or most other states, for that matter."

I love the contradiction...or rather, I hate it. I've never understood why sex is so stigmatized here. It's stigmatized to the point that the government withholds pertinent, scientific-based information from prostitutes, many of whom are repeatedly raped and abused, never picked that career and who aren't even protected by the law. In other words, this country allows women and children to be trafficked in for sex and then screws them all over again by giving them INCORRECT INFORMATION about how to protect themselves correctly and by leaving laws against trafficking off the books.

And this isn't even about prostitution, it's about sex and our government. This is about the fact that there's a general sentiment in this country that sex is always bad, sex should always be private and that sex is dirty. We've seen this time and again: in today's world the protagonist of Grand Theft Auto can shoot up all of San Andreas, but when he goes behind some closed doors, in the password-protected world of video games, to get it on, he creates a public outcry. The sad part is that the world of Grand Theft Auto is not so different from our own.

We live in a world now where apparently people shouldn't be having sex: it's such a hideous act that those who do, prostitutes and gays, don't even deserve the education to protect themselves from AIDS. In other words, they deserve to die. So then in that view, perhaps all of us deserve to die. Perhaps none of us deserve education about how to use a condom or how to get tested for HIV, because none of us should be doing anything that would put us at risk anyway. And so perhaps we're all on our own-- the Mexican girl who was trafficked in for sex and repeatedly raped, the horribly impoverished family in South Africa, the heroin addict on my street corner, me and you.

Is that what they're telling us? That each one of us deserves to die? Each one of us deserves their lies? That each one of us deserves AIDS? Is sex really that gross??

posted by iliza @ 2:43 PM