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PaperclipPerfector  11mo ago (text post)   3493 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for June 11, 2023

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

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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.

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.

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.

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