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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   31769 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 2, 2023

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Every once in a while I'll get random YouTube pre-rolls for very vague pharmaceutical ads that are generally targeted at LGBTQ communities. Entire ad campaigns that are purely aspirational and don't even mention what the drug is supposed to do. I'm thinking there might be a bit of an info bubble where people in those communities have a decent idea about the different drugs as products and it's more about establishing brand identity. More recently at my office in the break area where all manner of magazines are left lying around I noticed a full page advertisement in a similar vein (Men's Health May-June 2022 issue, pg41 so not that old). Effectively the same as the first page of this brochure.

While it was at least more straightforward about the purpose of the drug, the ad campaign slogan "detect this" and the 2017 "U=U" (Undetectable = Untransmissible) campaign (bonus CW, Fauci is apparently a big promoter) both seem to have a similar info bubble. In this case slightly different. I can understand how for people who are very aware of HIV and fret about things like detectable viral load then the messaging of undetectable being functionally untransmissible is more along the lines of "X rights are human rights" slogan.

But did anyone involved consider how a normie might parse "undetectable" in conjunction with HIV? That it might convey a sense of other people not being able to find out about the infection, even when those "other people" include partners? Which is not some hypothetical, the pull quotes from an article about a paywalled research article. Meanwhile an AMA Journal of Ethics article looking at the merits and drawbacks (reads like a position paper but apparently it merits peer review) didn't even consider whether or not attitudes about disclosure could be a drawback. Of course duty to disclose is itself an ethical question, so whether or not a campaign affects whether or not people fulfill it can be sidelined by not considering either of those questions relevant.

Not my circus, not my monkeys but from the outside I feel like the possible implication of encouraging sneaky fuckers who cannot be caught because they cannot be detected (especially since consent and disclosure get heavily emphasized in other areas of sexual ethics) might be a bad thing. And I'm sure there have been heated conversations about it internally but the polished, pharma+government+activist PR campaigns present a rather unified picture and criticism is hard to find (U=U also has terrible SEO and typed out is equally generic). From the U=U campaign presser I linked, here is how the opposition is presented:

But what about the naysayers? Those who don’t believe in U=U or have concerns? Some were contacted and declined to comment. However, Gina Brown, an activist from New Orleans who is living with HIV, says, “In the beginning I had some reservations about this message. I wasn’t really sure how it worked. To me it was almost too good to be true. I didn’t want to give PLHIV the wrong information or information that could get them into trouble. [Editor's Note: Louisiana is a state that criminalizes the intentional exposure of another person to HIV/ AIDS through sexual contact. But, despite the language in the statute, Louisiana courts have found that neither the intent to transmit HIV nor actual transmission is required. See hivlawandpolicy.org/states/louisiana]. You would think that I’d be an initial believer; after all, I had a daughter who was proof that treatment works. I was on 076 [the study demonstrating that giving AZT to pregnant moms and babies cut the risk of transmission by two-thirds], plus the fact I’d been in a relationship where we made a conscious decision to not use barriers and the guy never acquired HIV. I was undetectable during that time, as I am now. I happened to meet Bruce Richman in Florida at USCA [the U.S. Conference on AIDS] and we had an in-depth conversation about U=U. He told me where I could find credible information that would spell U=U out clearly. I devoured this information, joined the U=U Facebook page and became a member of the U=U Steering Committee. I am a true believer that if a PLHIV is undetectable they cannot transmit the virus. That’s why it’s important that every PLHIV have access to this information and the medications that makes U=U a possibility in their lives!”

Every once in a while I'll get random YouTube pre-rolls for very vague pharmaceutical ads that are generally targeted at LGBTQ communities.

This is what happens when the government will pay for anything. You get very expensive ads pushing very expensive drugs for conditions targeting a tiny % of population, but the drug companies make so much money it does not matter if the ads are not well targeted or such a tiny market. No one is paying for these drugs out of pocket.

A few years back, maybe 2017, I was driving and halfheartedly listening to the local radio. FM, nothing too exciting, just a slightly more original music playlist. The second or third ad in a break was for a drug. They listed a couple vague effects followed by more specific side effects. And then kept going. And going. It was probably 20 seconds of plausible side effects before I realized—I couldn’t even remember if they gave a drug name.

I’m fairly sure this was purely a joke, though I never heard anything similar on the station again. There was no punchline, no credit given to a radio show. It just...delivered this cascade with a straight face. And it worked, because medical advertising has an alien and perverse style which cries out for parody.

So...yes. Brand recognition by implication is a thing, and medical ads are already niche enough to border on the incomprehensible.

They might have aired a portion of "Unedited Footage Of A Bear"

But did anyone involved consider how a normie might parse "undetectable" in conjunction with HIV?

There are some different connotations inside the community that are easy to forget, but I don't think that's the problem.

Unfortunately, in this case as with a lot of HIV-adjacent stuff, it's the FDA's circus and the FDA's barrels of monkeys. If there's one thing that's more powerful than the general progressive interest in fixing linguistic problems or 'problems', it's a health and safety bureaucrat who has thirty forms requiring that you spell out "Yes" instead of putting down a "Y". So a lot of the various linguistic hoops and acronymization is some marketing monkey trying to turn a sow's ear into a silk purse, and often not doing a terribly good job.

