Monday, August 11, 2008

on film criticism

Jezebel.com gets me through the workday. Jezebel told me Sisterhood of the traveling pants 2 “has intelligence and heart”. http://jezebel.com/5033753/sisterhood-of-the-traveling-pants-2-puts-sex-and-the-city-to-shame

So even though it has the most unintelligent title in the history of chick flicking, M-L-T and I wanted to go. It’s been raining for two weeks and we couldn’t face the ever-more-prepubescent bar on Friday in our soggy-frizzy state. I hadn’t seen the first version but she gave me the summary: Carmen, Lena, Tibby and B share a pair of pants as they travel around, fedexing it luxuriously across continents.

The film is not intelligent. It won’t warm the cockles of your heart, although the olive-skinned and blue-eyed figure drawing model that Lena briefly dates will warm something in you. What the fill did accomplish was to piss me off royally for it's absurd approach to reproduction.

See Tibby and her boyfriend Brian date for ten months and then have sex for the first time. The condom breaks. Rather than go out and buy Plan B at the 24-hour drug store very likely to be open at that hour in NYC, Tibby launches herself into a depression that causes the breakdown of her relationship, hallucinations about parenting, and an inability to work or communicate with loved ones. Weeks pass before she even gets a pregnancy test!!!! She dances around in the sacred “pants” and begs the heavens for a miracle in the form of her period, which, of course, comes. Thank god cause otherwise she was totally going to have to have a baby and fail school, work and life in general.

Lots of tweens and teens are going to see this movie. M-L-T and I had to LINE UP in our small city to see this movie! What on earth kind of idiotic message does this send? That having sex results in broken condoms and months of panic and break-ups and unemployability? That beautiful researchers didn’t invent Plan B and smug regulators weren’t coerced into improving its availability? That abortion isn’t an option? Holy shit.

Next up to bat is the storyline about Lena, who broke up with her Greek boyfriend Costos only to realize a while later that she still loved him, by which point he had slept with someone else, got her pregnant, and had to marry her. WHHHHAAAATTTT??? The linear correlation between pregnancy and marriage is archaic but that’s not actually what pissed me off- in the end it turned out the new girl had LIED about getting pregnant in order to manipulate Costos into marrying her. ‘Cause that’s what us bitches do.

Heart-warming indeed.

I have nothing else to say, other than if you want to watch a movie about four women in NYC and don’t mind it being a racial white-wash, SATC:TM is a way better choice.

Friday, August 8, 2008

on sobey's

It’s not just Pisani, or that I donated blood on Wednesday and went through the regular Do you have sex with a man who has had sex with a man? business again, but also that it’s AIDS conference time again, so I have AIDS on my mind.

At the research centre where I worked in Halifax, we had a unit devoted to gender and AIDS. (For the record, Pisani is critical of this whole Aids & Development, AIDS & Gender stuff...she believes it hides what really causes AIDS: lots of sex and shooting up). When the XV International AIDS Conference was held in Bangkok in 2004, I remember my colleagues going. And coming back with reports of how the conference was literally Olympic. Tens of thousands of people attended. The theme was, afterall, “Access for all”. But I had to wonder if it cost my organization over $25,000 to attend a conference championing condom use and cheaper drugs (Duh, right?), whether something was amiss.

It’s four years later and the conference this year is in Mexico, and the G&M’s dependable Andre Picard is down there reporting with his ubiquitous glee for inflammation. Today his articles are about “The scale-up of antiretroviral therapy is the most ambitious public-health undertaking of our lifetimes”…note that public health is historically about sanitation and disease prevention, not mass medicating…and you’d never have to medicate someone if you prevented their infection in the first place…but the times they are a changin’…and anyway I like drugs, who doesn’t?

Next article: The vilification of lack of access to the female condom.

Choice quotes:
“The fault lies not with the product itself but with set-in-their-ways policy makers”
"This is a 15-year scandal born of ignorance and inertia,"
"The female condom is 18 times more expensive than a male condom. It's obvious why women are not using it more," he said.

