It’s true, he always makes me laugh. It’s the bow tie, the strangled delivery (he always looks like he’s careful not to open his mouth too much, lest something fly in…or out), and his oh-so-prim-and-proper prudery.
But early in the American epidemic, political values impeded public health requirements. Unhelpful messages were sent by slogans designed to democratize the disease — “AIDS does not discriminate” and “AIDS is an equal opportunity disease.”
George, you are a Republican. Vague political slogans that dance around the actual issues without mentioning any vulgar behaviors or body parts is part of the party rules. Yours is the party that gets the vapors when a nipple is exposed.
By 1987, when President Ronald Reagan gave his first speech on the subject, 20,798 Americans had died, and his speech, not surprisingly, did not mention any connection to the gay community. No president considers it part of his job description to tell the country that the human rectum, with its delicate and absorptive lining, makes anal-receptive sexual intercourse dangerous when HIV is prevalent.
I wonder why? I seem to recall that when Jocelyn Elders mentioned that masturbation was a normal sexual practice, conservatives and the Religious Right rose up in fury and demanded that she be fired…and to his shame, Clinton caved. I’m trying to imagine the response from the Republican base if Bush admonished everyone to wear a condom when engaging in anal sex.
See? Funny guy. I broke out laughing alone in my office at that thought.
He did fail to mention that other delicate epithelium, though: the one lining the vagina. He managed to choke out the information that heterosexual intercourse is the major mode of HIV transmission in Africa, but failed to encourage the admission that vaginal-receptive sexual intercourse is also dangerous. In addition to HIV, you can catch a whole raft of sexually transmitted diseases: syphilus, human papilloma virus, trichomoniasis, pubic lice, gonorrhea, nongonococcal urethritis, herpes, molluscum contagiosum, lymphogranuloma venereum, and pregnancy. Please…I really want to hear George W. Bush rattle off that list in a public address, and urge all of the men to avoid ejaculating on delicate membranes.
On second thought, maybe this scene is a more appropriate analog of the proposed Bush speech.
The late columnist Sydney J. Harris once described Will as “thin-lipped and constipated.” Perfect.
P.Z. can’t come out today. He’s not the Messiah. He’s been a very naughty boy. Now go away.
George, you are a Republican. Vague political slogans that dance around the actual issues without mentioning any vulgar behaviors or body parts is part of the party rules. Yours is the party that gets the vapors when a nipple is exposed.
Who cares what party he’s in? He’s right. Perhaps if we had been a bit more impolitic in the original public health campaigns against AIDS–instead of saying “AIDS doesn’t discriminate,” maybe showing pictures of patients with Kaposi’s sarcoma and saying “this is what AIDS does”–we might have seen declining infection rates 20 years ago instead of ten.
The One Lining…
Must resist urge to connect intercourse and Lord of the Rings. Intercourse and rings…
*snicker*
Powers fading rapidly…must reach utility belt…
pretty pointless rant on your part pz, imo.
Oh, I agree that he’s right — I’m all for much more open sex education. It’s just the peculiar juxtaposition of the straight-laced Will advocating this when he has been one of the voices of a Republican party that has consistently opposed such unabashed education was amusing.
To his credit, though, Will isn’t quite the line-toer that many of his peers are. He’s criticized intelligent design in schools, for instance. I do find it telling, however, that the AIDS article talks about risky behavior, but never specifies the solution—he probably would advocate condom use, for instance, but doesn’t want to upset that conservative part of his readership that rally around cries of “Abstinence!”
I hesitate to even call Will conservative anymore.
He seems way, way left of the republican party these days.
Will’s point that public sanitation measures have done more good than pharmaceutical breakthroughs (yes, we need both!) makes it hard to take him seriously as a Republican, though. Hasn’t their rallying cry since Reagan been “Smash the state, dude”? He’s gonna lose his country club membership for admitting that sound public policy can actually benefit people.
PZ’s objection as far as I can tell is mostly to Will’s genteel beating around the bush. I usually don’t like Will or agree with him, but the only content I object to here is his implied dismissal of the significance of other means of spreading AIDS. At the time when Will thinks Reagan should have been on TV talking about the lining of the rectum, the word on the street was that ONLY gays could get AIDS. This is clearly not true–and it’s not even the main factor in sub-Saharan Africa. I don’t see the good of making official statements that only serve to reinforce a common misconception.
I wouldn’t have problems with just showing a pie chart of known cases or a frank discussion of the sensitivity of various orifices, but what’s the chance of getting that? There is clearly a measurable risk related to unprotected sex in any form, and there was a public good in getting that message out.
“PZ’s objection as far as I can tell is mostly to Will’s genteel beating around the bush.”
