The Wisdom of Whores

It’s always dangerous to mix your coms with your orgs. In China, a link from the UNAIDS site takes you to a classic sex cybersquat: it offers links to dildos, fetish and swinger sites. All because the url for the Beijing Association of STD & AIDS Prevention and Control, bjaidsass.com, has “ass” in it. (With a url that includes the word whores I am, as you might imagine, sensitive to this kind of thing.)

The Association’s real site is, at a glance, not fantastically more informative than the squatters. We have “men-with-bad-haircuts-in-front-of-red-banner-at-conference”, which film directors will recognise as the statutory Chinese Location Identifier shot (example from my own archives of bum-numbing boredom below). We have a dandelion, an oak tree and a happy Western couple. None of it really relevant to the gay party scene that is currently driving the epidemic in Beijing. I ran a search on the site for the word “gay” (同性恋) to see if I was missing something, but no.

UNAIDS’s cyberslip-up was brought to my attention by Aimee Barnes, who also has an interesting post on China’s (in my reading of the data unsubstantiated) obssession with migrant labour as a driver of the HIV epidemic in China. What Aimee did not point out was the deliciously apposite tagline at the top of the bjaidsass.com site: Look for the ridiculous in everything!