HIV Still Seen as the ‘Gay Man Disease’
I thought that the whole ‘only gay men have HIV’ hysteria had passed in the late 1980′s; that someone had educated the obviously sex-education-sheltered population at some point letting them know that sexually transmitted diseases and infections affect well, sexually active people… Male, female, of all sexual orientations. However, I recently learned that in the United States, Canada, UK, Germany, and Hong Kong, discrimination is still going strong–Even to the point of being eligible to advance the health of others.
If you are a gay male living in any of the above countries, you are prohibited from donating blood. Why? Because if you’re a gay male, you have HIV… And if you don’t have HIV, it will be a mere matter of time before you realize that indeed, you do.
I had no idea that this was going on. I have never donated blood in my life due to a severe, life-long phobia of syringes. You couldn’t pay me to go anywhere near a syringe for any reason short of laying on my death bed in need of a blood transfusion. And if it was suggested that I needed blood for any reason but would not die… Yeah, you’re going to have to convince me further because there is no way anyone is coming near me with a syringe. When I was a child, you had to promise me that we weren’t going to the doctor’s pretty much any time I had to leave the house during the day for a reason other than needing to go to school and if we did wind up at the doctor’s, I have been known to walk into the office, see the syringe, and immediately flee the building and refuse to go back in, clinging and grabbing onto anything as I was carried against my will back into the doctor’s office. This situation has not gotten any better in the years of adulthood.
While the United States, Canada, UK, Germany, and Hong Kong prohibit gay males from donating blood, even if you have not been sexually active in years, other countries are not doing much better on the discrimination poll. In South Africa and New Zealand, gay and bisexual men cannot give blood up until they have not been sexually active for five years, whether it was protected sex or not and in Argentina, Australia, Japan, and Hungary, the ban on gay blood resides until after one year of not being sexually active.
The reasoning behind this ban is said to be due to practicality and not intended to be discriminatory in a malicious manner.
“All donated blood is obviously tested carefully – but it can take a few months for the HIV virus to show up. So if you only recently contracted HIV and you then give blood, you can unwittingly inject the virus into the blood bank. Gay men are seven times more likely to contract HIV than straight men. So it has been judged that the risk is simply too great.”
Even given the statistics used here, there are so many statistics out there done by so many different organizations giving completely different information so what this could have been a product of is simply picking the statistic tha best fuels your reasoning for needlessly discriminating against a group of people for the sake of discrimination. Bottom line, people are dying because there are not enough people willing to donate blood and instead of taking the blood of the people who are giving it, health industries around the world are still fueled by bigoted politics, especially given the fact that all blood banks test the blood they receive. All of them. No matter what. Not one drop of blood comes from a blood bank to a person in need of that blood without it having been tested. Why? Because sometimes people honestly don’t know that they have contracted a sexually transmitted infection and HIV is not the only STI that can be passed through blood, there is also hepatitis B, syphilis, and herpes.
The only answer to this blatant discrimination of gay males is education. It is so important to be educated and to educate those around you in whatever way you can to raise awareness about important issues like safe sex, blood donation, and STIs. The more people who become educated about these issues the less people we will have still believing that HIV is strictly the gay male disease.
h/t Amplify
The GOP’s Campaign Against Sonia Sotomayor
Sonia Sotomayor was originally nominated to federal court by George Herbert Bush; a fact that Obama mentioned in his speech to nominate Sotomayor for the US Supreme Court and a fact that the entire GOP and its supporters have conveniently ignored for the sake of having something else to bitch and complain about.
The Guardian’s Scott Lemieux has put together an article on Sotomayor’s qualifications for the job she has been nominated for and has discovered that Sotomayor’s qualifications mirror those of current Justice Samuel Alito; a man who the GOP has fawned over and that John McCain wholeheartedly supports and name-dropped all over the place during the last presidential election. But given the fact that Sotomayor is obviously qualified and possesses the same qualifications of a man supported at large by the GOP, they aren’t going to let her confirmation go without a fight… And the only reason why several smear campaigns have already started against her is because she is not a white, privileged male.