That’s not how I read it. It seemed to me what PZ was really objecting to is Will’s hypocrisy. Oh, maybe it’s only really hypocrisy-by-association, given the comments here Will not being an authentic Republican/conservative, but he does at least claim to uphold and support the abstinence-only, hide-the-nipples party, while calling for a solution that very party has made politically impossible.
As for Blader’s (representative) comment that…
“I hesitate to even call Will conservative anymore.
He seems way, way left of the republican party these days.”
…I’d note that these days you can be “way, way left of the [R]epublican party” and still have plenty of room to be an authentic conservative by historical standards. It’s not a measure of Will’s conservative bona fides so much as it is a measure of how vastly far to the right the party has moved in the post-Reagan era. Remember when Nixon was considered an archconservative? By today’s standards, he was a d@mn socialist: He instituted federal wage and price controls, fer Jebus’ sake!
Bill Dauphin
Man, I need to watch Oprah more. Thanks to blog comments, I now know what a “rainbow party” is, but I didn’t realize the evangelicals were holding their own counter-parties.
(quoting Will):
Someone, please refresh my memory: wasn’t it Reagan’s colon that we saw on the evening news at dinnertime? If so, then hey, may as well talk about recta and AIDS.
Maybe Parker and Stone can throw together a PSA. That could be hella-keww.
(PS: In case anyone cares, Pharyngula gets a passing mention on page 10 of F*U*B*A*R: America’s Right-Wing Nightmare.)
arensb
I was thinking about that too, but couldn’t come up with a way to mention it in my comment. I didn’t watch it on TV, but I remember Reagan’s polyps in the news.
He managed to choke out the information that heterosexual intercourse is the major mode of HIV transmission in Africa…
It’s an important mode of HIV transmission in the US as well. According to the CDC, approximately 13K people developed AIDS after contracting HIV through heterosexual intercourse in 2004. That compares to about 17.5K who contracted it through male-to-male intercourse, making male gay sex still a more common mode of transmission, but with straight sex catching up quick. Partly because of idiots like Will encouraging people to believe that HIV is a “gay disease” and they are perfectly safe as long as they are straight.
Someone, please refresh my memory: wasn’t it Reagan’s colon that we saw on the evening news at dinnertime? If so, then hey, may as well talk about recta and AIDS.
Maybe Parker and Stone can throw together a PSA. That could be hella-keww.
“Hi, I’m Ronald Reagan. You may recall that I recently had a problem with my rectum. Well, there’s a new threat out there, and it concerns all of our rectums. That threat is AIDS. You see, it doesn’t matter whether you’re male or female; straight or gay; virgin or promiscuous. If you have a rectum, chances are it will darn near kill you.”
(cue THE MORE YOU KNOW logo and music)
(Yes, I know that the plural of rectum is ‘recta’, but Reagan’s advisers felt that ‘rectums’ was more folksy, so he went with that.)
From the last link:
“Pilate: ‘He wanks as high as any in Rome.'”
LMAO! Now there’s a way to avoid STDs!
And, good points from several commenters on how far to the Right (ie, Reactionary) of Classical Conservatism the current incarnation of the Repub party (and a sickening proportion of the Dem Party) is.
Perhaps if we had been a bit more impolitic in the original public health campaigns against AIDS…
‘We’? Were you part of the public health campaigns against HIV in the 1980’s? If so, bravo, but I don’t get the impression you were.
ACT UP, GMHC, etc. were the only ones doing any kind of education and awareness campaigns back then. Not the government public health authorities or anyone else. What exactly do you remember as ‘impolitic’ about those campaigns? They didn’t make a big enough point of adding “Gay sex is icky, ICKY!” to the message that condoms must be worn without fail, every single time, until this disease is conquered?
Or did I misunderstand you?
[ …you can catch a whole raft of sexually transmitted diseases: syphilus, human papilloma virus, trichomoniasis, pubic lice, gonorrhea, nongonococcal urethritis, herpes, molluscum contagiosum, lymphogranuloma venereum, and pregnancy. Please…I really want to hear George W. Bush rattle off that list in a public address… ]
And then segue into Monty Python’s “Medical Love Song”: http://bau2.uibk.ac.at/sg/python/Scripts/ContractualObligations/MedicalLove
Read a rebuttal of the George Will op-ed piece which points out that Will does a good job of representing the “human rectum”…here:
http://www.thoughttheater.com
OK, so it’s left to me to say the punchline. Rectum? It bloody near killed ‘im.
And why do people like this think that it is only homosexual men who engage in anal sex?
ACT UP, GMHC, etc. were the only ones doing any kind of education and awareness campaigns back then. Not the government public health authorities or anyone else.
Do you not remember receiving the pamphlet from the Surgeon General in the mail? Or is 1988 no longer part of “the 1980s”?
http://tinyurl.com/rqke7
I’m not saying it wasn’t too little, too late. But to say thse groups were the ONLY ones in the 1980s doing ANY KIND of education is hyperbole at best, and dishonest at worst. Particularly since CL was clearly saying that the government education/awareness programs needed to be MORE like the ones that ACT UP and GMHC (etc.) were doing.
