A Series of Questions IV

A friend of mine has undertaken writing an article for Food for the Hungry in an effort to mobilize folks in the fight against the affects of AIDS. He asked me to reflect on several questions he posed to me as a catalyst for the article. Here's the result. This is question four of five.


IV. Hey, it’s really easy to not get AIDS – stop having extramartial/premarital sex. So why should I give my hard-earned money to these people who are obviously just really promiscious?


I guess my first response to someone who asks this would be—“So tell me, are you a virgin”. But really, for someone asking this question, I don’t think I’d go into the economic and cultural factors that drive someone to depression and a fatalistic outlook on life that fosters a mindset of “I’ll take everything I can get. Life is too shity to not at least get a little cheap sex.” I would want to, but also would probably not, go into the reality of the massive social pressure on teenage boys and men in many African cultures to have multiple sexual partners. In many cultures worldwide, men gain status correlative to the number of lovers/mistresses they have. Many young boys are pressured and taunted by their own fathers, friends and peers to have sex or they’ll be teased and outcast as a weakling or homosexual. (Don’t we do this in the US? In highschool don’t we assume someone’s gay if they’re not promiscuous or sleeping with their girlfriend? Don’t we honor and envy the jock who gets all the girls?) And I won’t even go into the story of the 17yr old girl who turned to prostitution because both of her parents died of AIDS and how else is she going to feed her two little sisters?!

So while these things might be going through my head, I think I’d hold my tongue and rather focus on something that might engage their heart, not their head. While these are all real issues, I think the type of person who’d be asking this question understands life as black and white—“life is what we make it”. First of all, that’s a really privileged and rare (in terms of percentage of world population) perspective—let alone reality. I think for this question I would try to focus on the women and children around the world who have AIDS at NO FAULT OF THEIR OWN. Millions of women and children are perpetrated against daily by virus-carrying sex-addicts. These women and children literally have no way of changing their circumstances (and may not even know there is another way of life) unless someone breaks into their world to offer them something different. In many cultures (and again, we don’t even have to look beyond our own) woman have no authority in the home and cannot refuse sex. She would be beaten severely (then likely raped) if she even tried to resist. Her husband, likely in the business of seeing his other lovers/mistresses if not prostitutes, has contracted AIDS and will now pass that along to his wife. She will give birth to an HIV+ child. These very women and children make up over 50% of Africa’s HIV/AIDS victims! Don’t you dare tell these women and children to simply stop being promiscuous!