Inter faeces et urinam nascimur
We are born between the piss and shit
Saint Augustine
The news out of South Africa—I’m not talking about the World Cup—is promising if not yet definitive: a vaginal microbicide gel containing a retroviral drug used to treat AIDS has been shown to be effective in blocking transmission of the H.I.V. virus. A two-and-a-half year study of nearly 900 women showed that those used the gel with consistency reduced their rate of infection by nearly 54 percent.
What is exciting about this news, including the fact that the drug is not expected to be expensive, is that it will give women, particularly those in sub-Saharan Africa and other locales where poverty denies them power, greater control over their own health. They will not need “permission” from their husbands or lovers to vaginally apply the topical gel 12 hours before having sex; intercourse will not have to be stopped, the man will not have to be wheedled into using a condom, and the dark cloud of sexual health will not have to intrude on the moonlight of “romance.”
Indeed, those who apply the gel on a daily basis will have even greater overall protection. But as I read about this report in The New York Times, and as I watched the PBS Newshour where Dr. Anthony Fauci (Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases) was interviewed by Margaret Warner about this latest development in the long war against AIDS, I couldn’t help thinking how pernicious are our sentimentally seductive notions about sex as life’s great elixir. Yes, it may well be. But sex is also damned messy.
Our movies never show the mess—the condoms and gels, the intrauterine devices, the towels, the occasional accidents, the wiping up after—so it is hopeless to expect that our television programming will. This, to say nothing of negotiating the responsibility for who buys which products. And that’s just for couples in relationships. Think of how much harder it is when we are in thrall to impulsive moments with one-night stands; men and men as much as men and women, or women with women for that matter, must learn by trial and error how to get over the communication hump before the desire to hump goes ... soft. (A phallocentric way to put it, I know. I beg the forgiveness of women readers.)
All such secret knowledge is taken to be assumed by the adults in the audience, and is withheld from our children at first to protect their innocence, and then to protect us from our embarrassment when we know their innocence is soon to be plucked. I hardly ask for grade schoolers to know the varied uses of KY, but if we are in fact interested in seeing our children adopt responsible attitudes toward sexual pleasure, then we need to wipe the romantic mist from our own eyes.
It’s not that condoms never make an appearance in the movies. But if they do, they are usually a comic device in a teen comedy, a sly reference to STD and pregnancy prevention that signals some basic sense of duty on the part of the loopy kids on screen. Do we ever see anyone actually applying a condom—or at least talking about it while the camera looks elsewhere? Well, yes: Seth Rogen and Katherine Heigl miscommunicate about using a rubber in Knocked Up! And tell me, if Ellen Page in Juno was such a wise, world-weary teenager—a Thelma Ritter of the suburban high-school set—how come she didn’t know how not to get knocked up?
We are nearly into the fourth decade of a sexually transmitted pandemic and the last thing our public media wishes to address is the specifics of prevention. It’s not glamorous. Oh, sure, it’s fine for teenagers to watch their silver-screen-stand-ins be bitten by vampires—our current AIDS metaphor in the Twilight series and HBO’s True Blood—but who wants to have these same pretty protagonists dealing with spermicidal gels or ribbed Trojans being put on wrong side out? (Well, if they ever get around to actual sex.) In gay coupling on screen, neither in our DVD pornography nor in our indie flicks, when was the last time one man literally “fucked the shit” out of another, with the consequence of a slightly harried, and perhaps even hilarious, clean up campaign?
The mess of sex is all too human. We are born between the piss and shit. And until we are capable of depicting this, or candidly discussing it, in our narrative art forms—our TV shows and our movies and our novels and our public service announcements—then we are not going to see a sufficiently robust response to the AIDS pandemic which has created orphans in Africa, seen a generation of gay men in their prime disappear, and become a cultural and political fault line wherever religious moralizers and right-wing zealots combine in a Devil’s dance over the graves of the dead.
