Dialogues Issues - Sex and Health 

I've said it once, and I'll say it again: I really enjoy bad television.  Granted bad is a subjective term, there's something to be said about realizing how bad the show you're watching is and still being unable to tear your attention away from it.  The program in question today is the Maury Povich Show and in particular his exposes on teen girls who want to have a baby.  This one is perhaps my favorite:

[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6uneIieUrgI]

The general pattern of these shows is that the 'deviant' teen in question is usually booed by the audience and gently berated by Maury into recognizing the irresponsibility of their decisions or possible future choices.  What does it look like if we however maybe take a step into Victoria's shoes?  I proceed by presenting a possibly feminist re-reading of her character.  Here we go...

Clearly, Victoria is a modern girl-on-the go who knows what she wants. She is gonna have her baby.  Clearly Victoria has thought out her decision and planned accordingly.  She's been preparing herself by building up an array of baby care paraphernalia.  That's right, if her baby loses its pacifier, that's okay, she's got three more.  She also has a vivid financial plan for how to take on the monetary burden of a child.  She's prepared to sell her body to care of her child.  This clearly points to her a sexual agent who has cast off the rhetoric of sexual fear so often aimed at teens.  In fact, she's so unabashedly unashamed about her sexuality that she's willing to not only cast off parental guilt by having sex in her mother's bed but able to confront society's stigma of teen sexuality by having sex in public places including parking lots, staircases and playgrounds.  The last of which points her ability to successful claim her own sexual nature and symbolically debunk the myth of the absence of childhood sexuality.  As a sexual agent with plans for the future, why do we insist on demonization Victoria, our teen sexuality warrior?

No, but seriously, putting aside this sarcastic tonality, why is the underlying logic that captivates both myself and the rest of the Maury viewing population?  One aspect of spectactorship that may have a hand in this is that television talk shows simultaneously place the viewer as an audience member and an omniscient viewer by cutting between shot of the stage directly and by pulling back to show audience responses and interactions.  This affect makes us both identify as the audience and have a critical outsiderness to it.  Does the audience's disapproval match our own or does their mass response serve us to question their motives?

These exposes also utilize several sensationalizing functions such as detailing the numbers of sexual partners, the age of sexual partners, the exchange of money or other items for sex and the public locations of sexual interactions.  In surveying several of these types of episodes it becomes clear that maybe the numbers are fictive or skewed.  For example, when touting total numbers of sex partners, the sums are always multiples of five, Victoria of course alleging fifteen, and also thirty seems to be quite a popular number as well.  Another episode makes sure to note that the teens involved have slept with older men, always highlighting 'in their fifties' or 'sixties.' The girls are generally depicted in their introduction montages on the street, up against chainlink fences or posing in front of dumpsters.  What do these images say about the way these issues are being framed visually.  Finally, there seems to be a ludicrousness about the motives: one girl is proud to admit that she had sex with a guy for a cheeseburger....with bacon. Sarcastic voice aside, if Angelique wanted a bacon cheeseburger that bad, why shouldn't be allowed to use sex to get it?

These shows present a hyberbolic representation of female teen sexuality.  These girls are in turn demonized for being sexual beings and in addition are berated for exhibiting a false consciousness for their desires whether that be reproductive or sexual.  I'm not necessarily saying that I may agree with these girls' decisions, but they ways in which they are hyped-up serve to further alienate young viewers from their own sexual feelings and choices by barraging them with an audience that shames and stigmatizes.  An audience in fact in which they are a part when watching these shows.  Furthermore, these teens are overly represented as working class women of color highlighting the ways in which racism interacts with negative representations of young girls' sexuality.

I so want to applaud the girls for yelling back at the audience when verbally attacked and provoked, but the way that the show is produced, their rebuttals are framed as comical.  It's a difficult question that I must pose to both myself and others: what are we really laughing at here?

In our graduate seminars, we talk a lot about race and color, including how whiteness is cherished and celebrated in and outside the United States.

