ALDO Shoes Has Discovered AIDS Is A Silent Killer

The BBQ Pit
1

We can stipulate that curing AIDS, and preventing new infections, would be a Good Thing.

But I have been passing by these damn ALDO shoe stores for about a year now and seeing just about incomprhensible posters with celebrities (or alleged ones) saying variants of “We can’t be silent about AIDS” or “We can’t be deaf, blind, and dumb about AIDS,” appropriately illustrated with the “artist” having, say, his hands over his ears, or duct tape over her mouth.

http://www.youthaids-aldo.org/

Many, many years ago, say, around 1985, I can remember some “Silence=death” campaign of “AIDS activism” premised on the notion that the Right, or an uncaring society, or a puritanical Church, or whatever bugbear, was suppressing knowledge of the AIDS pandemic and how to avoid it because of . . . whatever, embarrassment, disapproval, who knows.

That was in 1985.

Was Mr. ALDO just released from a fishtank in Lincoln Center where he’d spent the last 21 years? Because in that time I’ve heard a LOT about AIDS. And how it’s spread. And how to prevent it. And how to treat it. And how one might eventually cure it. For a good decade it was against the law to make a Broadway musical and not have it be about AIDS. Hell, it’s been two years since Parker and Stone made fun of this now-cliched trope with the “Everyone Has AIDS!” song in Team America.

Who, exactly, is it that Mr. ALDO thinks has been or is or is in danger of being “silent” about AIDS, at this point or in recent memory? What, exactly, are the lacunae of knowledge about the nature and transmission of AIDS that Mr. ALDO is worried about? Does anyone alive (at least, anyone likely to see ALDO’s posters, which admittedly doesn’t include uneducated sub-Saharans) not know exactly how AIDS works and how to avoid it?

Or is someone at ALDO just feeling sad they missed the victimology the first time around and trying to re-capture the self-regarding “activism” of the old days?

2

Gay Pride marchers: We’re here, we’re queer! Get used to it!
Lisa Simpson: You do this every year. We are used to it!

3

I was going to go through your OP kind of point by point, but I think it would be easier just to call you a dumbass and move on.

Dumbass.

4

Do you, then, believe that there is a problem specifically with “silence” and AIDS, here and now? And if so, what is that problem?

Because that was the point of my OP. My judgment is that there is not any meaningful present-day “silence” or “risk of silence” against which Mr. ALDO needs to be worried about speaking out. YMMV. I can acknowledge that without calling you or even Mr. ALDO a dumbass.

5

Sorry man, you aren’t going to win this one. No, it’s not exactly breaking news, but neither is raising funds and awareness of any other affliction. Would you pit Aldo if they were running a campaign for childhood diabetes or muscular dystrophy? These aren’t exactly breaking news either, but it’s beneficial to keep it in the news or in the public awareness, as that does help your fundraiser, you know, raise funds. This is a lame ass rant.

6

You betcha, according to the 2004 Kaiser Foundation Survey of Americans on HIV/AIDS.

Even in the US where 99% of respondents knew that you can contract AIDS by unprotected sex or needle-sharing, many people still think that AIDS is also transmitted by casual contact such as sharing a drinking glass (25%) or touching a toilet seat (18%).

The consequences of this kind of misconception may not be trivial, for example in the case of an employer who mistakenly believes he has to fire an HIV+ employee to keep the rest of his workforce from catching AIDS.

And in other parts of the world such as India and China, where the incidence of AIDS is rising rapidly, there are much more serious problems with ignorance about AIDS:

Slacker. It’s much more effective to call somebody a dumbass after you’ve factually demonstrated they’re a dumbass! :smiley:

7

You’ve missed my point. I didn’t think the campaign was at all stupid up to the point where it was “cure AIDS, prevent AIDS, educate about AIDS.” It was specifically (and only) the conspiratorial-seeming implication that there was a plague of “silence” that needed to be redressed that made me roll my eyes.

8

Well, my guess is that it would be people like you, who feel that everyone already knows all there is to know about AIDS and discusses it freely, so there’s no need to encourage open dialogue about it.

Did you happen to miss the repeated “YouthAIDS” logo and phrase everywhere on that site you link to? From what I can tell, the point of this fundraiser is to help prevent the spread of AIDS among young people. Do you also believe that no one needs to talk to kids about drugs, because everyone already knows how bad they are for you?