((It could be worse; the other common term of art was 'suppressed', for low-but-above-threshold results, and I invite you to think of as many amongus memes as possible for the counterfactual world where they tripped over that. This isn't specific to this matter: compare condoms in general and 'female' condoms in specific for an area with a ton of available optimizations, which you might as well try to flap your arms to fly.))

That raises other concerns -- it's very unlikely that the traditional detection envelop is also coincidentally the exact place where rates of transmission plummet -- but that falls into the general class of "FDA makes people search under lampposts" problem.

That it might convey a sense of other people not being able to find out about the infection, even when those "other people" include partners?

That's true, but I'm not sure it's very well-connected to the specific marketing here: if various IRBs prohibited the initial studies being used to justify U=U to such a point the marketing never got dreamt up to begin with, it's not like someone taking a discrete blood sample from a deceptive sexual partner would have returned a different result. And it's not like any level of sugarcoating things for HIV-suppressing drugs would have made it harder to guess: maintaining a good idea of what amount of HIV is floating around in the blood is kinda important for making sure the dose and utilization is right to start with.

[Editor's Note: Louisiana is a state that criminalizes the intentional exposure of another person to HIV/ AIDS through sexual contact. But, despite the language in the statute, Louisiana courts have found that neither the intent to transmit HIV nor actual transmission is required. See hivlawandpolicy.org/states/louisiana]

That's some activist-speak. Actually follow through the various links, and you'll find that they're referencing this case (cw: violent rape), which held law prohibiting intentional exposure only requires intent to commit an act which exposed someone to HIV.

Every once in a while I'll get random YouTube pre-rolls for very vague pharmaceutical ads that are generally targeted at LGBTQ communities.

I'm kinda impressed at how bad the YouTube ad engine gets, given you're seeing these and I keep getting Manly Man's Soap ones.

On a CW note, and thinking out loud, what is going on with men where someone is profiting by branding soap as distinctly masculine? Is this downstream of targeted advertising in the internet age ? I guess Irish Spring’s, “Manly, yes, but she likes it, too,” from the ‘80s suggests this has been around much longer.

I do wish mild ill on that dollar-store T.J. Miller from the Dr. Squatch YouTube ads — like he realizes he bought sweet pickles instead of dill after biting into a sandwich.

As a man who buys soap I am vaguely aware that I'm not supposed to use the ladies ones because they're more expensive and something something exfoliation, something something scented. I don't actually buy the man brand ones because they're also upsold but I appreciate that they are always next to the generic brand stuff that I can buy.

Marketing and consumer purchases have been retarded for a century. Are masculine soap brands any worse than masculine cigarette or car ads?

Tangent-to-a-tangent below.

The Dr. Squatch adds are part of a certain streak of marketing that can be described as "tongue in cheek hyper-masculine." The other ones that come quickly to mind are the various, heavily-punned male grooming devices (Gronk did a couple of commercials for one), and beef jerky. The themes of the adds are all fundamentally the same "be a manly man by buying this product ... here are a bunch of pun-ny dick jokes and comic book illustrations of masculinity; chopping wood, wrestling a bear, etc." They stop far short of any actual violence, and the entire air of the ads are always meant to be comical.

So, it's safe-for-kids masculinity. It's not actually genuine or earnest. It's the little boy wearing his dad's work shoes and pretending to "go to the business factory." And this is why a lot of these ads are not-so-secretly hated by traditional masculinity oriented men - because they infantilize the men in them and the men who would buy the products. I'm trying to picture my WW2 vet Grandfather coming home to his wife and saying "look, honey, I bought the MAN soap!" I can, however, easily picture a Laptop Class San Franciscan showing off his "Warrior Berkenstocks" with genuine pride ... because I saw that happen in 2016.

Tin-foil-hat me sometimes thinks this is part of a radical feminist agenda (I told you I was wearing that hat at the beginning of that sentence!) That these advertisers want to create a "dress up pretend fund time" version masculinity that lets husbands and fathers feel like men ... but never, ever lets let actually develop self-assured independent traits that could break them out of the matriarchal dominance of the wives / mothers (often the same person functionally).

Then again, I'm waxing philosophic about men's soap on the internet. I'll go outside and fuck a bear now.

I'll go outside and fuck a bear now.

What kind of man doesn't have a bear inside the house?

Once you're married, dead bears inside (rugs, heads, etc) and live ones outside is a compromise you have to make. (and who fucks a dead bear? Don't answer that.)

what is going on with men where someone is profiting by branding soap as distinctly masculine?

Presumably because Real Men don't use soap to bathe, they scrape off the topmost layer of skin with pumice stones and flint razors, then take a refreshing dip in lava? 😁

I don't know, a lot of soaps are floral etc. which I don't like - I prefer unscented ones. So I suppose if all the branding is for "feminine, girly, sweet-smelling" stuff, men won't feel comfortable shopping in the women's toiletries aisle?