To read further on the scientific study in The New York Times:
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/20/world/africa/20safrica.html?ref=health
We are born between the piss and shit
Saint Augustine
The news out of South Africa—I’m not talking about the World Cup—is promising if not yet definitive: a vaginal microbicide gel containing a retroviral drug used to treat AIDS has been shown to be effective in blocking transmission of the H.I.V. virus. A two-and-a-half year study of nearly 900 women showed that those used the gel with consistency reduced their rate of infection by nearly 54 percent.
What is exciting about this news, including the fact that the drug is not expected to be expensive, is that it will give women, particularly those in sub-Saharan Africa and other locales where poverty denies them power, greater control over their own health. They will not need “permission” from their husbands or lovers to vaginally apply the topical gel 12 hours before having sex; intercourse will not have to be stopped, the man will not have to be wheedled into using a condom, and the dark cloud of sexual health will not have to intrude on the moonlight of “romance.”
Indeed, those who apply the gel on a daily basis will have even greater overall protection. But as I read about this report in The New York Times, and as I watched the PBS Newshour where Dr. Anthony Fauci (Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases) was interviewed by Margaret Warner about this latest development in the long war against AIDS, I couldn’t help thinking how pernicious are our sentimentally seductive notions about sex as life’s great elixir. Yes, it may well be. But sex is also damned messy.
Our movies never show the mess—the condoms and gels, the intrauterine devices, the towels, the occasional accidents, the wiping up after—so it is hopeless to expect that our television programming will. This, to say nothing of negotiating the responsibility for who buys which products. And that’s just for couples in relationships. Think of how much harder it is when we are in thrall to impulsive moments with one-night stands; men and men as much as men and women, or women with women for that matter, must learn by trial and error how to get over the communication hump before the desire to hump goes ... soft. (A phallocentric way to put it, I know. I beg the forgiveness of women readers.)
All such secret knowledge is taken to be assumed by the adults in the audience, and is withheld from our children at first to protect their innocence, and then to protect us from our embarrassment when we know their innocence is soon to be plucked. I hardly ask for grade schoolers to know the varied uses of KY, but if we are in fact interested in seeing our children adopt responsible attitudes toward sexual pleasure, then we need to wipe the romantic mist from our own eyes.
It’s not that condoms never make an appearance in the movies. But if they do, they are usually a comic device in a teen comedy, a sly reference to STD and pregnancy prevention that signals some basic sense of duty on the part of the loopy kids on screen. Do we ever see anyone actually applying a condom—or at least talking about it while the camera looks elsewhere? Well, yes: Seth Rogen and Katherine Heigl miscommunicate about using a rubber in Knocked Up! And tell me, if Ellen Page in Juno was such a wise, world-weary teenager—a Thelma Ritter of the suburban high-school set—how come she didn’t know how not to get knocked up?
We are nearly into the fourth decade of a sexually transmitted pandemic and the last thing our public media wishes to address is the specifics of prevention. It’s not glamorous. Oh, sure, it’s fine for teenagers to watch their silver-screen-stand-ins be bitten by vampires—our current AIDS metaphor in the Twilight series and HBO’s True Blood—but who wants to have these same pretty protagonists dealing with spermicidal gels or ribbed Trojans being put on wrong side out? (Well, if they ever get around to actual sex.) In gay coupling on screen, neither in our DVD pornography nor in our indie flicks, when was the last time one man literally “fucked the shit” out of another, with the consequence of a slightly harried, and perhaps even hilarious, clean up campaign?
The mess of sex is all too human. We are born between the piss and shit. And until we are capable of depicting this, or candidly discussing it, in our narrative art forms—our TV shows and our movies and our novels and our public service announcements—then we are not going to see a sufficiently robust response to the AIDS pandemic which has created orphans in Africa, seen a generation of gay men in their prime disappear, and become a cultural and political fault line wherever religious moralizers and right-wing zealots combine in a Devil’s dance over the graves of the dead.
To read further on the scientific study in The New York Times:
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/20/world/africa/20safrica.html?ref=health
Actually, Mark Ruffalo puts on a condom in "The Kids are All Right."
ReplyDeleteThat was a nice touch in fact, because it felt real.