Commercial sex
AIDS has led to increased repression of women in the commercial sex industry in many countries. Governments and religious NGOs have assumed that if women and girls "trapped" in prostitution can be tested, gaoled, retrained or relocated, then the "real" problem -the infection of heterosexual male clients with "innocent families" will be eliminated. In fact, none of Asia and Africa's many moralistic or anti-prostitution programs have reduced the overall numbers of commercial sex transactions. On the contrary, every time the Cambodian, Vietnamese, Thai 24 International Viewpoint every four intravenous drug users are black or Hispanic. Three of every four HIV+ women in the USA are black or Hispanic.
Nine of every ten babies with HIV are black or Hispanic. The "Big Apple" even has
30,000 homeless people with AIDS.
The infections that kill people with AIDS get a foothold because our biological immunity is weakened. In a similar way, AIDS itself spreads wherever a part of society is less protected than the rest. Spreading through sexual, i.e. social contact, AIDS is a terrible indicator of the state of our societies.
In just a few years, AIDS has become a terrible pandemic, exploiting all the upheaval in human society, and the reduction of men, women, and even blood itself to commodities. Contributory factors include:
• massive poverty in the third world, particularly among women.
• worsening health, as a result of cuts in health care to repay the foreign debt.
• sex tourism, the politely ignored underside of the mass tourism which developed in the 1970s.
• development of a new range of blood products for medical use, without the necessary quality and safety controls, thanks to cutbacks in public health in the
North.
• the growth of the global economy in illegal drugs. Second only to oil in terms of revenue, the drugs sector brings together peasants impoverished by the shift to export-oriented mono-culture, local ruling classes (this is the only sector of the world economy dominated by economic interests within the third world), first world banks, and the frustrated, miserable and desperate drug users in the lower class districts of the north.
Intravenous drug use grew very rapidly in the 1980s. Nevertheless, governments or Filipino governments declare war on the brothels, they reopen in increased numbersr. Every ex-prostitute retrained in a craft and sent home is replaced on the street by a younger woman.
Better results in slowing the spread of HIV have been achieved by projects which help sex workers organise for their rights, educate each other, increase access to non-judgmental sexual health services, stand up to employers, and enforce safe standards in their working lives. Sex worker groups have achieved inspiring successes in cities from Nairobi to Phnom Penh. [KD] * refused to adopt risk-reduction strategies.
Meanwhile, sexual liberties did improve in a number of countries, but many homosexuals still live in virtual or real ghettos, and many people, gay and straight, are confronted by puritanical restrictions on sexual education, and on information campaigns about safe sex and the prevention of sexually transmitted diseases.
In short, AIDS is overwhelmingly and increasingly third world, poor and female.
Seven of every ten HIV sufferers live in Africa. In South Africa, the infection rate is 60 times higher for blacks than whites. In some central African towns, 30% of the population is HIV+.
Most victims are women. This means that any serious struggle against AIDS must include specific demands, like:
• a higher minimum age for marriage for women, and a lower minimum for men.
• a significant reduction in dowry payments. Some African governments are trying to popularise symbolic dowries, or replace the dowry with a European-style wedding ring.
• abolishing a man's right to repudiate and later reclaim his wife.
• making divorce easier for women to obtain.
• increasing the length of compulsory school attendance for girls, and really enforcing attendance.
• mixed education, with a frank treatment of questions of sexuality.
• a right to sexuality for unmarried women.
• campaigns against the sale of children, and prostitution.
• developing work possibilities for women, and increasing the social recognition of work women are already doing.
These issues are probably more important than current campaigns to tell people to use condoms to protect themselves against AIDS and sexually transmitted diseases. These issues are among the preconditions for a real solution to the pandemic.
Over the last few decades, the third world has been "globalised" Traditional village agriculture, in which women played a major role, has been destroyed, and its place taken by export-oriented mono-culture, where men dominate. Meanwhile, the process of rural exodus means that huge numbers of men leave home for the cities, or for seasonal work in another region. These men might be married in the village, but they live a bachelors life in the town. China alone has at least 100 million internal migrants.
This generalisation of monetary exchanges has reinforced men's control over their wives, daughters and sisters, since in the new cash economy the men are often the ones earning a cash wage.
In the mushrooming cities of the south, large new generations have grown up, formally forbidden from sexual relations before marriage, and without the resources to pay a dowry. These people are marrying later than their parents. And this has encouraged the massive development of prostitution in all the cities of the third world.
Things have not been helped by the increasing number of wars, and the collapse of neo-colonial states like Rwanda, Zaire and Liberia. Millions of Africans have been forced to migrate.
All these social factors have obvious consequences for sexual behaviour. An economic and social structure based on the family is exploding, to be replaced by an atomised, disjointed social framework, where traditional relationships are altered and overlaid by market relations. Sexual conduct has changed accordingly.
In many Moslem and animist villages, men used to pass one night with each of their wives in turn. Today, most of their multiple partners will be drawn from a relatively small pool of prostitutes. This acceleration of sexual exchanges has little to do with sexual liberation. Pleasure and promiscuity don't go hand in hand when they are reserved for men only. The right for both men and women to choose their sexual relationships implies liberty, discussion, exchange and respect. It is much easier to integrate the use of condoms into this kind of relationship.
There is no point in advocating fidelity instead of male promiscuity, which is a generalised phenomenon. The solution is sexual equality. Only sexual equality can enable men and women to achieve sexual pleasure and, in this age of AIDS, to discuss, and protect themselves. Human laws will never control our sexual behaviour. Today more than ever, we have need of new social laws
OUTAGE
AIDS