Sex In The Public Square - safe sex - Comments

Age, race, class and HPV

Elizabeth — Fri, 14 Mar 2008 13:01:02 -0700

Mojave66, that's interesting about the age-HPV thing. And the intersection of class and health is so important. Thanks for emphasizing it! I'd love to hear more of your thoughts about how to address those problems!

>We know that

Mojave66 — Thu, 13 Mar 2008 09:53:03 -0700

>We know that abstinance-only "education" is not really education. We know that lots of infections go undetected because of shame or embarrassment on the one hand, or because of lack of access to health care services on the other.

BINGO. This is exactly it. The Planned Parenthood spokesperson in the article who pointed out that abstinence-only education has been a 1.5 billion dollar boondoggle also hits the nail on the head.

As for separating out age groups, a cursory look at data on the HPV study I'm working on doesn't show much separation between 14-16 and 17-19 year olds in terms of HPV infection. Keeping in mind that those 14-16 year olds in my particular study are of lower socioeconomic status than most of our 17-19 year olds, who are college students, my impression is that race and class have a lot more to do with infection rates than age, something the study shockingly brings out. 50% of African-American teenagers are infected with STIs vs. 20% of white teenagers? That's a disturbing statistic right there, especially its implications for how badly we've educated youth around sexuality.

Thank You!

Amanda Brooks — Thu, 28 Feb 2008 14:32:12 -0800

Elizabeth, thank you for posting this!

Please donate if you can. The two orgs we're in contact with desperately need condoms. They've lost funding due to the anti-prostitution pledge and Catholic-dominated Chile is not condom-friendly.

This is a project of SWOP-East, officially incorporated as Project Prosper (a 501c3). Pledging Action is simply the name of the project, not its own organization...in case anyone had questions.

sometimes silly works

tracya — Wed, 31 Oct 2007 13:47:58 -0700

i saw this yesterday and was going to post it myself. i never had much interaction with the indian community until i moved to the UK, now i live in the curry capitol of england!

i think it's a huge step forward for the indian government to address a growing problem. asian culture suffers from a huge dichotomy, in that sex is openly repressed in dress and actions. we are talking about a culture where males and females are clearly separate, women are limited in many roles and punished severely for minor infractions. they still have honour killings, even here in england. yet men are obviously able to indulge in sex, most likely with prostitutes.

i agree the video looks silly to us but it's clearly designed to appeal to a specific segment of indian culture, in that sense it does work. similar to having a rap singer promoting safe sex in LA, NYC or chicago.

Scary, isn't it?

Elizabeth — Tue, 30 Oct 2007 08:27:17 -0700

But I actually do pretty well at 6ish if I've had some coffee. Of course the amount of coffee I'm consuming seems to be increasing....

I'd really love to expand the "Sex Symbols" idea ... and not all posts have to use that in their titles, either. Just so long as they use it as a tag so that they get collected on the Sex Symbols page.

By the way, the tune is still stuck in my head!

You wrote all that at 6:23?

Chris — Tue, 30 Oct 2007 04:37:56 -0700

You wrote all that at 6:23? Oy. But yes, the idea of putting it up in the "Sex Symbols" is a good one.

Corny is a state of mind

Elizabeth — Tue, 30 Oct 2007 03:23:54 -0700

Great find, Chris! My first thought upon seeing the men dancing in cardboard cutouts of condoms was, "yes, corny," and then I noticed that the piece was about 6 minutes long and thought, "wow, this must be serious!" I was surprised by how thorough it was. In the US we'd have tried for a 60 second PSA I bet. This one covered all the main reasons for use including pregnancy prevention (unlike the spots that two networks in the US rejected because they went beyond disease prevention and addressed pregnancy). It showed the proper way to put on and dispose of a condom. Until the last two minutes there were no women in the spot, which I thought was interesting. i'm out of the loop in terms of US commercials but do we make condom commercials that don't rely on sexy women? Oh, and speaking of women, this spot also mentioned condoms for women. And it mentioned gay people (though it did make it seem like gay people are the only ones who have anal sex).

One sign of how effective such a PSA might be? I've still got the tune running through my head. I imagine that later this afternoon I'll be bopping down the hallway at work with the words "I am the condom friend ever useful to you," scrolling through my brain.

An aside: I think we should put a copy of this in the Sex Symbols. It's easily done if we just add the term Sex Symbol as a tag on the post. What do you think? Then it will remain here on your blog but will also show up there. (There is not a place iwth a menu listing yet but it can be found at "http://sexinthepublicsquare.org/SexSymbols" and its that place where I hope to have short pieces that raise discussions on cultural artifacts connected to sex. T-shirts, ads, billboards, objects ... whatever.) What do you think?