Did you know that all Latina women are named Maria? Well according to Mike Huckabee, the nomination of Maria Sotomayor “will likely leave us with something akin to the “Extreme Court” that could mark a major shift” because she is so “far left.”
The appointment of Maria Sotomayor for the Supreme Court is the clearest indication yet that President Obama’s campaign promises to be a centrist and think in a bipartisan way were mere rhetoric. Sotomayor comes from the far left and will likely leave us with something akin to the “Extreme Court” that could mark a major shift. The notion that appellate court decisions are to be interpreted by the “feelings” of the judge is a direct affront of the basic premise of our judicial system that is supposed to apply the law without personal emotion. If she is confirmed, then we need to take the blindfold off Lady Justice.—
I’m sure Maria Sotomayor will be displeased to learn that Mike Huckabee is not a fan of her, but I wonder how he feels about Sonia Sotomayor… And um, Lady Justice!? I don’t think so. Does the GOP refer to Justice Alito as Mr. Justice Alito? No, I don’t think they do.
Newt Gingrich, who apparently took Meghan McCain’s advice to start Twittering, joined his fellow fraternity brothers Republican colleagues Sen. James Inhofe and Rep. Lamar Smith in calling Sotomayor racist for claiming that judicial diversity is important when determining “race and sex discrimination cases.”
So apparently Gingrich believes that an out of context remark made during a speech on race and sex discrimination cases that appeared in print in the Berkeley La Raza Law Journal in 2002 is proof that Sotomayor is a racist… Because no one knows what it’s like to be a woman of color more than a white male, right?
Karl Rove jumped on board calling Sotomayor an “intellectual lightweight,” obviously encouraged by Jeffrey Rosen’s New Republic article which allowed unnamed sources to attack Sotomayor as “not that smart” and lacking “penetrating” questions on the bench.
Because nothing shows someone’s lack of intellect than graduating summa cum laude from Princeton University as well as attending Yale Law School and holding the job of editor of the Yale Law Journal.
The attacks against Sonia Sotomayor are in bad taste and fueled by nothing less than racism and sexism… Pot calling the kettle black, anyone?
Oral Sex and Reciprocity
Sex, Sex, Sex and more Sex. We are so obsessed with sex that we often attach it to things that it has no relation to and when it comes to the actual conversations about intercourse, we use ridiculous euphemisms to highlight our supposed discomfort. Speaking directly is something that is often discouraged in women and yet we are expected to be overwhelmed with our lovers prowess even when they leave us wanting to reach for a vibrator.
Sexually, men are understood as predatory and in constant search of sex and this dynamic is routinely played out in the bedroom. No man is ever too shy to say suck my dick and often fellatio is perceived as a necessary prerequisite to copulation. A woman that does not enjoy giving head or finds it repulsive, is deemed to be sexually repressed. When it is about a man’s pleasure suddenly the idea of female sexual purity dissipates… Erections often lead to a loss of supposed sexual morality; orgasms before slut shaming.
Many men hump under the false assumption that their dick is the key to multiple orgasms and sexual bliss for women. How many times have you had a dick waved at you like it was this long awaited prize that you had been dreaming about forever? Oh yeah a dick, like they aren’t readily available for the asking.
I am going to let all the men reading this in on a little secret. A guy that is good with his hands and his tongue is a KEEPER. If you can polish a pearl until a woman’s eyes roll back in her head, then you my friend will always be invited into a bed. Don’t be a selfish lover.
I cannot tell you over the years how many times I have heard women complain that their lovers won’t go down. Seriously WTF…enough with men going down 3 times for every ten blowjobs they get. That stat is worse than the pay inequity between men and women. Where is the equality and reciprocity in that bullshit?
Even worse than that disgusting statistics are the weak ass reasons why men refuse to put their tongues into service….It either “smells down there”, (note suddenly they can’t say pussy or vagina), or they just “don’t like it”. Try telling a guy you don’t like giving blow jobs and set the stop watch because it will be seconds before he starts explaining to you that you have sexual issues.
