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.