There is definitely a difference in how deodorants, shower gels and such like are fragranced - the men's products are all 'leather, black pepper, sea minerals, peppermint' though there does seem to be a shift now towards 'citrus, herbal' as well. There probably is a lot of social conditioning going on - even this HowStuffWorks article adopts a "do you really want to smell like a woman?" angle, apart from the practical "men's skin and women's skin is different, so formulations need to be different", so there may well be a real effect of "if this guy smells like vanilla, he smells like a woman and comes across as effeminate" at work:

Call it shallow, but fragrance can be a big deal. You may not mind the way a woman smells, but you may be making yourself less attractive by using a woman's soap. Researchers found that women choose mates who are most different from them genetically, and they get their clues from a man's scent [source: Colenso]. Fragrances in soap and other skin-care products can alter your natural scent to such a degree that women may find you less desirable as a potential mate.

Not only this, but do you really want to smell like cherry blossoms or wild vanilla? The fragrances in soaps tend to stick with you throughout the day, and when you perspire, these scents become more pronounced, in combination with those produced by your hormones. Men's natural odor has been said to smell like cheese, and the smell of women's soap may not make for the best aromatic blend.

EDIT: And since perfume does react differently with different people's skins, then it could indeed be the case that 'masculine' scents are the ones that react and smell better with men's body chemistry.

The answer seems pretty obvious to me- women do the vast majority of the shopping in the US, and also have no idea what men want(which is for whatever soap is on sale at Walmart to come in bulk), so it’s intended to sell to women taking over boyfriend’s/husband’s toiletries shopping, or else needing a father’s day gift. The adds are campy masculine and address things that women spend a lot of time thinking about(eg nice skin) but men never do, featuring presenters that come off as gay to men but macho to women.

More or less how I ended up with a Dr Squatch bar of "man soap" for Christmas.

Same here. I quite like the Pine Tar and Bay Rum but I am sure it is over priced.

The charitable version's that a lot of heterosexual couples might benefit from being able to readily have a his and her's ablutions materials, without the various problems that come about from other labeling approaches, and this is a (stupid) workaround for it. No one's gonna die if they use their partner's shaving razor, but between travel, keeping adequate replacement stock, and other expectations, it seems like there's a lot of room for things to be obnoxious.

The middle-ground's that a lot of the femme-focused stuff is... up to taste. Lavender /everywhere/.

The less-charitable culture war one's that if you don't have a thing, you risk getting demand for it getting replaced by the signifiers of that thing, even if the underlying material is no longer present. If someone doesn't even know where to start about being a Man, they're a lot more vulnerable to advertisements offering easy outs, and this is a really easy out.

Agree that this isn’t aimed at normies, but I think we should point out that HIV positivity is itself a progressive protected class, from a woke angle, isn’t it?

How the worm turns. Am I remembering correctly that among Charlie Sheen's more grievous sins that finally got him taken off the air, was promoting U=U?

Sheen told NBC's Matt Lauer that it’s “impossible” he could have infected anybody else. But is that true?

Studies have shown that when people take strong cocktails of HIV drugs, they are far less likely to infect someone else. But the odds are not zero.

"A person with HIV can still potentially transmit HIV to a partner even if they have an undetectable viral load, because HIV may still be found in genital fluids (e.g., semen, vaginal fluids)," the National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Diseases says.

Huizenga confirmed he’s told Sheen this.

“Individuals who are optimally treated with undetectable viral loads … it’s incredibly rare to transmit the virus,” Huizenga said. “We can’t say that that’s zero, but it’s a very, very low level.”

Public health experts still advise very strongly that people with HIV use condoms every time they have sex.

It’s easy to forget, and if people don’t take their drugs on time, the virus can not only come back, but it can develop what’s known as resistance. That means the drugs don’t work as effectively, and patients have to move to different mixtures of the drugs to control it.

“We’re petrified about Charlie. We’re so, so anxious that if was overly depressed … he would forget these pills,” Huizenga said.

Charlie Sheen says he has "undetectable HIV." Here's what that means.

Importantly, these drugs don't cure patients, but, as Sheen's physician explained, they suppress the virus to the point that it's undetectable in the blood. That means there's a very small chance that people on treatment can pass on the virus to others. (The rate of HIV infection for negative partners was 96 percent lower if the positive partner was on treatment, according to government data.)

Men who have sex with men (referred to as "MSM" in the chart below) are still the group most overwhelmingly affected by the disease. This is a problem that's only growing in the gay and bisexual community, as Vox reporter German Lopez explains here.

Too bad for Charlie Sheen he wasn't gay, or a pharmaceutical company.

But did anyone involved consider how a normie might parse "undetectable" in conjunction with HIV? That it might convey a sense of other people not being able to find out about the infection, even when those "other people" include partners?

Nobody cares; they aren't customers in any case, and if they try to make a stink they can be censored or cancelled for homophobia.

Plus, YouTube pre-roll ads generally trend towards 5-15-second ads that may or may not be skippable (generally the latter); there's not enough time to put any info about a drug if that's all the time you get. (But then, why advertise a drug at all with that kind of slot?)

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