And then what? When you have these sores in your mouth, it’s not a good idea for your mouth to be in contact with other people, whether any of you have HIV or not.
Astro: I don’t know about your eating habits, or what kind of “communal food source” you’re using, but does it really involve an exchange of blood or semen?
I think it’s unreasonable. I was in early primary school when we started hearing about AIDS, so I was certainly bombarded by safe sex messages (and duly absorbed them, and practice safe sex.) I would not, as a result of that education, be concerned about the possibility of sharing a very small amount of saliva with a person who may or may not be HIV positive, but who I have no particular reason to suspect is. Irrationally, I might be more concerned if I actually knew that they were HIV positive, but even so, rationally speaking, I know better than that.
Given the heavy amount of press HIV and the means of transmission received in the 80s and 90s, it would require some pretty awesome cluelessness to have absorbed enough to be apprehensive and yet missed all the information about how it’s NOT transmitted.
That kind of shit is what led to HIV positive kids being shunned out of schools and playgrounds. Not OK. When you add in the insulting assumption that gay = HIV positive, really really not ok.
In addition to all the other idiotic assumptions one would have to make to defend the fear-of-gay-spit proposition, one would also have to assume that the gay man in question is either ignorant or malicious. After all, if you’re “smart” enough to figure out that he poses a risk, he should be able to figure that out as well. So he’s either an idiot who doesn’t understand germ transmission, or he’s so evil that he’s willing to share a deadly virus with everyone rather than refrain from fondue. Right. :rolleyes:
Maybe if you use your penis as a fondue fork, you would get more invites.
Apparently you have some pretty serious reading comprehension difficulties. If you will return to those halcyon days of yesterpost and review my OP I stated at the outset of my inquiry that the real world danger in this scenario (and cited and linked the CDC referencing this) was effectively zero. My original question asked if it was intellectually unreasonable, given the link in many ordinary people’s minds of “sharing body fluids can give you HIV > AIDS = death” for a layman (in this case a heterosexual female per the initially described situation) to be apprehensive about sharing body fluids with a member of group that has suffered disproportionately in terms of being impacted by HIV.
The overwhelming response was that despite my concerns of there not being enough clarity for the layman about the specifics of what is, and is not, hazardous, that in fact there *was *enough information out there, delivered over a long enough period of time regarding HIV transmission hazards that jumping from potential saliva in the shared fondue pot to disease transmission assumptions was not intellectually justified even in the mentally laggard.
For better or worse there are a large number of people who share the same prejudiced attitudes as the fondue hostess, and I was trying to get to the bottom of whether this was a reasonable or unreasonable level of social ignorance. It turns it it was unreasonable. If even positing and working through the question gives you such a case of the vapors you have climb aboard your drama llama to take a swipe at the OP you might want to look to your own prejudices.
I get that, but when people kept on answering your question in the positive (that is, saying that it is unreasonable) over and over again, you started defending “her” position. You can’t blame me for being just a bit suspicious about that. What would you have to gain from defending that position against all rationality otherwise? Why not just say, “Wow, thanks for all the responses. It looks like she shouldn’t have acted that way.”
That being said, you appear to do that exact thing here:
So, in the end, I do applaud your dedication to fighting your own ignorance. I only hope you can sufficiently communicate to your friend how inappropriate it is to treat people that way and how deeply she should be ashamed of herself.
Hostile Dialect,
Hostile Dialect, Narcissist
I have nothing to do with the OP of the original death by fondue scenario. You seem to be under the misapprehension I am somehow involved with this fondue woman. I am not. I was merely using that example to frame the question.
Oops. Sorry, I didn’t read the other thread.
Hostile Dialect,
Hostile Dialect, Narcissist
You know, you could dial this “offended on behalf of the gays” shtick back a notch, HD. It’s been kinda conspicuous just the last week or three.
/friendly hint.
Which brings up whats near zero?
Getting killed by lightning is near zero.
Getting killed by a spider is near zero.
Getting killed by a terrorist attack (average over 10-20 years) is near zero.
Having a plane crash into your house and kill you is near zero.
And plenty of other things are I’d suppose.
Plenty (most?) folks have their “pet irrational fear”. For some people its AIDS. Its not very rationale when you look at the statistics, but unless you yourself are a walking Spock in every aspect of your life and risk management, I think giving someone a free pass on a thing or two aint out of the realm of decency.
In my view, this is virtually identical to: “Is it reasonable for someone to feel offended at the racism in describing something as ‘niggardly?’”
In other words, if the basis of an offense or fear is objectively unreasonable or based on a foolish misunderstanding, should we still cater to it?
No.
The mere fact that someone misunderstood mountains of safe-sex advice, or mistakenly generalized it to a fondue setting, is no reason to legitimize it in any way.
Remember, when you eat fondue with someone, you’re eating fondue with everyone that person has ever eaten fondue with. So, please, make sure you have a big enough fondue pot to feed all of them.
A “black” person can certainly be offended by the word niggardly.
But it also possible for a person with an unsual background and vocabulary to use it without being a raging racist as well.
Yes, they surely can, just as the woman in the story which prompted this OP was, I think, certainly offended by being exposed to the HIV virus by her guest inviting a gay man to her fondue party.
