1980's AIDS Commercials

[Megan'sTouch 23875]

I was just a small child when these commercials aired, but viewing them was pretty intense! Anyone remember them? Thoughts?

 

[capitalman 3861]

Thoughts? Wrong website for this topic. I mean it's scary shit...maybe we should stop having sex?

[Phaedrus 209521]

I was just a small child when these commercials aired' date=' but viewing them was pretty intense![/quote']

 

Ugh. Nothing remotely humane or useful there. No pity, no understanding, no empathy, no useful information on how to avoid it. Just a huge pile of FEAR.

 

On a lighter note, did you *have* to tell us you were a small child when that came out? This isn't the "You know you're old when...." thread :)

 

Thoughts? Wrong website for this topic. I mean it's scary shit...maybe we should stop having sex?

 

Well, I think that ad is a product of its time. We've moved on since then, fortunately.

 

But I don't agree that it shouldn't be discussed here. I know there are quite a few folks who disagree with me on whether stuff like this is appropriate for CERB, but I've always found it preferable - in the long run - to deal with the world as it is, rather than as I'd like it to be. I'm sure everyone here takes appropriate precautions, but HIV and other nasty things are an unfortunate reality of life (for everyone, not just people here) and I see no benefit in sweeping them under the carpet and pretending they don't exist.

[datyaddict 2174]

I'm sure everyone here takes appropriate precautions, but HIV and other nasty things are an unfortunate reality of life (for everyone, not just people here) and I see no benefit in sweeping them under the carpet and pretending they don't exist.

 

"Stay safe" seems to be a pretty common salutation around here, and it's important to not let those just be words. We have to keep in mind what we all (hobbyists and SPs alike) need to keep safe from. Not just HIV and STDs, but the associated ignorance and shame and fear.

 

Sure there's plenty of self-censorship here, but that's mostly on a personal level (not attacking people or websites). The bigger issues - STDs, SP safety, the pervasive negative stereotypes about SPs - these not only need to be discussed, they need to be actively engaged. Ignorance is the enemy, communication is the solution.

[bcguy42 38594]

(Preface: I hold you, Phaedrus, in the highest regard. No criticism is intended in the following.)

 

Phaedrus: "Ugh. Nothing remotely humane or useful there. No pity, no understanding, no empathy, no useful information on how to avoid it. Just a huge pile of FEAR."

 

At the time these commercials first ran, they intentionally were "a huge pile of fear". The idea being that if it got your attention, you'd try to find out more about how to NOT be that person in that bed.

 

Well, I think that ad is a product of its time. We've moved on since then, fortunately.

 

HIV/AIDs has not moved on. Awareness and prevention are just as important today and tomorrow.

 

But I don't agree that it shouldn't be discussed here. I know there are quite a few folks who disagree with me on whether stuff like this is appropriate for CERB, but I've always found it preferable - in the long run - to deal with the world as it is, rather than as I'd like it to be. I'm sure everyone here takes appropriate precautions, but HIV and other nasty things are an unfortunate reality of life (for everyone, not just people here) and I see no benefit in sweeping them under the carpet and pretending they don't exist.

 

With you 100% on that one.

[Guest Ou**or**n]

Back in 1987 AIDS was only really starting to hit mainstream consciousness after years of being a 'gay disease'. A scene like that of someone with Kaposi's sarcoma would of been one the first images of someone with AIDS presented to the public. Don't forgot it was only two years earlier in 1985 that Rock Hudson died and AIDS went mainstream.

 

Direct advice like using condoms was still strong resisted by the US conservative government of Reagan.

 

The best book to understand the tragically poor response by both the American government at the time and resistence within the gay community itself is Randy Shilts And The Band Played On which to me is essential reading.

[Megan'sTouch 23875]

I strongly dislike fear-based "education." Decisions about HIV/AIDS should be made with our brains, not with our emotions, and commercials like this trigger an emotional response rather than giving us factual information by which we can make a decision. However, I say this as someone who received a post-HIV/AIDS sex education and I imagine in the times where they were just discovering the virus, it would have been very scary and maybe all the facts just weren't available.

 

I also find some of the commercials puritanical. In a Canadian one I found on YouTube, they suggested not having sex with multiple partners before even mentioning condoms. We all know that the best way to prevent the spread of HIV/AIDS is condom use. Having sex with one lady at a bar unprotected is far more risky, from my understanding, than having sex with 25 bar ladies using a condom.

