Sunday July 18, 2004
Patriarchal cultures must change
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If you go for dinner at Mechai Viravaidya\’s restaurant in Bangkok, Thailand, you won\’t get an after-dinner mint with your bill. The waiter will bring you an after-dinner condom.
It is Senator Viravaidya\’s contribution to battling the international AIDS epidemic, now 23 years old, that has claimed some 20 million lives already.
AIDS was once a disease associated with homosexuals and drug users. That\’s no longer true. Today, AIDS is being transmitted mainly by heterosexual sex. And since there are far more heterosexuals than homosexuals, in any population, it\’s spreading much faster.
Africa is currently the world\’s AIDS hotspot. In some countries, 37 per cent of the population are infected. Since gays make up less than three percent of the population, and few can afford prohibitively expensive intravenous drugs, the old stereotypes clearly no longer apply.
Already, some 7.6 million people in Asia are infected. Asia holds about half of the world\’s population. If AIDS achieves the same level in Asia as in Africa, about two billion people – one third of the world\’s population – will be living with a death sentence.
That\’s what Senator Viravaidya is trying to combat in his restaurant, aptly called Cabbages and Condoms.
Minute gains, minimal news
\”Times New Roman\”> The tactic seems to be working. Thailand remains a preferred destination for sex tourism. But 90 per cent of Bangkok\’s prostitutes now use condoms. By emphasizing “no sex without condom,” Thailand has apparently achieved a seven-fold reduction in AIDS/HIV rates over the last 13 years.
This week, Thailand hosted the 15th3\”> International AIDS Conference, held July 11-16 in Bangkok. Over 17,000 medical and social professionals from around the world gathered to find ways of combating AIDS.
There has not been a great deal of news about this conference. As Stu Flavell, Executive Director of the Global Network of People Living with HIV/AIDS said, “AIDS is about sex, drugs and death – and none of those are comfortable topics for us.”
Most of the conference has focused on technology. Condoms, of course. Retroviral drugs, to improve the chances of victims living. Generic drugs, to lower the cost per patient. And distribution, to get those drugs to the people who desperately need them.
A moral issue
\”Times New Roman\”> Dissension has focussed on patent protection and morality. In both, the U.S. leadership finds itself on the wrong side of the fence from most of the world.
The big drug companies, of course, want to protect their patent rights. From their perspective, the more people who get AIDS, the fatter their corporate return on investment.
The second area is morality.
Frankly, I find it hard to understand how all those delegates can discuss AIDS without discussing morality. Surely it can\’t have escaped their attention that if every person had sex with only one partner – traditional monogamy, in other words – AIDS would not and could not spread. Even in the gay community, fidelity would stop AIDS in its tracks.
Has it not dawned on these people that if there were no promiscuity, there would be no AIDS epidemic?
But the mass media generally do not like to discuss moral issues. On one day, Google\’s news service listed over 5,000 items about the AIDS conference. Fewer than 50 of them mentioned the word “promiscuity.”
Uganda has had greater success than any other African country in reducing AIDS infection. Uganda\’s president, Yoweri Museveni, takes a frankly moralistic stance, which he calls ABC – Abstinence, Being faithful, and Condom use, in that order.
U.S. president George Bush has slanted U.S. funding toward organizations that endorse support the concepts of Museveni\’s ABC program. Some call this ideological interference. Maybe it is.
Male promiscuity
\”Times New Roman\”> Barbara Lee, a U.S. Democratic congress member attending the Bangkok conference, protested that abstinence is not an option for most women around the world. Moralistic messages ignore the fact that many women have no choice about when they will have sex, or with whom.
True – if women are the intended audience. But they\’re not. The culture of promiscuity is primarily male.
AIDS thrives on poverty and powerlessness. Poverty in our affluent industrialized world means that drug users share needles. In the majority world, though, poverty also keeps women powerless. Women lack both rights and independence.
AIDS spreads fastest in cultures where men take for granted the right to have multiple sexual partners. In Thailand, an estimated 20 per cent of men use prostitute\’s services at least once a year. In China, ten per cent. In Canada, who knows?
Statistics on AIDS show a direct correlation between male promiscuity and the spread of heterosexual AIDS.
Therefore it is the patriarchal culture that sees women as the property of men, to be used as men decide, that needs to be changed. This is not just a matter of human rights. It\’s a matter of human survival.
Double standards
\”Times New Roman\”> In most of the world, women are still expected to be faithful to their husbands. Men have no such restrictions.
Before we start pointing self-righteous fingers at others, we should remember that until recently the same double standard applied in our own society. Brides traditionally wore white, as a symbol of chastity and purity. Grooms wore black.
If women in Asia and Africa do not have the choice about when to have sex, neither are they likely to have much success in convincing their men to wear condoms. So technology alone will not cure AIDS.
That doesn\’t mean we should abandon poor people to lingering death. We in the affluent western world have an obligation, it seems to me, to alleviate the suffering and to extend the life expectancies of those who are already victims. And we should do it without paying a king\’s ransom to the drug companies, who would otherwise think they had discovered the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.
But for any long-term solution, the attitudes of men must be changed.
Clear up promiscuity, and you clear up AIDS.
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Copyright © 2002 by Jim Taylor. Non-profit use in congregations and study groups permitted; all other rights reserved.
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