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PaperclipPerfector  10mo ago (text post)   3487 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for June 11, 2023

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Weird question. When I was in 4th grade, in the early 90s, we did a multi-day segment on AIDS, where they just went and scared the shit out of us.

So in my 20s any time I did something remotely risky, I'd freak out and go to the doctor. And they'd always ask if I was gay. And when I said no they seemed like they stopped taking seriously the possibility that I contracted it.

And looking back on it it finally just hit me. Was the whole program I went through in 4th grade a massive psyop aimed to stop gays from being stigmatized?

If so I feel honestly betrayed. It feels extremely wrong to use children in that way, even if the end seems like a good one.

Was the whole program I went through in 4th grade a massive psyop aimed to stop gays from being stigmatized?

No. It was a regular panic, which has happened dozens of times before or after. Exhibit one: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reefer_Madness This kind of ham-fisted propaganda exists about every topic the government ever wanted to propagandize, and in every language which any government speaks. And, as you witnessed on yourself, it worked - that's why they keep doing it.

I don't even think they thought of the gay angle - in fact, when AIDS was considered the "gay disease", the approach to it was quite dismissive, and the panic came later, when it turned out it's not, actually, exclusive to gays. Still, male gay penetrative sex has much more probability for AIDS transmission than hetero sex, and gay sexual mores are more promiscuous than among straights, which means for the doctor makes sense to take this factor into account, and evaluate the likelihood of the disease in that light.

Don’t think so.

Magic Johnson announced his diagnosis in 1991. So did Freddie Mercury, dying the following day . AIDS deaths peaked in ‘95. New cases peaked a bit earlier. You were living through the culmination of a decade of health panic.

Condoms substantially reduce the risk of transmission of chlamydia, gonorrhoea and trichomoniasis. However, since all the above are very much curable diseases, and since teenagers are infamously horny, impulsive and reckless, warning teenagers against them has little impact on condom usage.

Consider that before the HIV/AIDs pandemic, gonorrhea rates surged in the US. That was the sexual revolution and its aftermath. The only way to convince young people to use condoms was to put the fear of death into them. Accordingly, as it has become widespread knowledge that HIV is no longer a death sentence in almost all cases, STD rates (among heterosexuals) have shot up.

Yes. That's exactly what happened.

We saw it again with Monkeypox, where no one was willing to say "hey, this is mostly in a subset of the gay population, they should probably take precautions and it won't spread". This wound up costing some number of gay lives, but it was worth it to the powers that be to avoid a rando right-winger on the internet fulminating about gay diseases.

Public health is just political arguments as soldiers.

This is a weird argument to make given that, in my recollection, this:

"hey, this is mostly in a subset of the gay population, they should probably take precautions and it won't spread"

is exactly what happened. All my gay male friends got the vaccine (which was targeted at gay men and was pretty much never even promoted to straight men or women).

From the first New York Times article about monkeypox that shows up when I google it (from June 2022):

Nearly all of the cases outside of Africa have been in men who have sex with men. In New York, only 1.4 percent of monkeypox patients self-identified as straight, with the rest describing themselves as gay, bisexual or declining to say, according to city data.

They did come around, luckily before the thing metastasized. But before that, there was a month or so of disinformation during which a lot of people caught a very nasty disease.

Relevant - https://youtube.com/watch?v=mKc32jQIY0w

the trouble is that some children are timorous and some children are reckless. In order to save the lives of reckless children, warnings are calibrated for their safety, the result of which is that the timorous live in a state of perpetual terror. What I needed to be told is, "Do you know what? Most days you won't die. It's fine," you know?

The story of my life, and it's a great recipe for developing health anxiety. Mass media stories about health conditions are the worst. Oh, women's heart attacks sometimes just present as back pain? Guess I'll freak out every time my shoulder hurts then!

No. The people pushing that aids is a very likely outcome of sex were trying to push abstinence. The liberal line for a long time has been aids actually isn't that bad anymore, or it isn't super likely if you take basic precautions. Std education between 92 and 2016 was dominated by compromises with abstinence only groups.

Psyop but by the other side, if anything.

Bootleggers and Baptists situation. One group wants people to believe that sex is super risky and should definitely be avoided, the other wants to convince normal people that they're at just as much risk as puppy-play, orgy-having, junkies. Together, they can agree on a curriculum that convinces teens that HIV is basically spontaneously appearing for no particularly specific reason or mode of transmission. There isn't exactly a huge constituency for telling teens that they're probably fine to have fun with their partner, but don't get too carried away with the promiscuity and that condoms or birth-control are still important.

