PeniG
Justified & Ancient
- Joined
- Dec 31, 2003
- Messages
- 2,434
It's nice to see people having fun with symbolism, but don't get too dis-anchored from reality.
"Society" doesn't know a darn thing about STDs. "Society" is an enormous bunch of individuals, most of whom know myths or nothing at all. One in four teen-agers in America has an STD (thank you, abstinence-only education), and HIV still spreads in the adult population worldwide for reasons ranging from disempowerment to self-deception. And HIV+ people still have to deal with fear and villification - it's a long time since anybody called for a quarantine, but it isn't that long ago that a man was charged with "assault with a deadly weapon" for spitting on a cop. Yet people still go around having anonymous sex in tea rooms, perfectly intelligent characters with plenty of access to prophylactics on TV shows get unplanned pregnancies all the time (but nobody gets STDs except on "very special episodes"), and education is limited by law in many places to "just don't have sex till you're married and you'll be fine."
Buffy's dangerplay with Spike in the fifth season is probably the closest American media has come to talking frankly about the subject in the last 20 years.
"Society" doesn't know a darn thing about STDs. "Society" is an enormous bunch of individuals, most of whom know myths or nothing at all. One in four teen-agers in America has an STD (thank you, abstinence-only education), and HIV still spreads in the adult population worldwide for reasons ranging from disempowerment to self-deception. And HIV+ people still have to deal with fear and villification - it's a long time since anybody called for a quarantine, but it isn't that long ago that a man was charged with "assault with a deadly weapon" for spitting on a cop. Yet people still go around having anonymous sex in tea rooms, perfectly intelligent characters with plenty of access to prophylactics on TV shows get unplanned pregnancies all the time (but nobody gets STDs except on "very special episodes"), and education is limited by law in many places to "just don't have sex till you're married and you'll be fine."
Buffy's dangerplay with Spike in the fifth season is probably the closest American media has come to talking frankly about the subject in the last 20 years.