Every Day is a World AIDS Day

Commemorating the fact that it was yesterday when HIV/AIDS was all over news and is not there today while for millions and millions of people every day is an HIV/AIDS day, Eszter reminds us of the nature of the virus and of the pandemic:

"1st December is the international awareness day of one of the most dispiteous diseases, the AIDS since 1988. This infection is caused by a virus, the Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV), which enters into the DNA of the cells of the immune system, there reproduces and makes the immune system helpless against pathogen agents. In the long run due to the failure of the immune system fatal opportunistic infections causes death in the infected persons. The ways of transmission are sexual transmission, using intravenous drugs with common needles, nowadays rarely but blood transfusion means a risk factor as well and children can be infected during pregnancy, labour and delivery, and breast feeding.

Recent studies say that if HIV carriers’ babies are fed only with breast-milk the risk of getting infected is up to zero percent. Though if these babies need to get additional nutrition, the risk grows up to 20%. If an HIV positive woman wishes to have a baby it is not impossible, it needs only correct planning: delivering with caesarean operation and clearing up if the mother has enough breast-milk to feed the baby or not.

Time to time humankind has to face diseases which are considered to be fatal. It is enough if we remember Black Death which rated incurable to 1894. Before the immunization era plague killed one-third, almost half of the European population. Our hope is that researchers will be able to develop the immunization of HIV soon. The signs are encouraging.

Till then the numbers of the infected persons are sadly growing. Nowadays 34 million people live with HIV. In 2011 2,5 million people were newly infected (330.000 of them are children), and 1,7 million died by reason of AIDS.
The aim of the World AIDS Day is to raise awareness on prevention (to stop the spreading of the virus) and to educate people about the ways of transmission. Every people are apprehensive of the Unknown, this is why the most important challenge is to improve knowledge to reduce stigmatization. The Getting to Zero campaign begun last year and this will be the theme of the World AIDS Days to 2015.  

Getting to Zero is double-meaning motto: reduce both the new infections and the discrimination to zero. And IPPF has introduced a very important campaign in 2010, called Criminalize Hate, Not HIV with a special site HIV and the Law.

In 2010 I had the possibility to join a meeting where HIV positive people could share their experiences. This meeting was closed; these people were very careful and tried to keep their secret very strictly. This was a good place for the newly detected HIV positives to get acquainted with other patients, and to help how to survive the first period after getting the positive result. Even their age and the length of their positive status were diverse: from 18 to 60 years old and for one week positive to 30 years ago positive. For the question “What has changed?” the answer was ambivalent: “Both nothing and everything.”

Nothing, because they are still the same person who they were a day before, but everything, because in the future they would have to take care of themselves and their partner more. If every volunteer tried to call only 10 people’s attention for the prevention we could approach the number of the newly infected peoples to zero. Please take part in an awareness campaign held in your surroundings, start planning the AIDS Candlelight Memorial and help us to reduce the number of the victims."

Condoms, condoms, CONDOMS!

This is a public service announcement:  Following the educational example of The Golden Girls,  I ♥ Being a Girl reminds you that using condoms is the socially and ethically responsible thing to do. So is talking about them, promoting their use and challenging the weird people who would not mention (and/or use) them while having no idea about their sero-status!

+ Going on a condom buying mission is a good way to star your SRHR/feminist activism. Figure out how good are the salespeople in your neighborhood. 

If you find a especially nasty place that make people uncomfortable, go again and again (with your friends to make it a rave-like party) until they do sth about it. Make inquiries about the types of lube they have. Write angry notes in their "Customer suggestions" book. 

Make the access to supplies your little rebellious mission!

#IPPF60 in numbers

#IPPF60

 

Ever wondered how much does IPPF actually does around the globe? Watch and get educated.
And surprised, and proud.

Happy birthday IPPF!

Friday is the (Inspirational) Movie Night: Rent (2005)

#inspirational movies 

While marking a World AIDS Day in the calendar again tomorrow, putting your red ribbon on (though we hope you raise HIV/AIDS awareness all the other days of the year too) and going to do some activism...