These class discussions and other conversations with my fellow students and friends made me think about the various fairness products that are marketed and sold back home. (In no way am I trying to be the voice of my nation. These are just MY views on such 'beauty' products.)

Here's a fine example of what I'm talking about:

[video:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tI5WCNR81YM&feature=related]

So clearly, once you're beautiful (i.e. fair, white) you can achieve anything! Name, fame, money and power! You can realize your inner dreams and talents 'cos opportunities are endless!

So what happens if you're not fair? Well, basically then you're nobody! You're boring, unwanted and invisible. Your life sucks! (and not in a pleasurable way!)

Not only that, if cannot get married because of your dark complexion, all you need to do is use a cream! Look at this for instance:

[video:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-lN26TMwm6s&feature=related]

Use it for a couple of days and see the results! You'll impress your guy and his mother in no time! How gendered and how setreotypical is that!

Ummm, but wait, isn't skin color largely genetic? So the fairness creams/soaps/sprays just suck out all the melanin? That doesn't sound right! It probably just washes away dead skin cells, leaving it smoother and cleaner with a momentary glow. It cannot possibly change one’s life! Common!

It often worries me how whiteness and fairness has become a virtue among some social groups:

[video:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F-9tcXpW1DE&feature=related]

The message in the above video is clear - 'not so far people' are looked down upon by 'fairer' folks. The only way to shut them up is by 'becoming' like them, and if possible, a shade lighter! Intra-race racism? (I'm sure there's a better academic term for this.)

Corporates spend a lot of time and energy researching their target consumers. Of course there the question of what came first? The chicken or the egg? Was there always a need for creating fairness? Did the marketers study people's aspiration or did they create this market through such campaigns by feeding consumer's minds with bogus claims?

It amuses me that most brands selling such fairness products are not domestic. Nivea, Garnier, J&J and many others have spent millions of $$ conducting R&D on Eastern markets to come up with skin whitening merchandise.

Oh, and if you thought their target audience is just women, you're wrong! Men too have been using fairness products. As the following clips suggests, men can finally 'come out' as they now have their own personal line of fairness products. Of course, men's fairness creams are packaged in blue, grey and black as opposed to pink in case of women :)

[video:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MgBevCTBTJw&feature=related]

It's completely macho to make yourself go a few shades lighter 'cos now, women will run after you!

A pharmacy in London launched a calculator that uses the six degrees of separation concept to determine your number of indirect sex partners. The idea is that every time you sleep with one person you sleep with all of their previous sex partners. I get the idea but the execution is a low-grade scare tactic rooted in false assumptions about sexual risk.

Risk of contraction is not about a number pinned to your slutty lapel. Risk of contraction is about specific behaviors. Did you use a condom every time? Was lube involved? Were there visible sores? Were you having oral, vaginal or anal sex? Did your partners use protection? These are questions that can help determine your risk, not the number of sexual partners.

I know, we like nominal figures to figure out where we lay on the sexual totem pole. A number is comforting, easy to understand but ultimately misleading. Think about BMIs or simply weight. The numbers say something but they don’t paint the whole picture.

The heart of the calculator is in the right place but the underlying assumption is that fear will motivate people to use condoms and get tested. The fear of slut shaming is an easily accessible tool. I looked around at comments from people who calculated their indirect sexual partners and one concept popped up repeatedly: EEEWW! DIRTY!!

We make the immediate mental leap from indirect sex partners to direct and feel this sense of shame. 14 million people? I fucked 14 million people! Quelle horror!

Calm down. You did not really sleep with 14 million people just like you don’t really know Brad Pitt through six degrees of separation.

This isn’t to say that having sex with lots of people doesn’t make you more likely to contract an STD/STI. It does. But there is more to the picture than that. Type of sex, partners’ sexual histories, partners’ sexual health, your health, and levels of protection used are several very important mitigating factors.

