Megan Carpentier interviewed on the social and political importance of “Dancing With The Stars”. The Pope says condoms are okay, sort of, and there’s a new pill that might prevent HIV transmission.

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Yeah, but sex isn’t like that

Pope on condoms

A drug that prevents HIV?

Cal Thomas has nasty fantasies

On this episode of Reality Cast, I’ll be talking to Megan Carpentier about “Dancing With The Stars” and what the Bristol Palin dust-up meant.  Also, the Pope eases up ever so slightly on condemning condoms, and research suggests that there’s a pill you can take to prevent HIV.

Amplify used one of those computer-generated video things to highlight the way that abstinence-only programs are about trying to get kids to be as prudish and immature as the people who write the programs.

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The gross-out stuff in abstinence-only tells you way more about the people who write it than it could ever tell you about what sex is really like.

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The Pope decided to take the time this month to remind the world why we shouldn’t be taking sex advice from elderly lifelong celibates.

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The whole thing was incredibly confusing, because it was just a quote in an interview, and not some kind of major edict.  Indeed, the Pope was clear about one thing, which is that using contraception is always less than ideal, but he was just saying if you’re HIV positive, it’s slightly less sinful to have sex with a condom than to have it without.  But the ideal is, as always, not having sex.  So he’s still a poopyhead that promotes sex negativity. 

To make it worse, the whole thing was very vague.  The one example the Pope gave, which was translated as “male prostitutes”, just created more confusion.  It seemed he was saying that since women can get pregnant, they have no right to safety at all, but men should have an exception. 

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This is good news, and we should take it. Especially since he caved and admitted women have as much a right not to die of AIDS as men.  But we need to be clear that the Pope is not suggesting that condoms are good.  He’s simply saying that in the case of HIV prevention, they’re a lesser evil.    But let’s look at the good side of this, which is that the Pope is giving in ever so slightly to reality. 

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To be cynical about this, however, I have to point out that the church has really been trying to make inroads in terms of recruitment in Africa, in part to balance their membership losses in South and Central America.  The no-condoms stance looks particularly vicious and bleak if you’re coming from the continent hit worst by AIDS.  But the good news is that this means that even the Catholic Church is capable of bending its rigid, inhumane dogma if they’re faced with so much opposition that they have to.  The Pope probably thought that given the choice between spreading lies about condoms and condemning them or taking a teeny-tiny stance towards reason, the teeny-tiny stance would keep more people on board.  In fact, as you’ll see from the coverage, he’s actually being treated like a big hero for agreeing that perhaps widespread death is too high a price to pay for anti-sex attitudes.  But he’s still not taking a strong stance of putting human life before his hostility to sex. 

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Except, of course, that those are life-threatening diseases if you have poor access to medical care to treat them.  Which is true of many people living in heavily Catholic areas.  The Vatican isn’t talking about using condoms to prevent other diseases, probably because they don’t want to open the door to a discussion of what they really, really, really don’t want, which is for women to be liberated from the rigid gender roles the church wants to condemn them to.  

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So let’s be clear: if it’s a disease that absolutely kills men and women, the rich and the poor alike, then it’s okay to use a condom.  If it’s a disease that will only kill you if you’re too poor to get proper medical care, you probably just have to go ahead and die rather than use a condom.  And if you’re a woman whose well-being and very life depends on not getting pregnant, too bad.  At least we know where everyone stands in the hierarchy.

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insert interview

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Well, we’re all full of good to great news about HIV prevention worldwide.  First, the Pope chilled ever so slightly on the idea of people wrapping it up instead of dying of AIDS, and now this. 

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Yes, hard to believe, but it’s true!  The drug is far from foolproof, but the men in the trial who took it every day had a 73% reduced chance of contracting HIV.  In communities that have regular access to condoms and for people whose partners are happy to use them regularly, this isn’t too big a deal.  Condoms still work significantly better.  But for people who don’t have those privileges, this is big.  And for people who do use condoms but otherwise have a lot of high risk sex, this could be a great back up method.  Damn, it’s weird to even use contraception language to talk about HIV prevention, which has always been more fraught.  But that’s where we want to be! 

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This just makes the situation even better.  Of course, the downside is those drugs are super expensive and so taking them as prevention might not be a whole lot easier or more affordable than using condoms, and using them with condoms might not be doable for the most at-risk populations at all.  And it’s not like you can just go to the doctor and get the drugs as prevention yet. 

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Dr. Anthony Fauci is the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, and he’s actually more excited about this than I would be.  I’m cautious.  A lot of the time we hear news like this and then find out it wasn’t as great as we initially thought.  But he seems pretty assured that this is going to be the real deal, and that HIV infection rates can be significantly slowed with the use of this drug, especially if promoted alongside condom use.  But there are problems.  In the study, many people who reported taking the drug every day did not actually do so.  Compliance is an important part of it working.  Plus, having to take the drug for years at a time might make it even harder for people to keep up with it.  Look at the pill’s failure rates and you’ll see how people can get lax.  But my biggest issue is one that the doctor brought up.

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This is a bigger deal than it might initially seem.  Very few people will take a daily pill as back-up.  To make it worse, since condoms are also contraception along with disease prevention, there are a number of political forces that are highly interested in reducing condom use rates.  Take the last segment, for example.  Is there a chance that the Pope’s reluctant acceptance of condom use to prevent HIV will be retracted the second there is a non-contraceptive prevention measure on the market, even if it’s less effective and more expensive?  I wouldn’t put it past the church to exploit this.  But if people end up preferring the pill to the condom, that’s bad.  Even if they use it perfectly, it’s still less effective than imperfect use of condoms and way worse than perfect use of condoms.  We’re already seeing some evidence in some populations that perceived access to drugs to control HIV is encouraging more reckless behavior, so I worry. 

But on the whole, I’m pleased with this.  Any weapon we can add to the arsenal is good. 

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And now for the Wisdom of Wingnuts, this is just a big sadistic fantasy for you guys, isn’t it edition?  Last week I noted that Mike Huckabee fantasized about the First Lady, her daughters, and her mother getting a patdown at airport security, and now this from Cal Thomas on Fox News.

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It’s getting really disturbing how these conservative male pundits react to the fear of themselves getting searched by fantasizing out loud about women they dislike getting it instead. They’re implying that abuse is only wrong if it happens to dudes or women they feel belong to them.