 

Another USA commercial showed a married couple holding hands and they said "our commitment to each other protects us" as if someone marriage will protect you from HIV/AIDS. We all know now that a ring on your fourth left finger provides no protection! What about couples who cheat? What about couples who spread HIV/AIDS to each other after a blood transfusion?

 

Of course, I say this with 20/20 vision so perhaps I should not judge the commercials so harshly. I just strongly dislike the fear-based emotional approach. When we are filled with emotions, we often don't make the best deicisons.

 

Thoughts? Wrong website for this topic. I mean it's scary shit...maybe we should stop having sex?

One of the things I love about CERB is that it's not just a place to post ads or to find an escort/MA, but a community of intelligent people with different backgrounds and opinions. This is the general discussion forum which means we discuss a variety of topics. I see nothing inappropriate about discussing the HIV/AIDS propaganda and misinformation of the 1980's.

[Old Dog 179138]

I strongly dislike fear-based "education." Decisions about HIV/AIDS should be made with our brains' date=' not with our emotions, and commercials like this trigger an emotional response rather than giving us factual information by which we can make a decision. However, I say this as someone who received a post-HIV/AIDS sex education and I imagine in the times where they were just discovering the virus, it would have been very scary and maybe all the facts just weren't available.[/quote']

 

Megan, it is 20/20 hindsight. As WiT stated earlier, the people that were most notable with the affliction at the time were in the 4H group - Homosexual men, Heroin Addicts, Hemophiliacs and Haitians.

 

Haitians were identified because it had spread to both sexes in their sexually active community and they were identifiable as a group. Hemophiliacs were perhaps the most pitied - they were the ones who received the disease through tainted blood transfusions, when testing was not even on the radar. As for gay men and heroin addicts - well let's say the pervasive thought AT THAT TIME was that this was God's judgment for their sins. HIV/AIDS was originally touted as the "gay plague."

 

The ads you saw in the late 80's and early 90's were a manifestation of societal attitudes. The spread of HIV/AIDS again was portrayed as a manifestation of society gone awry, the result of the the permissive nature of the sexual revolution of the 60's and 70's. Again it was more a fire and brimstone approach - celibacy was preached in lieu of protection.

 

A final thought. I was a history major at university. The wisest professor I ever had was a gentleman that simply said this, "You should never transpose today's values on yesterdays issues. In retrospect so many things will be morally wrong, but without them occurring, none of what exists today would exist."

[Phaedrus 209521]

(Preface: I hold you, Phaedrus, in the highest regard. No criticism is intended in the following.)

 

*blush*. Thankyou. And none taken :)

 

At the time these commercials first ran, they intentionally were "a huge pile of fear". The idea being that if it got your attention, you'd try to find out more about how to NOT be that person in that bed.

 

Well, I should say that I missed the early stages of the AIDS publicity, being young enough for it to go over my head.

 

To be honest, I'd have thought much better of the ad in Megan's original post if it had had any indication of where to find out more. Just a hotline number, or an address you could send a SAE to. Anything more constructive than "If you take drugs of have sex, this will happen to you".

 

Well, I think that ad is a product of its time. We've moved on since then, fortunately.

 

HIV/AIDs has not moved on. Awareness and prevention are just as important today and tomorrow.

 

Absolutely. But I'm glad that people seem to have realized that pure scaremongering isn't all that useful. And I'm also very glad about the subsequent invention of things like the Internet, which has made finding things out *much* easier than it used to be.

[fortunateone 156618]

I kind of think bring this up this way is cool.

 

I can't count the number of times where I will read on an escort forum that HIV is only for gays and IV drug users, and NO one else is at risk.

 

Those kind of comments come from the ones who either only saw the scare tactics ads (meaning since they weren't an "H" they know they are safe) or the ones who are post 80s and never seemed to get any kind of STD transmission information that had any effect on them whatsoever..

[JuliasUndies 7288]

I think that Since these commercials have aired, the only thing that has graduated and moved on regarding the HIV/AIDs virus has been the Awareness, prevention, compassion and way too much acceptance.

I feel that this virus is still at a stand still and somewhere somehow politics has mingled it's way into this killer preventing cures or vaccines to be made available. It has become more of a money generating industry and population control factor for Africans than actually curing and making people better. I notice that for every virus (bird flu, mad cow, swine flu ect) that affects our economy, seems a miracle vaccine appears right away and put's our minds at ease which in turn re-stabilizes the economy.

However, this virus is different. Not only is it an effective population control but reflects good on our health care system and even better for the economy(medical industry),by generating funding and by treating patients with expensive drugs prolonging the inevitable. Instead of curing it-which would be cheaper, the funding would dry up because people would rather have the cure or vaccine than pay for drugs.

