Apologies for the silence, which was in part due to a glorious whirlwind of a visit to Dublin, where I spent a while with Ireland’s answer to Oprah, Gerry Ryan. I’ve always been a bit of a fan of Gerry’s morning show on RTE2 so I know that pretty much anything goes. And I was encouraged that lying in the studio was a print-out of the story Lee Rudolph was talking about in a comment on an earlier post — “Europeans get drunk “to have sex”" (more below).
But still, I thought I had better be on best behaviour on a national breakfast show. Then, as I was just about to go into the studio, I heard Gerry winding up a call with a listener along these lines: “Sure it licks other dogs’ arses. It licks it’s own bollocks. And then you let it lick your face…”. Best behaviour? The dog’s bollocks to that.
You can hear the whole show here (choose May 9, 2008).
I’ve been a bit distracted of late by the impending launch of The Wisdom of Whores. Now I’m distracted by the post-party haze, and this shelf at Blackwell’s is completely bare. But I promise to be back on sex, science and all things sundry in the next day or two.
Thanks to everyone who came (especially the Bookseller from Madrid, who’s in the back there).
Brazilians are world chart-toppers in several things, among them football, HIV prevention, and enthusiasm for sex. There’s also a transsexual culture that is perhaps more vibrant than in any other country outside Asia. But people are still a bit squeamish about putting those things together, as the embarrassment of mega-footballer Ronaldo has shown.
Ronaldo was found in a hotel with three sex workers in short skirts and high heels, but that, to a Brazilian footballer, is a source of pride rather than shame. Ronaldo’s problem is that under the short skirts were penises. In the opinion of many Brazilians that makes Ronaldo a fag, and that’s not good for his footballing reputation. He’s now pretending he didn’t know that the girls were boys, which does not say much for his sexual prowess. Perhaps this will help push Brazil to extend its usually sensible acceptance of sex one step further.
I’d write more about this, but I’m off to “The Matinee”, London’s rites-of-spring gay rave, with a copule of young Brazilian friends.
I promise not to keep posting reviews of The Wisdom of Whores to this blog. There’s a whole page dedicated to reviews (”What They’re Saying”) over here, and if any readers want to contribute their own views I’ll post them there. Even if you hate the book.
But since it’s an idle Sunday and I’m suffering from pre-partum butterflies, I’m going to content myself today with pasting in Alex Renton’s review in The Sunday Times. I can’t link to the online version for some reason, but it’s searchable from here. My favourite line: “Pisani is herself a member of what she calls the Aids mafia, although I suspect that some former colleagues might like to see her over a bridge in concrete slippers.” Read on. Read the rest of this post…
Vancouver is the only city in North America that provides a safe place for addicts to shoot up in. The local government thinks it’s a good idea. The national government doesn’t. So they’re sticking their oar in to undermine the project, according to local researchers.
“Scientists accuse Tories of ‘despicable’ interference”, yells a headline in the Globe and Mail. “An article published in the International Journal of Drug Policy charges that the Conservative government interfered in the work of independent scientific bodies, attempted to muzzle scientists and deliberately misrepresented research findings because it is ideologically opposed to harm-reduction programs,” reports Andre Picard. (I’d love to provide you with a link to the original article; the IJDP is the official journal of the International Harm Reduction Association, but they’ve decided to limit their policy impact by publishing through a restricted access Elsevier journal.)
At issue, on the face of it, is funding for research and a continuation of an exemption from national law that allows the safe injecting site to operate as a research site. But the real issue is, as always, whether the conservative government wants science or political expediency to inform its drugs policy.
Last month, an independent committee published a very detailed report about the impact of the Insite safe injecting space, which serves around 600 people a day, has helped over 300 people stay alive after an overdose, and overseen 220,000 safe injections. Read the rest of this post…
A great deal has already been written about the death, perhaps suicide, of Deborah Jane Palfrey, aka the DC Madam. Ms. Palfrey was convicted two weeks ago of running a prostitution ring that met the needs and desires of honchos in Washington. A couple of the honchos involved lost their jobs as a result of buying services from Ms Palfrey’s staff, but none lost their lives, or even livelihoods. One of them was Randy Tobias; he once controlled US$ 15 billion in spending to fight HIV and AIDS, and he wouldn’t give a penny of it to any organisation that did not actively pledge to oppose prostitution. Randy has to quit as head of USAID, but he’s now got a nice, cushy job as an airport manager.
Tobias typifies the hypocrisy about prostitution which riddles the United States. He says he only paid Palfrey’s staff for massages, not for sex. And Palfrey says that to her knowledge her staff only provided massages. She said it in court. He didn’t have to. She was convicted of a number of crimes. He wasn’t. She is dead.
Tobias presided over a programme that aimed to end prostitution in the world. (I am not making that up. Check it out in the Box headed “Violence Against Women and HIV/AIDS”: “The Emergency Plan will also support interventions to eradicate prostitution”.) For a round-up of what people whose livelihoods is to be eradicated think of that, see the links to posts about Palfrey’s death on Bound, Not Gagged. The supporters of this policy argue that the willing buyer, willing seller principle which drives most of American life does not apply in the area of sex. They argue that prostitution is not a victimless crime.
This self-serving moralising, this craven hypocrisy about the trading of sex, is the real crime. It has just claimed it latest victim, in the form of Deborah Jeane Palfrey. May she now find peace.
From the ever-helpful Kaiser Family Foundation we have a new game: Pos or Not? Players get to see a photo and profile of young men and women, then have to guess whether or not the person is HIV-infected. It’s intended to challenge prejudices and preconceptions, and I have to say it does it pretty well. Check it out by clicking here:
It takes me back to the time we were trying to explain the results of a study of HIV and syphilis to transgender sex workers in Jakarta. Stats — even terrifying ones like “23% HIV positive” don’t necessarily mean much to people who dropped out of primary school, so we drew 100 waria on a graph and coloured 23 of them in red, and 17 in green, with quite a few in red and green stripes. Read the rest of this post…
The Wisdom of Whores isn’t published until next week, but one of the more absurd predictions in the book has come to pass.
Here’s the passage from the book.
Chatting with my friend Bert who works for the World Bank, I marvelled that almost every UN agency was on the AIDS bandwagon. Bert gave me a “Well duh!” look. “The UN institutions are professional beggars, and beggars go where the money is,” he said. “So you get “culture and AIDS”, “kids and AIDS”, “fish and AIDS”. I’m just waiting for “climate change and AIDS”.
The claim comes from Daniel Tarantola who, along with the posthumously sainted Jonathan Mann, turned HIV into a human rights issue, a development issue, a disease contracted by people who are poor and ill-educated, rather than a disease contracted by people who share needles or have unprotected sex with lots of partners. Read the rest of this post…
Vancouver is the only city in North America that provides a safe place for addicts to shoot up in. The local government thinks it’s a good idea. The national government doesn’t. So they’re sticking their oar in to undermine the project, according to local researchers.
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