When I think of New Zealand, I think of bucolic scenery, lovely seas, and fantastic mountains, but it turns out the Aukland government is fighting turf wars, gang violence, and prostitution in the streets of a number of the country's towns. The perhaps "interesting" answer has been to try to outlaw outdoor prostitution, which officials believe is the primary problem, but the real push leading to the legislation is that residents are offended by all the used condoms to be found in alley ways. Perhaps it would make those officials feel better if they knew that going back to the 1920s, British lawmakers tried the same thing in London, for the same reasons. One of those was quoted as saying he wanted to collect all the used c's and have a bon fire with them.
Well, weird British Lords or not, at least the low lives in N
I wouldn't wear them, but they are pretty fetching!
Yes, it's silly!
A MAN was juggling three crying babies while trying to board a a train.
Once he finally found a way to sit down with all these little bundles, the lady sitting next to him asked: "Are they all yours?"
The man replied: "No, I work in a condom factory and these are some of the dicustomer returns."
The body which govern Australian football is disciplining footballers for making and posting to UTube a homemade video featuring a condom-wearing rubber rooster having too much sex - this with a dead chicken being used like a puppet. The Aussie newspapers all over this story, but my only question is "Why"?
It's gross and very silly, but to give it so much credence surely just makes these small minded men a. AFL is demanding North Melbourne take disciplinary action against the players responsible for a video featuring a ##condom-clad rubber rooster performing sex acts.
It was made by a group of up to seven Kangaroos players during pre-season training and was seen by all players at the club.
It shows a rubber rooster manoeuvred by a human hand performing sex acts on a real chicken carcass, which is meant to depict a woman.
The rubber rooster wears a ##condom on its head in the four-minute film, titled The Adventures of Little Boris
In what an Irish HIV/AIDS expert calls a "very worrying trend," the STD rate is booming in Ireland, and the education needed to combat that has been pretty sadly lacking. This is perhaps not surprising given that Ireland was the last of the Western nations not only to get the message about safe sex, but to even allow condoms to be sold - legally - in the Green Isle. Many thanks to Bono and his group's support of the small but determined movement to sell condoms, the nation finally was "allowed" to make that choice in the 1980s, but it is still not something that has been embraced by the Irish government. AND, there is a scary new movement to bar ALL forms of contraceptives in Ireland, one led by a former chemist and a famous footballer. They clearly do not understand their own social history OR the fact that in just the last year alone, the HIV rate in Ireland has risen by over 25%. This is a "worrying trend." More worrying in some ways is a desire on the part of some to drag the Irish back into the dark days of illegal contraception, disease, and unwanted children.
With all the vitriole being spilled over Pope Benedict's condemnation of the condom whilst visiting AIDS' ridden Africa, it might be that the experts, and everyone else, have missed a chance to give the whole sex, condoms, safety, morality issue another think.
That is not to say that what the pope said was "right" in the most literal sense - not to speak of his appalling timing! - but that is it not possible that the condom has become such a Western symbol of "safety" that all those experts who have been trying to spread the safety message in Africa may be taking the wrong tack, and that is why billions of c's have not made any inroad into the HIV/AIDS problem...in fact, it just keeps getting worse?
I think that the director of Harvard University's HIV Prevention Research Project, who has supported Pope Benedict s recent controversial claim that condom distribution was exacerbating the problem of Aids in Africa, may have a point. He points out that his is not a Catholic view, nor is it about morality, but it is about what does and does not work. Dr Green has said studies had shown that there is not a single country in Africa where HIV prevalence has come down primarily because of condoms.
"We now see HIV going down in about eight or nine countries in Africa and in every case, we see a decrease in the proportion of men and women who report having more than one sex partner in the past year. So, when the pope said that the answer really lies in monogamy and marital faithfulness, that s exactly what we found empirically.
We have for a number of years now found the wrong kind of association between condom-availability and levels of condom use. You see the wrong kind of relationship with HIV prevalence.
Instead of seeing this associated with lower HIV infection rates, it s actually associated with higher HIV infection rates. Part of that is because the people using condoms are the people who are having risky sex.
Studies in Uganda had found that people for whom condoms had been made available were found to have a greater number of sex partners. So that cancels out the risk reduction that the technology of condoms ought to provide. That s the phenomenon known as risk compensation. "
This is a bit like the mid-60s when young people became much more blase' about using protection because they "knew" that new miracle drugs could cure venereal disease. Little did they realize what they were spreading, and how they were contributing to the ever-increasing number of hybrid STDs.
The message in Africa has had to be a simple one - use condoms, save yourselves. As that message spreads, those who are not monogomous figure they are "safe" or "safer" when they use condoms sometimes.
