>Mr Heartfield wrote:
>
>>I'm not sure what your point is. Are you saying that gay men are not a
>>high risk group? I think it would be silly to stand on ceremony when the
>>evidence is that on an average, they are a high risk group. As to what
>>it tells us, that's something altogether different.
>
>a public health expert such as Richard Levins may ask: does a
>significant statistical difference in the characteristic of interest
>between the contrast classes prove that the criterion used for
>setting up the groups is indeed causally significant?
It doesn't. Being gay, being African, & using drugs intravenously are causes of _neither AIDS nor HIV transmission_.
Spurious conflation of gay men, Africans, & IV drug users with "risk factors" does several ideological damages:
1. It discourages safer sex among those who think they are not "at risk."
2. In the guise of enumerating so-called "risk factors," writers reproduce ideological categories & give them an aura of biological causality, as if "gay men," "Africans," & "IV drug users" were biologically different "kinds" of individuals than the rest of society.
3. Ideological categories mask class & other oppressions. IV drug users are no more at risk than others if they do not share needles, to take just one example. Rich IV users of heroin probably are less at risk than the poor who cannot afford condoms, clean needles, etc. Oppression of homosexuals has imposed the closet & encouraged secrecy, without decreasing sexual activities. In a sexually repressive society that discourages frankness & openness, sexual communication -- esp. of information about health questions -- is problematic between sexual partners (regular as well as chancy ones). Sexual repression also provokes reaction against it, paradoxically making risky sex -- anal sex without condoms, for instance -- more attractive than otherwise.
Yoshie