What I find most intriguing about this calculator is that we use a number to asses sexual risk in part because speaking about STD/STI history is a taboo. The calculator does not ask important questions like "How often do you use protection?", "Have you contracted an STD/STI?" or "How long did you go untreated after contraction?" These are not polite questions to ask, though the amount of people and their ages and gender seem to be. 

Imagine a culture that spoke about STDs/STIs like other illnesses.

"Yeah, I was feeling really run down and it turned out to be syphilis."

"I stayed in last night because my herpes infection was acting up."

We cannot fathom discussing sexual health when sex itself is the elephant in the room. Dampening discussions about sex in turn promotes serious anxieties that we turn into cultural boogiemen. STDs/STIs become faceless scourges lurking in strangers' pants. And how can we root out those monsters? A good solid number that tells us the imagined our imagined exposure rates. we can then modify our behavior to better avoid these specters.

This is not to say that STDs/STIs aren't a problem. They are an issue that we can deal with socially but we prefer to fumble in the dark with sexual health instead of broad daylight. we readily accept flu vaccines but some scream themselves horse over the bogus actrocity of the HPV vaccine.

(Originally posted on wiqaable.com)

One of the few things I can't handle is people's injury stories. People talk about their injuries and scars as if they would make them more brave or honorable or whatever, but frankly, I think it's disrespectful to talk about painful stories in front of a person who just can't handle it. Is it about masculinity? Do you need to talk about your scars to prove how "dangerous" or "strong" you are? Well, I don't care. So next time you see me, please don't talk about breaking your bones.

This is because I've never had any big injury since I was born. I've never broken my bones, I've never gotten into car accidents, and I've never fallen down the stairs. I've been so fortunate that I don't know how painful it would be to get your bones broken, and I would imagine the most extreme pain possible right before I pass out. That's a painful imagination.

I've never been really sick either, except for occasional skin problems I always had growing up. I've never gotten a flu, I've never had food poisoning, and I've never been hospitalized. I'm not saying that I've always been healthy, but if health is determined, simplistically, by the absence of disease or injury, I've always enjoyed my health.

Perhaps this is part of the reason why I don't like going to a hospital. I'm so unfamiliar with that super clean and slightly sorrowful atmosphere inside the building. I also don't really trust Western medicine because my mother is an acupuncturist. In addition, what I've noticed recently is that sexist American culture associates the acts of being sick and weak, going to the hospital, getting taken care of, and even taking care of someone, with feminine quality. I'm part of it; I believe it's not only me who think somehow recovering from a cold without medical care is something to be proud of, therefore, masculine. Simply put, in American culture, healthy is masculine, sick (and weak) is feminine.

I believe that health means differently to different people. It may entail physical, mental, and emotional health, and it may refer to having a perfectly functioning body or being able to feel empowered and enjoy everyday life. And I think to some people, being healthy also means being able to compromise their health without being afraid of bankruptcy.

I was astounded when I learned that there was no universal health care in the United States. I really thought it was a wrong piece of information. I thought it was a joke. Indeed, it's a ridiculous story that makes nobody laugh but makes everyone angry. When I was in Japan, I had access to health care through my father's Employee's Heath Insurance, just like anyone else. When my father was unemployed, I had access to health care through local government-supported health insurance, just like anyone else. In Japan, I enjoyed being healthy, which I believed was a basic human right. But I guess it's considered a privilege in some countries like the United States of America.

I'm still baffled by this fact--the world's arguable superpower cannot even protect its own citizens (let alone immigrants). What do you do when you get sick and if you don't have health insurance? You don't go to a hospital and just wait for the body to win. What do you do when you're house is on fire? I don't think you wait for your house to be burned down; you call the fire department. What do you do when the environment is polluted and destroyed? I don't think you wait for the rain forests to clean the air, for the ocean to dissolve the pollutant, or the Earth to get cold again; you stop driving, you turn off lights, and you stop buying things. It's as natural as that.

You might be wondering why I'm writing about health care on wiqaable. The reason is simple, health care access is about gender, race and sexuality, as much as it is about class, and immigration status, and so on. And, believe it or not, it's about life and death.