Wrote below on some factors in the early 90s, but for my experience in the early 2000s your story sounds more plausible. We didn't linger especially on HIV/AIDS, other than still treating it as a death sentence, but we did also go over the worst case scenarios for every single STD as well as worst case scenarios for birth.

For the birth part, I do wonder if they really thought that part through? It certainly made the girls in my class not want to get teen pregnant, but it wasn't like the worst case scenarios they highlighted applied only to teens and I'm sure it turned at least a few off having children altogether, which I very much doubt was the goal of most abstinence-only groups.

Edit: I'm sure there's a longer post that could be made on how much of the propaganda spread to bring down teen pregnancy rates was too broad and actually served to make pregnancy and childrearing appear unappealing in a general sense.

deleted

Correct, straight men who aren't junkies basically just don't get HIV at all. The exceptions are rare enough that it isn't even worth thinking about for straight men. Women that only have sex with white and Asian men rarely get HIV as well. HIV really is entirely trivial to avoid for most people. My impression is that the public health people did the same sort of routine we saw with Covid, which was a combination of them being sincerely histrionically risk-averse with telling noble lies to get people to care about a disease that is basically irrelevant to their health.

Straight men don't tend to get HIV unless (as in the worst-affected African countries and in Russia and Brazil) a large population of prostitutes becomes infected and acts as a reservoir (even if only a small percentage of interactions between an infected prostitute and a john result in transmission, it adds up):

In 2015, the [Russian] Federal AIDS Center officially registered 1 million HIV-positive people. Of these, approximately 53% of infections were related to drug use, 43% to sexual contact between men and women, and 1.5% to homosexual contact

Sure, Russia in 2015 was perhaps a moderately homophobic country, but it's clear heterosexual transmission in Russia was and is a problem, as it is in South Africa, Zimbabwe and elsewhere.

AIDS center can't check actual source. Even worse, the 43% you citing in bold refers to subset of people who answered the center's question about source of infection (more than half of people declined). So, proper way to present numbers is something like:

60% declined to answer

22% said IDU

17% said heterosexual

0.6% said homosexual contact

Heterosexual transmission as main way of infection manifests in that there are more HIV+ women than HIV+ men, South Africa and Zimbabwe have it, Russia doesn't.

According to polls, homophobia in Russia is still increasing since ~2005.

It needs to be added that Russia doesn't have methadone replacement therapy and IDUs are more problem.

Unless you went to an all-boys school, I assume that half of your classmates were female. The risk of male to female HIV transmission is much higher than the risk of female to male transmission.

As ever, the multipliers on these are wild:

An advanced stage of HIV infection in the index patient (odds ratio 17.6; 4.9 to 62.7) and sexual contacts during menses (3.4; 1.0 to 11.1) increased the risk of female to male transmission and stage of infection (2.7; 1.5 to 4.9), anal sex (5.1; 2.9 to 8.9), and age of the female partner (3.9; 1.2 to 13.0 for age > 45 years) increased the risk of male to female transmission.

Just applying as simple of heuristics as "don't screw people that are dying from AIDS and currently bleeding" prevents the vast majority of infections. The number of heterosexual teens getting HIV from hooking up at parties is just absolutely trivial.

But the question is not how many heterosexual teens get HIV from hooking up at parties. Rather, it what the lifetime risk of getting HIV is from heterosexual sex when using condoms versus when not using condoms. Because sex ed is not just about "what to do at parties."

That's 12% and 20% of people getting infected after regularly having unprotected hetrosexual sex with an infected person. Yes 20% is higher than 12% but those are both pretty low in the context of the parent post's point.

Those are actually very, very high numbers from the perspective of an educator who is concerned with the long-term health of his or her students.

That's after the 1 in 200 chance of picking someone for a long term relationship who has an active HIV infection.

Most of whom are not in normal people dating pools because they’re sex workers/gay/drug users/etc.

Looking at this graph, I could see where concerns about AIDS spreading from things other than men having sex with men would be high in the early 90's, though obviously men having sex with men would still be the main concern.

Between the slope on that graph at the time and the fact that this would be pre-HAART (which led to a dramatic decline in the death rate from AIDS) I think it was likely out of genuine, if perhaps out of proportion to the risks, concern.

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