The question is, though, what level of sympathy we extend to someone who is offended b something that’s unreasonable. The thought of catching HIV / AIDS from the saliva of a gay man is simply unreasonable, and although the woman may have certainly felt such fear, it’s ridiculous to cater to it.
So, too, with offense over a word that has no racist connotations at all.
Does “unusual background and vocabulary” mean “familiar with the English language?” As everyone knows, the word has nothing to do with race and doesn’t even corellate with existing stereotypes – I’ve heard a lot of racial jokes about people being cheap or thrifty, and they’ve never involved blacks – that’d be the Jews and Scotchmen who take it on the chin there. I don’t think I’ve ever heard a single racist meme to the effect that blacks are parsimonious.
And the fact that a black person can be offended by a word having no racial indication at all is proof of one fact only: people, when provided with incentives to manufacture outrage, will duly perform. Doesn’t mean we have to care.
On the OP: I might be less worried about AIDS than about the spread of any pathogen from someone in a population that I know or perceive has higher patterns of promiscuity and risky sexual behaviors. Syphillis, herpes, HPV – I haven’t researched how transmissable they are through saliva, and I’m not especially ashamed of that given the stories I see in the news about the epidemics of various diseases clustered in the “gay community;” I’m just generally less comfortable having anything approaching fluid-swapping with anyone I have decent reason to expect might frequently be swapping lots of fluids in lots of orifices of third parties. I’m not feeling too bigoted when I handicap the odds of my elderly grandmother patronizing a glory hole in a Provincetown nightclub at a lower percentage than that of Adam and Steve. On the same note, I have an acquaintance, straight as an arrow as far as I can tell, who makes frequent trips to Thailand and Panama. “Recreational” trips. I try not to share too many spoons with him either.
No one who has been paying any attention for the past 20 years could possibly believe there was any real chance of contracting HIV from a fondue party. If the fondue hostess really believed this (and wasn’t just using concern about AIDS as an excuse for being homophobic) then public health messages are hardly to blame. The idea that HIV could be transmitted via indirect contact with saliva doesn’t withstand even casual consideration. If HIV could be spread as easily as the common cold, it would be pretty obvious by now. And I doubt the public safety messages would focus so much on condoms if you could just as easily contract HIV by being sneezed on.
I can remember about 20 years ago, when I was a kid, sometimes hearing rumors like “You shouldn’t eat at restaurant X because they have gay waiters there and you might get AIDS and die.” But even then, even among elementary school kids, the fear was primarily that some kitchen accident might cause an HIV+ employee to bleed into the food.
That’s a relief.
But . . . the thing is . . . we know that some combination of ignorance, indifference, or malice is far from uncommon in the choices people make regarding potentially exposing others to their germs. We know it from something as simple as the guy on the bus blowing his flu-ridden nose copiously and then touching all available seat surfaces or guiderails without regard to what he might be passing on, just as we know it from the very non-trivial incidence of people who know they have STDs but proceed to have unsafe sex with reckless indifference and, in a handful of cases, with an active desire to infect others.
Seriously, once everyone learned about AIDS (or herpes, or whatever), the transmission rates should have dropped much more rapidly than they did if everyone who knew they had it immediately ceased any risky behavior. It’s pretty clear that not everyone did.
Now, the desire for sex is not the desire for fondue (though fondue is really good, and depending on the sex, and depending on the fondue, you might have a bit of a tossup), and we can say fondue’s less likely to warp judgment about exposing others to potential harm than is the prospect of a sexual encounter. But I think we can all agree that, not just among homosexual men, there are plenty of human beings who are: in denial; ignorant; indifferent; or just plain don’t give an f about the possible harm their conduct (in whatever connection – drunk driving, shooting guns in the air) might have on someone else.
For purposes of this discussion (and not to suggest that fondue + saliva is a likely mode of transmission for the AIDS virus, because I don’t think that’s very likely at all), the distinction isn’t really fine for someone who **does]/b] [rightly or wrongly] already believe that HIV is a superbug that will fight its way into you through a sea of hot cheese, and has moved on to handicapping which of her guests might have HIV. Anal sex and multiple anonymous encounters are known and pretty relliable modes of transmission, and are known or perceived to be common among much of the male homosexual population. I’ve never heard any suggestion that lesbians on a widespread basis engage in contact that would combine a risk of tearing rectal tissue and then depositing a biological fluid therein, or that large numbers of lesbians are having fluid exchanges with people they just met at a dance club, bar, truck stop, park. And (not coincidentally, probably), lesbian HIV infection rates are very different to those of homosexual men.
In sum, while the hostess may have been without medical basis in worrying about her fondue becoming an AIDS death cocktail, she wasn’t without basis in assessing homosexual men as more of an at-risk group than lesbians. Probabilities are just that – estimates of what’s more or less likely to be true across large populations. They have very evident shortcomings as decision-helpers in specific cases, which doesn’t stop people from using them, and from sometimes being rational in using them. Overall, this woman was pretty irrational as to her overall conclusion on the AIDS risk.
What I mean is this. You run your white behind around the black ghetto talking about how niggardly Obama is being with the federal budget and see how long you go without bodily harm.
Yes, I know the technical definition of niggardly is. But anybody with any real world experience also knows it also sounds too damn close to another N word.
Is the person offended totally in the wrong or right? No IMO
Is the person using it totally in the wrong or right? No IMO
But thats no reason to assume the worst about either one of them either.