sexual excess

Ok so I thought I would put up an article which I wrote sometime back for the campus magazine. Unfortunately for me, the article was not published on account of it being too much of an attack on the Singapore government and also because it had a very sombre tone.

I’m not going to defend the article. It probably has loads of flaws. I just wanted to make a point and that is why I am publishing it here coz I really needed to get the message out.

So read it and please do leave your comments behind.

The Gravity of HIV/AIDS

Barely 25 years ago- in 1981- the first case of AIDS was diagnosed. By the mid 80’s there were multitudes of patients dying of this plague. AIDS was a very unique disease as it had no symptoms of its own, it borrowed the worst from cancer, pneumonia, dementia, oral thrush, blood poisoning, blindness and bowel disease to create a condition that was horrifying in its plethora of suffering. Have I scared you enough? This is just the tip of the iceberg. From here on, the cocktail of drugs that is given to you to suppress the symptoms only make you weaker, it is like being on a 24 hour cycle of nauseating, writhing chemotherapy, and slowly, but surely, you wilt, you decay away in fervent agony.

It has been 25 whole years and still, the gravity of this disease has not been fully appreciated. It certainly has been recognized and action is being taken by quite a few associations in Singapore and worldwide, but people, the common mass, the participants of the great nation that Singapore has become, where do they stand? What do people think about AIDS and HIV? Like most people, they know of the risks, they know of the consequences, but do they really believe that this disease will strike them because it is their own actions that might land them with the illness in the first place?

The 1960’s and the 70’s were times in which you could jump into the sack with anyone you felt like. Possibly the worst thing that could come with this moment of passion/love/loneliness/one tiny lamentable lapse in judgment was pregnancy and even then, you could hope for a joyful reunion between partners and parents when the baby was born (or not). However, nowadays, having sex with a whole army of faceless, nameless strangers is likely to land you with a death sentence and believe you me, it’s not just one fancy lethal injection (or one clean slice of head) putting you to death. Is that one extra orgasm worth it?

The disease first became evident in the homosexual community and through this the community (forever) earned itself the distinction of churning out patients of this dreadful, long suffering, incurable terminal disease. This stereotype operates under the existence of massive amounts of evidence to show that AIDS and HIV have transcended all boundaries of sexual orientation. It is a fact that of the 898 people who have been diagnosed as HIV positive since the year 2000, an overwhelming 81% of them have been heterosexual. Speeches that are given by state leaders choose to ignore these statistics and brand the homosexual community as prime transmitters of this disease. This ignorance and blind prejudice have the potential to counter any sort of effective reduction of AIDS and HIV among the population through new polices and speeches.

Firstly, the heterosexual community, through ‘credible’ sources of information may become complacent to the danger of multiple sexual partners. The complacency is fatalistic especially since the heterosexual victims of HIV far outnumber the homosexuals and the intravenous drug users. Do we really want to see the majority of the population thinking they are safe from such risks when it is so obvious that the virus doesn’t spare anyone? Secondly, the homosexual community has always pointed to the government for not recognizing them as outstanding citizens who contribute to the good of the country and therefore they have criticized the government for not educating them, particularly them, about the dangers of (unsafe) sexual excess. This has resulted in ignorant sex escapades (sexcapades to the word-savvy) and rebellious sex which have obviously resulted in more and more HIV positive tests and more and more lives destroyed.

Therefore what is the verdict here for Singapore? To strive for a more cosmopolitan, more tolerant, better educated Singapore it cannot have two communities and a government pointing fingers at each other and being complacent and flippant of actions that could cost them their lives. Education about the disease will not work if opinion leaders, in their role of exactly who they are, creators of opinions, talk nonsense. Mindsets have to be changed. The disease exists; we need to deal with it. Singapore cannot debate the causality of such problems through a myopic lens, it needs to expand, grow up and realize that judgments will not scare the horror away, it will only nurture it.