We as people of this earth need to realize that HIV/AIDS is a pandemic, killing millions of humans world wide (babies are being born with it) by simply doing the most natural human instinct. But the difference between the swine flu like viruses and HIV/AIDS is being represented almost like a choice, for instance in the commercial, if we have unprotected sex or share needles we will get this all by ourselves and we are to blame for our negligence and swine flu can be contracted by sharing a cubicle. We can only be educated so much and education cannot prevent people from having sex, blood transfusions, helping someone bleeding or getting into fights and sharing blood..

I know this.. When the nintendo first came out, it was a dumbed down version of the super nintendo that came out shortly afterwards.. the nintendo made so much money, it was so popular that the super nintendo made even more, and sold at a higher price..but the technology for the super nintendo was formulated before the regular nintendo and released it only after the dumbed down version. Playstation what now 10? 3 D televisions? Only released after a series of HD flat screen plasma...having had the technology. But Aids? Is this a progressive therapy meant to rape the pockets of humans by holding back the cure for someones pocket book? And as long as we believe it's our fault and feel thankful for whatever treatments possible that this isn't a pandemic?

Sex is a beautiful, happy experience shared by individuals and should be celebrated and encouraged.

AIDS is not a sex disease, a dirty disease or a druggies lifestyle, it's a human virus called Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome and needs to be cured, NOW!

[MightyPen 67414]

I strongly dislike fear-based "education." Decisions about HIV/AIDS should be made with our brains' date=' not with our emotions, and commercials like this trigger an emotional response rather than giving us factual information by which we can make a decision.[/quote']

I agree with that sentiment almost all of the time, Megan. But this is one of the few contexts in which I disagree.

 

At the moment of contemplating risky sex I think we'd agree most people aren't thinking entirely rationally. They're in the grip of a chemical soup we call emotion. If you're going to counter that urge, you need to do it by implanting a compelling emotional counter-response that has a chance to kick in under those conditions.

 

The facts and education are much more useful for the other 99% of everyone's time when, say, they're making plans about their lives and considering how to treat others that might have AIDS. In the latter case especially, the fear campaign has negative effects.

 

But if you're trying to just save people's lives... I think that complex ideas just weren't going to do the job. Fear is a useful stopgap approach while society adjusts to new facts, and injects into the culture the meme that "this is something SERIOUS and could affect YOU and be HORRIBLE".

 

Thanks for pointing to those ads... quite a time capsule.

 

(On a related note, I remember in the early 70s on some American station seeing a state trooper being interviewed on the news about some especially bad drinking and driving death. And he said to the camera, "we've tried all kinds of law enforcement approaches and they're just not working. These deaths won't stop until society changes and stops accepting drinking and driving as normal."

 

It seemed like within a year I started seeing the first anti-drinking-and-driving campaigns on TV, and they all had scary accident pictures and heartfelt please from the bereaved -- an *emotional* argument more than a factual one. It was the first time in my young life I realized that it was possible for authorities to use mass communication to try to engineer a culture. And it mostly worked. Happily in this instance, with a positive message.

 

I remember thinking at the time, "could they do this with *any* message?" ... )

[Phaedrus 209521]

I feel that this virus is still at a stand still and somewhere somehow politics has mingled it's way into this killer preventing cures or vaccines to be made available. It has become more of a money generating industry and population control factor for Africans than actually curing and making people better. I notice that for every virus (bird flu, mad cow, swine flu ect) that affects our economy, seems a miracle vaccine appears right away and put's our minds at ease which in turn re-stabilizes the economy.

 

Sorry, but I think you're just dead wrong about this.

 

Bird 'flu and swine 'flu are simply new strains of a disease for which vaccines have existed for years. The only problem with 'flu is that each vaccine is useful only for one strain, and so when a new strain appears and spreads quickly it takes time firstly to isolate it and develop a vaccine, and then to manufacture enough of it to satisfy demand - the manufacturing capacity to do this very quickly simply doesn't exist. FWIW, the 'flu shots which we get every fall are a vaccines aimed at the two or three strains that the experts forecast were most likely to be prevalent about a year beforehand; so the decision on what 'flu strains to vaccinate against this year was probably made last winter. This is, to some extent, guesswork.

 

There's still no vaccine for Mad Cow disease (or CJD); it can't even be *diagnosed* in humans before an autopsy. What's happened there is that it's been largely controlled in livestock, thus reducing the chance of it making the jump to humans at all.

