Thanks to SH for engaging.

London’s Natural History Museum celebrates with an exhibition of a Sexual Nature. For those who can’t make it to Kensington, Isabella Rossellini has made little sex-pods available on line. Here’s her take on young bucks:

Rossellini also offers charming, two-minute insights into the sex lives of spiders, sea-horses, dolphins and others, courtesy of the Sundance Channel. If your interest in the sex lives of other species is piqued by these vignettes, I would urge you to go to the (unacknowledged) source: Olivia Judson’s Dr Tatiana’s Sex Guide to All Creation. Judson is an evolutionary biologist and sometime New York Times columnist who takes joy in the pleasures of creation, and who infects others with her enthusiasm for life. Give her more than two minutes: you’ll be richly rewarded.

So instead, I’ll have a rant about something that is somehow still shocking to me: the lengths to which loopy anti-abortion groups in the United States will go to deprive women of safe contraception and sexual health care. The target, once again, is Planned Parenthood. Over a one-week period last month, men went in to the sexual health service providers clinics in 11 cities, claiming to be sex traffickers seeking services, including abortions, for the underage girls they’ve enslaved. That would be a really dumb strategy for a real sex trafficker — in the US, even more than in Britain, the authorities are under pressure to find the army of enslaved girls that the abolitionists conjure up at every turn. It’s a well-hidden army; though a massive UK crackdown led to over 500 arrests related to selling sex a while back, it didn’t yield a single trafficker. Not that that has stopped the abolitionists’ conjuring. Shame on The Guardian for not referring back to its own excellent investigative work in this area.

Planned Parenthood immediately suspected that no trafficker would be that dumb. Certainly not 11 traffickers in different cities in a week, when such a thing had never happened before. Though it smelled like a hoax, they dutifully reported the alleged trafficking to the FBI and asked for an investigation. Now Loopy anti-abortionist group Live Action has admitted, with some pride, to their juvenile prank. They’ve released two of their “undercover” videos, to which they’ve they added juvenile-prank-style title screens.

My personal favourite: “Planned Parenthood Gets the Pimp Discount for His Underage Sex Slaves”. I will say that the clinic manager in New Jersey sails pretty close to the wind. But then which of us who has tried to provide services for people in need who have nowhere else to go does not bend the rules? As Planned Parenthood says: “Falsely claiming sex trafficking to health professionals to advance a political agenda is an astoundingly cynical form of political activity.”

Compared to this, the standard operating procedures in the AIDS world — using Global Fund money to buy 4x4s for officials — seem somewhat tame.

Update: (or rather backdate). Steve sent me this interesting reminder of an earlier assault on Planned Parenthood. Sigh.

Seasonal silliness from my family. I’d like to claim to be the stylish one on the ski-bob, that odd bike thing with skis where the wheels should be, but I’m afraid that accolade goes to my father. He’s on the bike in the final video clip (I precede him on the sled). But for the fact that he dropped his cigar in the snow, you’d never know he was 75…

One woman, who tends as many in the audience towards the well-preserved Russian hooker look, asked me afterwards whether it was true that HIV could pass through a condom. I get that a lot, so I just explained how daft the idea was. “Ah! I’m a Doctor of Psychology and I didn’t know that,” she said. That slightly floored me, but it was nothing compared with what followed: “You said there was not much good news around HIV. But my colleagues tell me there is, that nowadays homosexuality is 80% reversible.”

This in a country whose capital already allows gay marriage. Apparently there is still a long way to go…

Para los Hispanofonos, aqui la presentacion. Tampoco uno de mi mejores, pero se hace lo que pueda.

Salaam kepada pembaca di tannah air kita. Kalau seandenya ada di Jakarta hari Minggu ini (Tanggal 3 Oktober), ayo ikut skrining khusus film baru Madame X, di Senayan XXI, Jam 9.30 (blerch!). Di minta 250,000 rupiah; dana akan digunakan untuk mendamping kawan2 waria yang perlu di rawat HIV. Satu di antara setiap tiga waria penjajah seks di Jakarta sudah perlu bantuan; untungnya ada kelompok waria seperti Yayasan Sirkandi Sejati yang kerja secara rajin untuk membantu komunitas tersendiri. They need your help, so please support them. Apalagi, dari trailer, kelihatannya Madame X adalah film yang norak habiiiiiiiiiiiiis, berarti tentu saja lucu dan berhasil. It should be fun!

Illustration by Fernando Vicente

This week, the Great and the Good of the AIDS industry gather in Vienna for the biennial AIDS circus. With delicious irony, the conference, held right next to the barracks of the UN’s Drug Warriors, will focus in part on getting more countries to do the one thing that really works in HIV prevention — providing clean needles to drug injectors.

That means that there will be a lot of talk about the evidence base. There’s always a lot of talk at these conferences, and although I escaped Vienna just before the start of the conference (to see the inimitable Grace Jones play Lovebox), I’m as much of a windbag as anyone. While pontificating in the BMJ video (below) about the evidence base for harm reduction, I think there’s a more important point to be made to the small coterie of scientists who wash around in the larger tide of 20,000 AIDS junkies, Poz Professionals, singing orphans, dancing hookers, jostling NGO workers, bewildered journalists and UN PR-wallahs that floods these conferences.

The point, made at greater length in an essay in the Lancet (pdf), is that we can’t look at scientific evidence in isolation. [The collage at the top of this post comes from the essay. For works of both anatomical and philosophical beauty, do browse Fernando Vicente's illustrations]. Yes, there’s lots of scientific evidence that harm reduction saves lives. But there’s a huge body of political evidence, too. And that evidence suggests that politicians do what voters want, or, at very best/worst, what politicians think they can get away with. For many politicians in many countries for many years, that has meant not spending voters’ money on helping people take drugs more safely.

As long as that is true, the scientific evidence will continue to be secondary. No matter how many well-spoken epidemiologists do their bit on YouTube.

Or, for that matter, how many nice people stand at the entrance to festivals such as Lovebox handing out orange wristbands that read “Nice People Take Drugs”. As I wandered in with my happy band of blue-tongued smurfs, I reflected that if ever there was a case of preaching to the converted…
But I also take issue with the statement, which has a UNICEF lobbyist ring to it. “Most people at risk for HIV are young” does NOT translate into “Most young people are at risk for HIV”. Nice people take drugs, certainly. But are we to believe that most people who take drugs are nice? Maybe yes, maybe no; since a majority of young people in the UK take drugs, it rather depends on your view of human nature.

Still, the folks at Release who run the campaign have come up with some fun ideas. I especially like the “Politicians Drug Confessions” playing cards.

You can buy them here.

If you’ve only got four minutes, I would also thoroughly recommend spending it with comedian Julia Sweeney, as she has the “sex talk” with her daughter.

Thanks to Txema, who is always ready to make a girl smile.