The Wisdom of Whores

A discussion with an interesting group of students at Tulane in New Orleans on Thursday made me think (not just about how they pass of the acronym SPH as standing for School of Public Health, when clearly it really stands for Socialising, Partying and Happening). We were wrestling with that endless question: how do you get young, hormone-fuelled people to turn down the chance to have fun just to avoid a small chance that they’ll get infected with something that will put them on pills in an unimaginably distant future?

The answer from the American South (in which New Orleans sits by an accident of geography rather than a convergence of spirit) seems astoundingly last-century. As you can see from the map, it’s also not all that successful.

According to an HIV prevention meeting in Albany, Georgia, the problem is pop music, which makes us drink, which makes us shag. But only if we’re teenagers. Adults are too out of touch to understand deep and meaningful lyrics such as these, from Jamie Foxx’s “Blame It on the Alcohol”.

‘I’ll keep filling up your cup while I feeling on your butt and you don’t even care that I was unaware of how fine you were before my buzz set in.’

Despite the double negatives, that seems pretty straightforward to me. It’s helpfully translated for us by hip and happening youth culture consultant Marc Fomby as ‘I’m the one that has to get drunk to go home with you, in other words you don’t care that I thought you were ugly before you got drunk’.

The solution, obviously, is to tell kids that what their hormones, their instincts, their natural curiousity and very probably the example of their friends, siblings and even parents are suggesting they do is BAD.

“When they come to school they are expecting us, both the students and the parents, to redirect those bad behaviors but we cannot do that unless we can educate them on the dangers of some of the bad things they are doing,” says Barbara Turner, Coordinator for Student Support Services.”

Seventy million people infected with HIV around the world, over half of them already dead. And still, the richest and most scientifically self-congratulory country in the world is pushing the “sex is bad” approach to prevention, and pushing it hardest in the parts of the country where people appear to be at highest risk.

Think I’m kidding? Check out this reworking of abstinence only lessons at work in the US school system (from OMG blog via NL).

I notice that in teens, as in the 20-24 year-olds shown in the earlier map, New York is an outlier in the northeast. (Note that because of CDC’s disgracefully slow surveillance procedures, these data are at least three years old.) More on New York’s new campaign for women and girls shortly.