Telling you that you smell, is just a way to shame you into accepting his failure to be a considerate partner. It is common knowledge that the vagina is often constructed as dirty and to tell a woman that she smells “down there”, preys upon this meme and unnecessarily shames her. I don’t know where men image got the idea that their crotch smells like a bed of roses. The crotch is not a sweatless, odourless area and whether male or female, there is an odour. Call it body musk, call it crotch rot but no genitals smell like a 500 dollar bottle of perfume.
Even when some give in, it is often a case of “if you really want me to”, accompanied by a childish whine. Socially we still view sex as something men do to women, and orgasms as something men give to women. We fail to understand that this false meme is centered solely on the penis entering the vagina, rather than a sexual act that is meant to specifically pleasure a woman. As womanist/feminists ,we long ago claimed a right to our orgasms and so I must image ask why the hell are so many women still putting up with this bullshit? To me it seems really simple; if you want head give head and if the man you’re fucking cannot agree to that, wouldn’t a hot bath, a shower nozzle and a good book be less frustrating for all?
Cross Posted from Womanist Musings
Obama Nominates Sonia Sotomayor for Supreme Court
I apologize for not getting this up yesterday, but I sleep sometimes.
Yesterday morning Obama announced his nomination of Sonia Sotomayor for Supreme Court to replace Justice Souter.
Sotomayor would become the second woman on the court, only the third female justice in the history of the Supreme Court, and the first Hispanic justice to serve on the Supreme Court.
She is obviously qualified for the job, having graduated from Princeton University summa cum laude, she attended Yale Law School, where she was an editor of the Yale Law Journal. She spent five years as a prosecutor with the Manhattan district attorney’s office before entering a private practice. She currently serves as an appeals judge for the US Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit, covering New York, Vermont, and Connecticut.
Even with all of her extensive experience and qualifications for the job, conservatives have already started showing us how rocky the road to her confirmation will be, calling her a “judicial activist”
Conservatives argue Sotomayor has a “hard-left record” and believes that judges should consider experiences of women and minorities in their decision-making.
Here is President Obama’s introduction of Sonia Sotomayor:
And here is her speech:
First Door on the Left went over to an extremist conservative blog to see how the conservatives were reacting to this nomination and of course, as you may have suspected, they were full of hate speech, racism, and sexism. Check it out if your stomach can handle it.
Prop 8 Decision Day: California Upholds Discrimination
The California Supreme Court upheld the discriminatory Proposition 8 and has yet again told its same sex citizens that they are not worthy of equal protection under the law. While the 18,000 same sex marriages that were performed in the short amount of time that the state recognized gay marriage in 2008 will be upheld, the option of marriage for thousands of other same sex couples in the state will not be able to become a reality–At least not until Prop 8 is overturned.
While Prop 8 has won this battle, we cannot (and will not!) let it win the war. All couples deserve the same fundamental civil rights regardless of sexual orientation. Plans are already being formulated to overturn Prop 8 by bringing the question of same sex marriage back to the ballot in California.
The Courage Campaign is scheduled to hit the California airwaves within the next 72 hours with a 60 second television advertisement of Fidelity–The most-watched video ever in the history of California politics. They are also launching a new television ad in the spirit of Harvey Milk’s call to come out, wherever you are, and proudly tell the stories of the people most affected by the passage of Prop 8.
To find out where the Day of Decision rally is tonight in your town, text “RALLY” and your zip code to 27336 and you will immediately receive a text message with the event closest to your neighborhood.
The Feminist Majority Foundation has also put together a petition and needs supporters of equal rights to take the love and equality pledge that says we refuse to quit until all people are equal under the law.
Edited to Add: I was on my laptop when putting this up and didn’t get to see the video for the new Fidelity television advertisement from the Courage Campaign. Watch it below:
Sex-Positivity
I'm passionate about sex-positivity and believe every sexual being should have the freedom to explore their sexuality safely and without condemnation. I even lost my ad network after my refusal to censor myself after reviewing feminist porn.So if you're in the market for sex toys, porn, books, etc. take a look at the retailers below, all of which are feminist-friendly.
Out Campaign
The OUT Campaign allows individuals to let others know they are not alone. It can also be a nice way of opening a conversation and help to demolish the negative stereotypes of atheists. Let the world know that we are not about to go away and that we are not going to allow those that would condemn us to push us into the shadows.
