Egyptian Scribbles: sexual rights

Friday, 26 October 2007

Spreading the condom joy....

My purse was stolen today and I had to cancel all my credit cards.... so I have been feeling thoroughly miserable. To cheer me up, a friend sent me a link to a great condom educational song from India ... watch it for yourself at http://digg.com/lbv.php?id=3835822&ord=1

This ludicrous, but highly amusing, video is very similar to initiatives that I saw in Papua New Guinea when I was there in March 2007. I was in PNG conducting interviews in remote highland villages. We were assessing the impact of a Canadian gold mine that is situated right in the middle of the highlands (owned by Barrick Gold). The conditions we found were shocking and deeply upsetting. But the wonderful condom/ AIDS awareness posters always made me smile (even if it seems to be only mildly encouraging men to actually use the condoms....). I loved this poster in particular... where the warrior condom man takes on the AIDS epidemic....

Quotations from Books/ Legal Cases/ Articles I"m Reading

From Richard Rorty, "Human Rights, Rationality and Sentimentality":
"If one follows Baier's advice one will not see it as the moral educator's task to answer the rational egotist's question "Why should I be moral?" but rather to answer the much more frequently posed question "Why should I care about a stranger, a person who is no kin to me, a person whose habits I find disgusting?". The traditional answer to the latter question is "Because kinship and custom are morally irrelevant, irrelevant to the obligations imposed by the recognition of membership in the same species". This has never been very convincing, since it begs the question at issue: whether mere species membership is, in fact, a sufficient surrogate for closer kinship. Furthermore, that answer leaves one wide open to Nietzsche's discomfiting rejoinder: That universalistic notion, Nietzsche will sneer, would only have crossed the mind of a slave – or, perhaps, the mind of an intellectual, a priest whose self-esteem and livelihood both depend on getting the rest of us to accept a sacred, unarguable, unchallengeable paradox.
A better sort of answer is the sort of long, sad, sentimental story which begins "Because this is what it is like to be in her situation – to be far from home, among strangers", or "Because she might become your daughter-in-law", or "Because her mother would grieve for her". Such stories, repeated and varied over the centuries, have induced us, the rich, safe, powerful, people, to tolerate, and even to cherish, powerless people – people whose appearance or habits or beliefs at first seemed an insult to our own moral identity, our sense of the limits of permissible human variation."