Why are you trying to pick a fight with someone who agrees with you?
Well, it’s possible I misunderstood the point of CL’s comment.
But I didn’t exaggerate all that much. 1988 is technically the eighties, yes, but it’s the very end of the Reagan administration–and already a couple of years past the “twenty years ago” CL suggested as the turn-around date that could have been achieved with a more ‘impolitic’ campaign.
My point was just that some people, small shoe-string operations in most cases, were working very hard to control the epidemic before that time–in exactly the “25 to 30 neighborhoods” to which Will glibly refers. They didn’t have a lot of help.
Why not? One contributing factor is that many people, including many in the public health establishment, believed that AIDS did, in fact, discriminate, and only affected people who deserved it.
My question for CL, to make it clear, was: how exactly would the perpetuation of that attitude have helped to stem the tide?
George seems to be rather scientifically and historically challenged, “The 14th-century Black Death killed one-third of Europe’s population, but it was in the air, food and water, so breathing, eating and drinking were risky behaviors. AIDS is much more difficult to acquire. Like other large components of America’s health-care costs (e.g., violence, vehicular accidents, coronary artery disease, lung cancer), AIDS is mostly the result of behavior that is by now widely known to be risky.”
Just think of all those ignorant scientists who believe that the Black Death was caused by bacteria–yersinia pestis–carried by fleas on rats and transmitted to man by fleabites. What a silly theory.
Pregnancy is a sexually transmitted disease?
First one to notice! You get a prize!
Yes, of course pregnancy is a sexually transmitted disease. It takes sex to get it, and it mangles your physiology and makes you sick and puts you at risk for death and you’ll probably be afflicted for 20 years or more and it’s going to cost you a bucketload of money to get free of it.
When I first read the Will article, I thought it was just vapid and wimpy. Then I read the thought-theater article, and I had to go back and re-read the original just to see if it was really as bad as he was describing. It was! It’s not just about Will’s own political position, he’s actually carrying water for the puritans — but very sneakily.
Made me think of Indiancowboy….
Dianne wrote:
“It’s an important mode of HIV transmission in the US as well. According to the CDC, approximately 13K people developed AIDS after contracting HIV through heterosexual intercourse in 2004. That compares to about 17.5K who contracted it through male-to-male intercourse, making male gay sex still a more common mode of transmission, but with straight sex catching up quick. Partly because of idiots like Will encouraging people to believe that HIV is a “gay disease” and they are perfectly safe as long as they are straight.”
I couldn’t match the stats on the website to the 2004 HIV/AIDS Surveillance Report, until I realized the website combines male and female transmission categories, gives the estimated numbers based on the 35 areas that do confidential name-based reporting, and doesn’t give the further breakdowns within the heterosexual transmission category. For 2004 (looking at reported, not estimated, adult cases only), there were 15,607 male-to-male sexual contact transmission cases, 4,564 injection drug use, 1,696 male-to-male sexual contact and injection drug use, 71 hemophilia/coagulation disorder, 3,373 male heterosexual contact (of which 435 involved sex with injection drug user, 4 sex with person with hemophilia, 29 sex with HIV-infected transfusion recipient, and 2,905 sex with HIV-infected person of unspecified risk factor), 90 recipients of blood transfusion, blood components, or tissue, and 7,355 other.
For females, 2,355 cases in the injection drug use category, 21 hemophilia/coagulation disorder, 5,278 heterosexual contact (of which 871 involved sex with injection drug user, 251 sex with bisexual male, 15 sex with person with hemophilia, 37 sex with HIV-infected transfusion recipient, 4,104 sex with HIV-infected person of unspecified risk factor), 106 recipients of blood transfusion etc., and 4,099 other.
So, for men, there were 17,303 cases of AIDS via gay sex and
3,373 via straight sex; for women, there were 0 cases of AIDS via gay sex (unless there are some lurking in the “other” column), 251 cases via straight sex with bisexual males, and 5,278 cases via straight sex total.
You’re clearly not “perfectly safe” as long as you’re straight–especially if you’re a woman, where you’re clearly far safer if you’re *not* straight–but there’s also still a big difference between gay and straight HIV transmission (as well as between male-to-female and female-to-male transmission).
There are also huge racial differences in U.S. AIDS rates in the heterosexual category–of those 2004 male cases, 416 were white, 2,115 were black, 782 were Hispanic, 32 Asian/Pacific Islander, 14 American Indian/Alaska Native. For females, 796 were white, 3,355 were black, 1,021 were Hispanic, 47 were Asian/Pacific Islander, and 30 were American Indian/Alaska Native.
I think this is very strong evidence in support of a targeted harm reduction model, rather than an “AIDS affects everybody equally” model.