{"id":59720,"date":"2012-07-28T15:00:41","date_gmt":"2012-07-28T19:00:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/?p=59720"},"modified":"2012-08-03T15:20:21","modified_gmt":"2012-08-03T19:20:21","slug":"hiv-and-ppp-both-can-be-helped-through-awareness","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/polyamory\/hiv-and-ppp-both-can-be-helped-through-awareness\/","title":{"rendered":"HIV and PPP: Both Can Be Helped through Awareness"},"content":{"rendered":"

By Maria Padhila<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

Hairdressers from Cameroon wore dresses and wigs made of female condoms. An international health organization has a tent in its lobby this week with a display of condoms and wooden dildos. And the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence work their awareness magic, as reports Michelle Boorstein from The Washington Post<\/em> live blog<\/a>:<\/p>\n

\"Poly
Poly Paradise at Burning Man. Photo by Eric.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

\u201cThe language of gender and sexuality has changed through the AIDS crisis, said Sister Vicious, a 66-year-old co-founder of the group who has been HIV positive since 1980 and looked like a cross between a vampy clown and Marilyn Manson, with a red wig, whiteface makeup and black and white ruffles all over her shirt and skirt.\u201d<\/p>\n

The International AIDS Conference is taking place in Washington, DC, this week, and while there\u2019s a distinctive circus atmosphere I think I\u2019d enjoy in my home city, I\u2019m out of town on a working vacation with Isaac, hiking around in the Appalachians. They\u2019ve got wifi in these here hills, but I\u2019m still filing earlier than usual this week, so I apologize in advance if something wildly interesting goes down at the conference and I\u2019m not aware of it.<\/p>\n

Despite the amazing changes and new openness around HIV and AIDS, there\u2019s a group that\u2019s still being silenced and shunned: sex workers. From a Reuters report<\/a>: <\/p>\n

The United States … has clung to a prohibition on the entry of foreign sex workers established more than two centuries ago … Activists, and some conference officials, say that runs counter to a goal of achieving an end to the epidemic that affects more than 34 million people worldwide. On Sunday, a group of sex-worker activists carrying red umbrellas and noise-making vuvuzelas crashed the AIDS gathering\u2019s kick-off news conference.<\/p>\n

Other events planned for the week include daily live video link-ups with the Sex Worker Freedom Festival — an alternative satellite event taking place in Kolkata, India, in response to the exclusion from Washington of foreign sex workers.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Meg, a former sex worker from Chicago who asked to have her last name withheld, is one of the few voices representing the female sex worker population at this year\u2019s conference.<\/p>\n

She blames what she calls a \u2018systematic exclusion\u2019 of sex workers from policy discussions by academics, reporters, and lawmakers for prevailing stereotypes of \u2018people thinking of sex workers as vectors of diseases.\u2019<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Sex workers also report that they are being threatened, harassed and even arrested simply for carrying condoms. You know, I\u2019ve been driving around for a year with a long, shiny, golden strip of Trojan Magnums in the between-seats storage box in my car. They were a prop for a play (my guys use Kimono Maxx) but all the same — am I going to get arrested?<\/p>\n

But there are more reasons than just the contraband condoms that this issue hits me: one is that I used to be a dancer, and while that\u2019s technically not a sex worker, most people rarely draw such fine distinctions. I feel for what\u2019s happening with sex workers and support their efforts to get better working conditions and protect their health.<\/p>\n

Two, as someone who in real life does a lot of writing about public health, I know damn well the ones on the front lines in solving public health problems aren\u2019t puritanical. They respect science and solutions that make sense. Who really knows the score in the fight against HIV?<\/p>\n

I practically have the phrase ‘engage the key stakeholders’ on an autofill key. So why isn\u2019t this group of beyond-key stakeholders getting engaged? Sometimes they are, on the down low, with funding from enlightened sources and through several changes of channels before the money goes through, so scared religious politicals can\u2019t get in the way. Excluding foreign sex workers from this conference simply doesn\u2019t make sense — it can\u2019t possibly help anyone get closer to the goal of protecting health. It\u2019s a waste of resources, energy, and brains.<\/p>\n

Three, I have a dream (one that neither of my guys would approve of in any way, so it\u2019s a kind of moot point). If I had my way, my daily work would be as a sex worker\/therapist to older men. The loneliness and isolation some of them soldier through is a sorrowful thing, and it often ends badly. People need to be touched and listened to once in a while to stay human. And older men in particular need this from someone who doesn\u2019t have an agenda — who doesn\u2019t want something from them beyond payment for services rendered, who can give them the space to feel what they want. <\/p>\n

Without romanticizing the difficulty of such work, I think it would be much more sane and constructive work, more healing, than anything I\u2019ve been paid for thus far. That\u2019s not going to happen in this lifetime, but that\u2019s where I\u2019m coming from.<\/p>\n

Fourth, and the reason this intersects with polyamory: sex workers are human (news flash) and a certain percentage of humans have a polyamorous orientation, I believe. Also, polyamorous people are also regarded by the outside world as ‘vectors of disease’, when, like sex workers, they\u2019re often the ones taking many more pains and care not to have any such problems.<\/p>\n

As I write about polyamory, I\u2019m often struck by the ‘white whine’ phenomenon — that I should be lucky to have such issues. Parsing the emotional territory of multiple relationships is in many ways a PPP: Privileged People Problem. But if you take the risk to love more, you may also acquire that deep knowledge that we\u2019re all in the same boat, and what hurts the woman pulling that other oar is also going to hurt you. Sex workers are not the ‘other’ who should be excluded from the table — in fact, they might well deserve a place at the head of the table.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By Maria Padhila Hairdressers from Cameroon wore dresses and wigs made of female condoms. An international health organization has a tent in its lobby this week with a display of condoms and wooden dildos. And the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence work their awareness magic, as reports Michelle Boorstein from The Washington Post live blog: \u201cThe … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7221,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"generate_page_header":""},"categories":[207],"tags":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/59720"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7221"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=59720"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/59720\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=59720"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=59720"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=59720"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}