Posted on 07/02/2003 10:25:09 AM PDT by presidio9
Figures newly released show HIV infection rates in NSW have increased for the first time since 1994. The only surprise, perhaps, is that the rise did not come sooner.
AIDS lobby groups are blaming declining federal government funding and leadership. They are acknowledging a rise in unsafe sex among homosexually active men, the largest group affected by the virus in Australia. They are also pointing to foolhardy youth, and the false belief the virus has been cured.
What they haven't got their heads around is the use of language.
American culture soon sweeps the world. And so the verb "barebacking" - a euphemism for sex without condoms - has sped from the US to Australia via the internet and international visitors. You can now be a "barebacker", as in noun.
In the US, barebacking sometimes has political overtones. Gay men in big cities are fatigued by safe sex. High infection rates over there have collided with a cavalier fatalism for some: you'll be infected anyway, so why not claim your right to have all the unprotected sex you want?
At the extreme end of the barebacking phenomenon in the US is "bug chasing", in which a small (though unaccounted) subset of gay men desire and actively seek out HIV infection as a type of identity.
In January, the US edition of Rolling Stone ran a story justifiably condemned for exaggerating the incidence of bug chasing. Barebackers, by contrast, appear much more common, and increasing in number, in the US and in Australia.
There is nothing new about unsafe sex, of course, and the term barebacking was initially a symptom of what was already occurring. The globalisation of gay chat and pick-up rooms in the past two years has given voice to a taboo. No one used to say, let's have unsafe sex. But some now say, "Do you bareback?"
In the Australian context, barebacking is about taking risks and denying consequences. The word seems to have shifted from a symptom to a cause of unsafe sex; more gay men are proudly posting on their profiles that they "bareback", with a touch of alluring sexual outlawry.
Certainly, just being human - slipping up, poor choices, being depressed, consumption of drugs and alcohol - plays a big role in HIV seroconversions. But so, too, does language that glosses over danger, promulgating a culture of denial. The myth of barebacking needs to be confronted in community campaigns and educational material. Most often, the campaigns ignore the word.
It is true that Australia has had success in containing the virus. Most gay men do use condoms most of the time. And barebacking may not be a problem if two men having sex are of the same HIV status - both negative, or both positive. Increasingly, it is said gay men are making choices about whether to use condoms based on risk reduction rather than elimination.
But how well informed can gay men's casual unprotected sex choices be? Sydney's Health in Men study, by the National Centre in HIV Social Research, recently showed 55 per cent of gay men did not disclose their HIV status to casual partners during the six months before the survey. A shot in the dark, undoubtedly.
Periodic surveys, meanwhile, have shown steady rises in unsafe sex among gay men with casual partners in Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Perth and Adelaide since the mid-'90s.
NSW has just announced a rise in HIV diagnoses of 12.8 per cent in 2002 - 386 diagnoses, compared with 342 in 2001, a figure significantly higher than anticipated. The spike coincides with a 20 per cent rise in Queensland last year, and a 7 per cent rise in Victoria, the third annual increase down south.
Grim Reaper shock tactics were never going to influence gay urbane sophisticates but nor, it appears, do the current complex, ambiguous and confusing safe sex posters circulating in the gay press and in gay venues.
AIDS educators argue it is a more complex world, requiring complex messages. But if we were so sophisticated, HIV figures would be falling.
The shifting language seems to have left the educators behind. It's time for a new national campaign to demystify barebacking. It's time to listen to what's being said.
Nah, too un-PC.
It's the GOVERNMENT'S fault (no matter what government) that idiots get AIDS.
Sodomites have decided to ignore right and wrong already, why does it surprise people that they've moved on to ignoring cause and effect?
Well, considering that condoms are about 85% effective, when used properly, in preventing pregnancy, they can't be used for risk elimination anyway. Especially when you consider:
A sperm is about 5 times bigger than the HIV virus
Pregnancy is possible about 5 to 10 days out of the month for most women, compared to the 365 days per year susceptibility of HIV.
Several additional reasons that the effectivity of condoms in preventing HIV infection in anal sex is probably even lower than their effectivity in preventing pregnancy are a little too distasteful to list in detail.
Sure. Putting your thing into sewage is good for it. Fecal matter is recommended as an unguent by everyone.
Is this idiot nuts or what?
No, the money that could have used to bring a faster cure for cancer will have bought an AIDS cure, and then we will subsidize its distribution. We will have succeeded in removing a strong motivator for behaving well.
Yep, that must be the problem alright.
Actually, it's about taking risks and shifting the consequences and made possible by liberal enablers like those at the Morning Herald. It is ironic that those whose "compassion" compels them to squeal the loudest are those causing the damage.
"It should come as no surprise that something bad happens when a man inserts his penis into another man's anus."
God did not make him gay. Homosexuality is learned behavior.
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