It’s disturbing to note, as Reuters reported this week, that nearly half of the world’s 37.2 million people carrying the AIDS virus are women. That percentage rises to nearly 60 percent in sub-Saharan Africa, Reuters notes.
So with World AIDS Day coming up on Dec. 1, you’d think it would be time to rethink the sexually “active” (aka promiscuous) lifestyle that much of the media and nearly all the feminist mainstream promote as the ultimate female liberation. But as columnist Jim Pinkerton points out on Tech Central Station today, the liberal establishment continues to grind out the same old message–party on, as long as you use a condom–even as the death toll mounts (it’s around 25 million right now).
And wouldn’t you know, one of the biggest promoters of the Condoms R Us theory of AIDS control is the World Health Organization (WHO), the U.N. affiliate that used to be known for fighting polio among Third World children. WHO’s latest undertaking, however, is something you want to shield the kiddies’ eyes from: an online “tool kit” for prostitutes that supposed to inform them of the various kinds of paraphernalia with which they can bedeck themselves and their clients–and then pray that the virus isn’t transmitted. As Jim writes:
“WHO may be physically located in Geneva, but its mind seems to have moved to the Sunset Strip. In the eager-beaver prose of the [WHO] press release, the new kit includes ‘practical “how to do it” documents like “Hustling for Health” and “Making Sex Work Safe.”‘”
Naturally, since WHO and the flock of NGO’s that collaborated on the online tool-kit are ever so politically correct, they never refers to prostitutes as “prostitutes,” but rather as “sex workers,” which is supposed to give their “work” a nice proletarian zing. Indeed, WHO went so far as to have the “sex workers” actually write the documents. “Hustling for Health” was penned by an actual hustler!
A WHO press release says it paid “experienced sex worker groups to support programme managers in setting up and maintaining projects. ‘Of Veshyas, vamps, whores and women’ for example, is based on experiences from an Indian NGO and gives practical advice on how to build up a network of peer educators in brothels and deal with the brothel owners, how to set up condom distribution networks and how to structure payment incentives for peer educators….
“‘Sex workers know better than anyone else about the problems they face, the kind of language and programs that work. Only by involving them can both male and female sex workers and clients be motivated to make use of condoms and health clinics,’ said Friederike Strack from Hydra–one of the sex worker organizations collaborating on the tool kit.”
One of the major funders of this sex-worker writing project, Jim reports, is none other than George Soros, the billionaire currency speculator who thought that if he could spread enough money around, he could engineer the unseating of President Bush. When Soros’s Moveon.org failed to force the president to move on out of office, Soros evidently refocused his attentions from You Know Who to WHO.
Trouble is, Jim says, that between the studiously nonjudgmental WHO, and the “sex worker” groups, whose main agenda is making prostitution respectable and encouraging more of it, the AIDS establishment seems more interested in keeping the sexual revolution going than doing something about one of its deadliest consequences. Jim writes:
“My visit last July to the XV World AIDS Conference in Bangkok left me with the uneasy feeling that many AIDS activists were more interested, strange as it might sound, in preserving the sexually liberated status quo than they were in stopping the disease. Why? Because the activists approached AIDS through the prism of liberation and politicization, in which the great good was human freedom, and the great “bad” was Puritanism….
“If that seems like an outrageous allegation, consider the choice of Bangkok as the site for last summer’s conference; that city is home to the Patpong district, the most notorious fleshpot in the world. And yet the AIDS conferees paid little heed to it. They staged no ‘take back the night’-type marches or protests through Patpong. That might have been bad for business — both for the pimps and streetwalkers on one side of the AIDS equation and the activists allegedly on the other side.”
One measure that would probably help stop the spread of AIDs, says Jim, are quarantines, which have been extremely effective in fighting epidemics of infectious disease in the past:
“But these extreme measures, however effective, have never been employed in re: AIDS. Why not? To put it bluntly, the left has built a sexual-cultural carapace around AIDS that has beaten back even tough-minded public healthcrats.
“So instead of quarantines, we get condoms. That is, serious measures to thwart an epidemic are taken off the table, and so less serious, and less effective, measures take their stead. Oftentimes, condoms are simply a joke; they are a fig leaf over the problem, not a solution to the problem.”
And so, in the name of celebrating sexual freedom, we continue to condemn an increasing number of the world’s women to early death.