HAHAHAHAHA. In all honesty, would you ever, ever use a female condom? Would you? When you could instead ask the guy to wear the condom? It’s not like the female condom is some genius sneaky way to get around a pushy guy who won’t agree to condom use. Not that I’ve ever used one, I refuse. It’s like sticking a Sobey’s bag inside you. It would suffocate my cervix. It would obviously sound ridiculous and probably get bunched up. How would that situation be easier on a subjugated woman? Most of the barrier contraceptives people have developed for women are practically weaponry (ever cut your foreskin on the lip of a diaphragm? Well me neither but anyway. Ever even SEEN a Lea Shield? It’s like the Keeper, which I personally feel is bad enough, but it is five times as heavy and hard as a rock. Plus it causes toxic shock syndrome).

The female condom is a failure, sort of like those baby walker things we had as kids and that caused a lot of fall-down-the-stairs-head-injuries were a failure. THE DESIGN SUCKS. I’d rather these expensive conferences deleted the arguments about policymaker inertia over a sucky thing, and got back on the train of telling men that condoms prevent disease and yo, you should use one, especially with sex workers, what are you, STUPID? Tell women that condoms prevent disease and that they have every right in the world to ask to use one and they don’t need to go around sneaking Sobey’s bags up themselves to protect themselves, that protecting yourself is noble and normal and not something to hide and decent men will be up for it. Honestly. I know I know, women are forced into unprotected sex- but the female condom would not help them, it’s as obvious as a float in the Macy’s parade and just as uncomfortable.

Thursday, August 7, 2008

on second thought

so you know how i wrote about how Pisani pissed me off a bit? well, her high school flippancy still bothers the serious nerd in me, but in acknowledgement of my own penchant for sarcasm, I gave her a break and read her book. In summary, these are her scarlett letters against the AIDS industry:

“the Community” is bullshit. Infected housewives have nothing to do with prostitutes, in fact they hate the prostitutes (who their husbands visited, causing their infections). Don’t put any old infected person in the same support group.

Peer education is bullshit. Prostitutes can’t teach each other supportively how to prevent HIV because they don’t trust each other because they compete for clients.

AIDs is not a job qualification; having AIDS does not make you a good counselor, researcher, or policymaker. “Participation” by infected but otherwise untrained people in these activities can and does screw them up.

Bush gave $15 billion to AIDS in the developing world to divert attention from his racist, illegal war in Iraq.

The unfortunate result of lots of money for ever-cheaper antiretroviral meds is that more people live with HIV chronically; the longer you live with it, the longer you have to infect other people with it.

NGOs serve a few people well. It’s like World vision foster children: sure, one child goes to school, but what about the starved economy of the entire nation?

Government can effectively do prevention, and get at way more people than grassroots groups.

Sub-Saharan Africa has more sex, more promiscuity, more men having sex with young women, more dry, damaging sex- and as a result is the ONLY place in the world where non-sex-worker heterosexuals are contracting HIV like wildfire. EVERYWHERE else, the problem is largely the domain of drug injectors, sex workers and the people purchasing sex from them, and gay men.

Wet, monogamous (even if serially), enjoyable heterosexual sex has a hard time spreading HIV. If infected people didn’t have sex with younger generations HIV would die out almost entirely because of effective prevention of mother-infant transmission.

African leaders and Islamic and Christian leaders have spread lies about HIV and are responsible for seas of infections.

Not supporting safe-injection sites like Vancouver’s Insite is INSANE.

Having lots of sex partners at one time spreads HIV more effectively than having lots of sex partners one after another after another.

You are most infectious in the 6 months after contracting HIV; which is also when you are least likely to be aware of your infection.

Prevention has lost ground to treatment in terms of financial investment. Big surprise there.

Generous confidentiality about HIV testing might have been a mistake in terms of protecting the infected: if it’s so unworthy of discrimination, why so much pressure to hide my HIV status?

….

I hand it to Pisani, although some are quite obvious, and all took way too long to communicate, these are great points.