Yes, yes, I’m playing to completely unjustified sterotypes. Except that they are not completely unjustified. Could I have predicted that we’d have to listen to a rant about the evils of porn, the fact that lapdancers have post-traumatic stress, the fact that women still don’t get paid enough? Yes. Did I know that when my guest introduced herself as a prostitute and dominatrix there would be brows beetled in fury that one of “them” had managed to infiltrate? Yes. The Cat among the self-righteous pigeons did (just as predictably but with much greater humor) defend her right to be heard; those who seek as good feminists to silence her pulled the normal “she’s too traumatised to know she’s traumatised” nonsense. The whole discussion was old, tired, and without obvious point. (Except to appeal for more “grass roots feminism”. Grass. So last century.) The question of whether women might be paid less because they often choose, perfectly sensibly, to spend less time at work and more time doing other things, was raised, and rather rapidly dismissed. The question of whether we might, actually, be better at some things and worse at others than men was dealt with through the curve of normal distribution. At the mean, the sexes basically have the same capacities. It’s just that men are more scattered than women, so there are more male geniuses, and more male morons. But that doesn’t mean we’re fundamentally different. Our reproductive organs are different, our hormones are different, but our brains (apart from the map-reading bits) — no way.

Then today I went on-line at my new day job. I’ve been hanging around the Wellcome Trust so much lately that they’ve given me a desk. And what’s the lead story on their website this very day? New research shows that the appropriately named doublsex gene sculpts not just the body of males and females, but also the brain. It’s just in fruit flies so far. But mammals have the dsx gene too…

On individual measures that are often indicators of women’s ability to make their own choices and decisions — educational level, for example, we see a strong correlation too, both at the national level:

and at the household level:

So, in countries where women are more equal to men on measures of workforce and political participation as well as education, there’s more HIV than in countries where women are more constrained. In countries where women are more educated, there’s more HIV. Within countries, more educated women are more likely to be infected with HIV.

Multiple concurrent partnerships: we’re crap at defining them, and therefore at measuring them. The imporant issue is simply: how likely is an infected person to be having sex with an uninfected person in the relatively short periods when viral load is high? These periods are more frequent where other STIs (and especially HSV2) are high. But the highest viraemia is right after someone first becomes infected. So anyone who has several partners in the two of three month window in which they themselves were infected are most likely to pass on the virus to others. If enough people (men AND women — it has to work on both sides of the equation in a heterosexual epidemic) have multiple partners in that time, you have the potential for a hyper-epidmic. Without it, you don’t.

Here are data from the first round of national surveys of HIV-related risk, way back in 1989-1991. The dark bars are people who reported that they had more than one REGULAR partner in the previous year. I.e. more than one person to whom they were married and with whom they had been having sex on an ongoing basis for a year or more. You can see that there’s something of a difference between countries in Africa and those elsewhere.

For your interest, I’ve also put in what people think their partners do. In almost every case, men report fewer partners than their wives think they have. I.e., women think men are pigs. And women report more partners than their husbands think they have. Men labour under the illusion that women are angels.

Ho hum.

Such as this study from the University of Toronto, which shows that mice behave just the way lad mags would have us believe humans do, and sing about it. The researchers were listening to the sounds mice make as they have sex, or even contemplate it. Mice communicate in two ways: squeaking (which more or less means unhappy mouse) and ultrasonically (which tends to mean happy, excited mouse). Give a male mouse a whiff of female urine or pheromones, and he makes happy sounds. Give him a female to have sex with, and he gets happier still. Ultrasonic communication zinging all around the place. Female mice, on the other hand, squeak away like mad. They’d rather stay in and wash their hair, obviously. As for other laddish behaviour, well, give a mouse amphetamines, and they go all ultrasonic with delight. But female mice — not even a squeak.

The bastard defence rests on the claim that you’re not being sexist if you call a female colleague a silly cunt, because you’re just as likely to call a male colleague a stupid bastard. This “we’re just as foul to everyone so it’s not abusive” is a different Bastard Defence from the one used by Australian cricketer Brad Hogg earlier this year. He had to claim that calling members of the Indian team bastards wasn’t intended as an insult to their descent (which would be illegal) but merely to their lineage. I wonder what the players’ fathers made of the distinction.

Bad enough that foul-mouthed employees might cost more money in law suits. But British bosses now have to worry about their customers, too. According to the Financial Times, the law which comes into force today will make an employer liable for sexist and abusive language on the part of customers. It gets worse. A company can be prosecuted if a third party takes offence at an insult aimed at some absent soul. So if the Arsenal team members make rude jokes about women when they’re in the all-male locker room and a particularly delicate flower is upset on behalf of his girlfriend, he can take Arsene Wenger and co. to the cleaners. The Daily Mail doesn’t seem to have found the story yet, but I’m sure it won’t be long before we hear the siren calls of “Pollitical Correctness Gone Mad”.

“Only one of the five speakers and one of the two chairs turned up and there were a mere twelve people in the audience,” Michelle told me. “After the one speaker had delivered his paper (about working successfully with young men in Punjab) I went next door where there was a session on female-controlled HIV prevention, which was packed to standing room only! So much time, money and energy is being diverted into technical fixes such as female condoms and vaginal microbicides, but few people are working with young men to empower them to make better choices for themselves (which can only benefit women).”

She’s right. Perhaps that’s because we’ve given up on men. They already have the power to make decisions about who they have sex with and whether latex will be involved, and they still they choose unprotected sex with potentially infected partners more often than is convenient for HIV prevention workers. Guys choose to do lots of other daft things, too: driving too fast and shooting up drugs and brawling at the drop of a hat. The instinct to take risks (or to ignore the risks they are taking) is probably hard-wired. Young men are “protected from reality by a strong sense of invincibility (which I guess helped them to step into battle in the not so distant past),” Michelle points out.

The question is, can guys be persuaded to give up some of these daft behaviours? The answer is clearly yes. When there is a risk of getting a girl pregnant, young men become more likely to use condoms. Where the threat of HIV is visible, ever-present, and — crucially — the subject of constant discussion in bars and at funerals (as it was in gay communities in the 1980s) young men become more likely to use condoms. But we’re not going to win any battles with men by shunting the onus for HIV prevention on to women.

What was heartening was the subject of the winning team’s research. Janelle Schlossberger and Amanda Marinoff, both 17 year-olds, won a $100,000 scholarship for creating a molecule that helps block the reproduction of drug-resistant tuberculosis bacteria. TB has long been the poor cousin to HIV in research terms, although by neglecting TB we’re essentially undermining much of the progress made in treating HIV in many of the worst-affected countries. TB is the most common cause of death in HIV-infected people in many countries. Unless we improve TB treatment and stamp on drug-resistant forms of the disease, we’ll be throwing our progress on HIV down the drain.

That’s not strictly true. In many countries, HIV is driven largely by drug injection, and most injectors are men. But it also misses the point. It is not about “sexual relations”, it is about the risks that men choose to take when they have sex. Suggestions for a politer way to say “penis” are very welcome.