The programs that have worked in a big way in Africa have made protection available, have taught about it, BUT the big message was about sticking to one partner, remaining faithful, or as the early and successful Uganda program put it: "Zero Grazing" !
Dr Green ads that "Condoms work in certain types of situations and [with] certain sub-populations and condoms have had a positive national impact in certain concentrated epidemics, so yes, I don t agree with the pope across the board. " He simply feels that a one-size fits all approach does not work, and that the message needs to be much broader, and yes, to include that ever-shrinking i
The news from Toronto last week was all about a mother's shock when her son came home with an interesting assignment: he had to buy condoms and then compete in a race to see who could put one on a wooden penis the fastest.
The mother is taking the case to the school board, which she will ask to ban this kind of "lesson." The mother, who is also a nurse, felt that parents should be informed of this kind of assignment, and that it was not appropriate for the age group - 14-year-olds! But her greatest concern was just how upset her son was about the whole thing.
Perhaps making a race out of the whole thing will help the children remember the lesson, or perhaps it will al
After her 14-year-old son was assigned to buy condoms and compete with classmates to see who could place one fastest on a wooden penis, a distressed parent will ask her school board in Cambridge to require teachers to communicate with parents about upcoming lessons on human sexuality. A public-health nurse for 20 years, Linda Strobl said she doesn't oppose the curriculum that teaches Grade 9 students about sexually transmitted infections. However, she was incensed with the condom-buying assignment at her son's school-- 75 kilometres southwest of Toronto -- and even more concerned that she knew nothing about it until her son came home upset one day last fall, complaining he didn't want to do his homework for health class. "I was about to tell him he had to do it, when I saw his distraught face and he told me he had to buy condoms for a race,"Ms. Strobl said.
One of the pioneers of condom production and education, and still one of its biggest proponents and providers in the third world, Phil Harvey, says that he charges a few pennies for his c's - through his charities in places like India, Haiti, etc., - is because people appreciate and are more likely to use with care that which they have paid for. Though not directly related to the story out of New Guinea last week, that philosophy did come to mind.More than two million condoms paid for with Australian aid money were left to expire in Papua by the government’s National AIDS Council Secretariat; they were worth $123, 000 (US) dollars. The condoms are now past their sell-by date and cannot be given away or sold in this country that has the highest HIV rates in the whole Pacific rim. The loss has led to some research which has found that this office has a sad history of mismanagement, to include 100s of thousands of dollars spend on junkets and other goodies for the administrative staffs who were supposed to be managing the country's safe sex programs.board, which aims to reform its activities and look into serious allegations of mismanagement. Documents obtained by the news agency, AAP, show the secretariat has overspent its budget, with hundreds of thousands of dollars wasted - most notably on unnecessary travel. The documents also outline alleged abuses by staff. The secretariat’s new chairman Peter Barter, a former PNG health minister, says the stockpile was discovered during a recent audit. Let's hoep that the 45 million male and female condoms which should now be arriving there - all free! - will fill the bill, but what a horrible (another!) blot on the condom landscape. (It’s estimated two per cent of PNG’s population is infected with HIV/AIDS, affecting between 40,000 to 60,000 people.)
At Massaschusett's Stonehill College a senior student - Katie Freitas - was frustrated that her college did not make birth control available to students, so she collected lots of freebies and made them available in the dorms. But when administrators at the Catholic school learned about her efforts, they got rid of the condoms, citing the college's ban against distributing birth control on campus.
"We're a private Catholic college," Martin McGovern, Stonehill's spokesman. "We make no secret of our religious affiliation, and our belief system is fairly straightforward. We don't expect everyone on campus to agree with our beliefs, but we would ask people, and students in particular, to respect them."
McGovern said the college's policy follows church teachings, which oppose use of artificial contraception. Most Catholic colleges do not distribute birth control on campus.
"This is not a shocking revelation," that the college does not permit condom distribution, he said.
Freitas, who said she is not Catholic, said she decided to make condoms available because she was concerned about the consequences of students having unprotected sex.
"Abstinence can be part of sex-ed, and should be," she said. "But college students are going to have sex, and they should be encouraged to have safe sex. In certain moments, students aren't going to stop to run to CVS, so I think they should be available on campus."
The dispute at Stonehill echoes debates on access to birth control on other Catholic campuses in the region.
Students at Boston College recently passed a referendum urging the college to offer affordable testing for sexually transmitted infections and access to contraception.
I think this young woman should be applauded and that this ancient struggle needs to be relegated to the history books...ask Phil Harvey!
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