A study reports that 45,000 uninsured people die early deaths every year in the United States. This particular article reports that Dr. Wilper says, “Although blacks and Hispanics are more likely to end up uninsured, racial differences in the percentages of deaths was not statistically significant.” This is clearly a confusing, if not misleading, statement. First, it is true that African Americans and Latin@s are less likely to have health insurance. Second, it is true that people of color are more likely to get injured or sick because they are more likely to work and live in dangerous and polluted environment. It's called environmental racism. If we think of why and how people get sick, as well as whether they're insured or not, health care access obviously has everything to do with race.

Similarly, the issue of health care access speaks directly to Queer communities. How many years did Reagan take to admit and publicly announce that AIDS was a serious epidemic? Many of us remember what it means to be denied access to health care, and, health itself. Imagine what percentage of sex workers, female, male, or trans, have health insurance. Imagine what percentage of undocumented immigrants, from Mexico, China, or the Philippines, have health insurance. And those are the people we live together. Those are the people who support our daily lives. Those are, in fact, us.

How many more years are you willing to wait for universal access to health care? Even without looking at other countries, I frankly think that the United States should be deeply ashamed of its failure to take care of its residents. With its twisted idea of glorified masculinity, I really hope the U.S. will not start boasting about enduring its diseases or bragging about its injuries, without realizing that they are actually deep and fatal.

The Centers for Disease Control is considering promoting routine circumcision for baby boys in the US as a means of decreasing the spread of HIV, says the NYTimes.

Not only is this ignorant; it is dangerous. To women, and to people of color.

Public health policy makers have been talking up circumcision as a way to reduce HIV transmission ever since data first showed that it could reduce infection rates by up to 50-60% among African men. PEPFAR, UNAIDS and others jumped on the surgical bandwagon, ramping up efforts to promote circumcision in Africa. Family Health International even created a Male Circumcision Clearinghouse with the latest information on research and intervention.

And no wonder the joy. 50% reduction of transmission is fabulous. Unless of course, you knew that there was another way to reduce transmission by close to 100%, called... condoms. The fact is, promoting condom use in Africa has not been super-effective, and often because the public health officials have not found ways of addressing socio-cultural barriers to condom use: power differentials and gender dynamics; communication and negotiation; work migration patterns and their relationship to sex work. At a loss to address these underlying issues, interventionists jumped at the chance to make a medical intervention instead. Snip, snip, and a neo-colonialist intervention further disempowers men in a culture where disempowerment is one of the deepest running concerns.

And it is even more disempowering to women: early studies in Africa didn't bother looking at how circumcision might affect women. No data was collected on whether HIV transmission was reduced among female partners of circumcised men. More disturbingly, even, no studies looked at how de-prioritizing condom promotion could affect other sexual health issues for women: transmission of STIs; unwanted pregnances and abortion rates; sexual violence. How do you judge an intervention a success without looking at the whole picture?

Though this was glossed over in the NYTimes article, the Lancet released a study earlier this summer showing that "Circumcision of HIV-infected men did not reduce HIV transmission to female partners." So now we know, this much-touted (medically controlled) intervention does not protect women. Why promote it in the US, then, much less Africa or anywhere else in the world?

CDC says that they are promoting it amongst gay men, who are in one of the highest risk groups in the US. But circumcision performed at birth will clearly not be weeding out babies based on sexual identity--parents of all boys will be instructed to circumcise. This is not a huge change, the majority of boys in the US are circumcised, so why does it matter? It matters because if circumcision is touted as protecting against HIV, then other interventions--especially condom promotion--get short shrift, and both women and men lose in the end.

And those who are least likely to circumcise in the US are those from Latino and African American communities. Just as in Africa, rather than being willing to examine how culture and oppression might impact sexual decision making, we are instead stepping in with a paternalist intervention that implies that it is men and women (particularly men and women of color) who can't figure out how to make their own sexually heathy decisions, and it is the great white doctor who must step in and save them from themselves.