There is a plague of silence, but it’s not some conspiracy among the far right: it’s among the general population.

9

Absolutely. And if I thought any significant number of Indian and Chinese peasants would see and benefit from the ads, that would be great.

Or, is the proposition: “Hey, Bal Harbour shopper, you know all about AIDS, but in rural China there is a plague of silence, so go educate those ignorant at-risk people by breaking the (Chinese/Indian, not American) silence?” Maybe, I don’t know.

I’ve also (in seriously trying to find a serious explanation for the accusatory “silence” theme) considered the possibility it is a clumsy way of saying: “Well, of course we all know about AIDS (in the U.S.), but we’ve talked about it so much that we’re almost in danger of becoming complacent in our knowledge of it, which is, you know, kind of like a form of silence.” It’s a stretch and I have no idea if it’s what they intended.

10

Many schools aren’t allowed to teach proper sex education to students, beyond “Don’t have sex until you get married!” No info on condoms, safe sex, birth control, STDs, which includes AIDS.

Doesn’t that speak to a “plague of silence?” When people seriously believe that educating your children about AIDS and sex will make them want to go out and have sex immediately?

11

I wonder what’s keeping that ignorance alive.

12

Is the campaign all that pitworthy? I mean, sure, I would probably PREFER a campaign revolving around the fact that AIDS is still out there and that treatment isn’t a cure, but where’s the crime in going with something a little on the dull side.

FWIW, I wouldn’t say there is exactly a “conspiracy of silence” out there, but I do think that AIDS has gotten a little too far off the radar. I’ve seen a ton of breast cancer campaigns out there, but I can’t remember the last time I saw AIDS awareness really come to the forefront.

13

I think it’s fair to say that some of the attention, therefore the “vocal” if you will portion of the fight against AIDS has waned a bit in popular culture in the last 5 to 10 years. AIDS is still killing people, and therefore it’s still a problem. Bringing the subject up again in places like the mall is then breaking silence in a way, and they should be supported for doing so. For promoting it through the wearing of dog tags or the retailing of horribly ugly shoes, perhaps not so much.

14

It’s not just ‘silence’ the whole campaign is based around a ‘Hear no evil, See no evil, Speak no evil’ style of images that you can see here.

I don’t see anything wrong with the campaign.

15

Maybe this was more MPSIMS than Pit, but I figured I’d be calling ALDO and the self-regarding “celebs” sententious goofs, so . . . .

The “silence”/“hear no evil” thing made me think of this classic.

16

Yes, the posters you are complaining about are “in your face”. But, so are a lot of the ads for a lot of the other disease awareness campaigns. That’s how they get attention. Also, given the documented callous reaction to the AIDS outbreak by the likes of Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson, referring to “bugbears” seems pretty lame. And, the tone of the quote strongly indicates that there is something bothering you beyond mere annoyance with the ads. Could that reason possibly be… gay people?

17

Nope. Shrill people, yep. Self-satisfied people, yep. Overly-dramatic people, yep. Homosexuals own no monopoly on those traits but some of the “AIDS activism” has been tainted with those traits.

I will concede a point that several people have made or implied here, which is that advertisements by their nature rely on exaggeration and shock value and there would be little profit in getting annoyed every time an ad monger did something over the top.

18

This is just my take on the matter, but I would guess that the “don’t be silent” message is specifically directed toward youth, seeing as this is a youth initiative. Even if everyone knows what causes AIDS and how to prevent it, it is still very difficult for young people to bring it up in actual sexual encounters. “Hey, I’d like you to wear a condom” is surprisingly hard to say. The more young people talk about it, the more it gets normalized, and the easier it is to insist on safety with your sex partners. YMMV.

mischievous

19

<tap, tap> Is this thing on?

20

I’m going to come out on your side here, Huerta88. The campaign sucks. It’s dumb. It’s clumsy, and barely makes sense. The duct tape? Give me a fucking break. The strategy of this campaign might have made sense in the past, not now. The message is old and doesn’t ring true to the problem, therefore it’s easily ignored, therefore it sucks. I wish they would have taken all the money and effort that they expended here and put into a better creative strategy and better creative. It makes the wrong point in a tired, heavy-handed way. D minus.