 

It should also be said that developing a vaccine for HIV is uniquely difficult. Vaccines work by priming the body's immune system to recognize and destroy a pathogen; there's an obvious catch-22 here when the virus you're aiming at targets and takes out the immune system itself.

 

As for HIV... yes, it's about money, but you've got it entirely backwards. The big problem with HIV research is that the big pharma companies aren't charities, and exist to make a profit... but if they do come out with a cure for HIV, or a vaccine against it, the pressure to sell at cost and to waive their intellectual property rights so that the manufacturers of generic drugs can also make it would be... immense. Some countries (e.g. South Africa) have already stated that they'll ignore patents and trademarks if they feel so inclined. This means that any company that does come up with some remarkable new development for HIV or AIDS will make no money off it... and so they don't bother investing much in the first place. That's why HIV research and breakthroughs tend to come out of academia, funded by charities and governments; future profit is less of an issue here.

 

The big money for the pharmaceutical behemoths is made on treating the baby boomers' chronic conditions in first world countries where patients can pay and patents are respected, which is why we see an endless parade of drugs for cholesterol and arthritis and the other things we develop as we get older. But there's no nefarious plot to use HIV (or any other disease, for that matter) to reduce population in the developing world; the simple fact is that large corporations don't care about spending large amounts of money to develop a drug or vaccine on which they'll never recoup their investment. That's all. It's callous, yes, but that's the world we live in.

[ottawaadventurer 5114]

Phaedrus - as someone working in the area, I couldn't have said it better. You got it bang on.

[JuliasUndies 7288]

Sorry, but I think you're just dead wrong about this.

 

Bird 'flu and swine 'flu are simply new strains of a disease for which vaccines have existed for years. The only problem with 'flu is that each vaccine is useful only for one strain, and so when a new strain appears and spreads quickly it takes time firstly to isolate it and develop a vaccine, and then to manufacture enough of it to satisfy demand - the manufacturing capacity to do this very quickly simply doesn't exist. FWIW, the 'flu shots which we get every fall are a vaccines aimed at the two or three strains that the experts forecast were most likely to be prevalent about a year beforehand; so the decision on what 'flu strains to vaccinate against this year was probably made last winter. This is, to some extent, guesswork.

 

There's still no vaccine for Mad Cow disease (or CJD); it can't even be *diagnosed* in humans before an autopsy. What's happened there is that it's been largely controlled in livestock, thus reducing the chance of it making the jump to humans at all.

 

It should also be said that developing a vaccine for HIV is uniquely difficult. Vaccines work by priming the body's immune system to recognize and destroy a pathogen; there's an obvious catch-22 here when the virus you're aiming at targets and takes out the immune system itself.

 

As for HIV... yes, it's about money, but you've got it entirely backwards. The big problem with HIV research is that the big pharma companies aren't charities, and exist to make a profit... but if they do come out with a cure for HIV, or a vaccine against it, the pressure to sell at cost and to waive their intellectual property rights so that the manufacturers of generic drugs can also make it would be... immense. Some countries (e.g. South Africa) have already stated that they'll ignore patents and trademarks if they feel so inclined. This means that any company that does come up with some remarkable new development for HIV or AIDS will make no money off it... and so they don't bother investing much in the first place. That's why HIV research and breakthroughs tend to come out of academia, funded by charities and governments; future profit is less of an issue here.

 

The big money for the pharmaceutical behemoths is made on treating the baby boomers' chronic conditions in first world countries where patients can pay and patents are respected, which is why we see an endless parade of drugs for cholesterol and arthritis and the other things we develop as we get older. But there's no nefarious plot to use HIV (or any other disease, for that matter) to reduce population in the developing world; the simple fact is that large corporations don't care about spending large amounts of money to develop a drug or vaccine on which they'll never recoup their investment. That's all. It's callous, yes, but that's the world we live in.

 

My thoughts about how I think everything goes down is not up for debate.

Here I am doing my part in sharing my thoughts. I don't think I'm wrong, I didn't quote any statistics, only what I thought, my thoughts can't be wrong because I thought them and I think I think what I think and no one will give up the cash cow for the cure, as for nefarious plots, We both agree there is one, $$$.

I'm sure you missed my point, The bottom line here is that it's a sad day when greed is more important than saving human lives. Warning statistic, something you can contest:

I hope we are looking more into bone barrow transplants for HIV since it has been proven to cure it by producing more healthy white blood cells to attack and kill the virus..That would be interesting to see in Canada.