We suggest you combine the useful with the entertaining and turn to Rent (2005) for this week's inspiration. This is a screen version of a ground-breaking Broadway musical, adaptation of the Giacomo Puccini's opera La bohème, that was the first musical that was explicitly - and in a normalizing way - featuring bisexuality, homosexuality, transsexuality, sex work, the urbane HIV/AIDS crisis, drug use... not your classical fluffy musical!

On the other hand, it's still very scenic, very melodic, very romantic, very musical, really, and, yes, inspirational too.

And reminding that HIV/AIDS is not what it once was provided that you have access to treatment.

IPPF ♥ - YSAFE for #IPPF60

#IPPF60 #SRHR

As we are celebrating the 60th anniversary of IPPF, listen to what YSAFE young people have to say about it!

IPPF ♥ for #IPPF60

#IPPF60 #SRHR

  

"IPPF started its journey in 1952, when 8 family planning associations joined together to fight for a cause.

60 years later and the organization is nearly 20 times larger. It works in 172 countries, delivers millions of services all over the world. And drives major changes in global policy.

Together, IPPF’s family makes up the largest sexual and reproductive health and rights organization in the world. None of this would have been achieved without the untiring efforts of IPPF’s staff and volunteers, and our partners in government, civil society and business.

There is so much the Federation can be proud of: it continues to improve the health of millions by contributing to health systems strengthening around the world. It provides services where no government facilities exist, it trains health workers, reacts rapidly in emergency situations and provides expertise that others can learn from."

LET'S EAT CAKE!

This is the cake that IPPF Western Hemisphere Region enjoyed!

Friday is the (Inspirational) Movie Night: Stealing Beauty (1996)

#inspirationalmovies

There are lot of bad news going on lately... Go, Google Savita Halappanavar, Tonio Borg, Malala Yousufzai... Google Operation Pillar of Defense... sometimes it hurts so much to read the news.

So, although there is quite a lot of socially critical and tough movies we have prepared in our "feministing / SRHR" filmlist, this week our offer is that you go soft and kind on yourself. Some self-care, you know.

Stealing Beauty (1996) is a poorly recognized feature Bernardo Bertolucci. A sweet, sensual coming-of-age story set in an eccentric social circle/family and filmed in Tuscany (go, now Google "Tuscany" for a change). Featuring a very young Liv Tyler discovering smaller and bigger pleasures, autonomy and authenticity.

A very nice way to say goodbye to this November-November...

    

WSYA Power 2 Women: GotStared.at / Saransh

As you should know by now, I ♥ Being a Girl received one of the 2012 World Summit Youth Awards. The award showcases the best ICT solutions made by young people that moves us closer to achieving the MDGs. Ours is - obviously - in the category Power to Women.

As we are far from being the only ones doing things around gender via the internets and such, here you have some more:   

Saransh Dua, @SaranshDua and GotStared.At

I enjoy spending time with family and friends, reading, and traveling.

GotStared.At has grown a lot as a campaign in terms of the core idea behind the movement. Now it is a movement that aims to create a counter culture amongst the people in our society where respecting the other gender would be considered cool.

Over history it has been realized that certain trends tend to catch the fancy of the common man. AIDS awareness, education for the poor, green energies, etc. are examples of causes which, obviously being quite relevant, managed to gain wide spread public support in India when compared to many other pertinent issues as well. We aim to create something similar with the idea of gender as the central theme.

For too long the idea of gender debates, discussions have been a talk amongst the elitist in India. This needs to be converted into a discussion amongst the masses and we aim to do just that. We are all about simplification of complex issues which the public tend to shy away from discussing simply because of the jargon used in the messages sent to the public or the fact that in the age of twitter and face book people tend to be drawn more towards graphic driven content. We create posters and other visualizations portraying complex issues in the common mans parlance. The result of this is that rather than people tuning into what maybe a few experts have to say, to tune into what their community has to say and engage with them on the online platforms provided by us.

 

The idea behind #itsnotherfault came out at a time when most of the public in India was extremely hassled over the widespread assumptions that the girls who were getting molested on the street of India were the ones who were asking for it. This meant that the short clothes and bar hopping lifestyles were causing a rise in the “testosterone” levels of the Indian male and the poor guys had no option but to sexually harass the women as she was apparently “asking for it”.

So the site GotStared.At was initially developed by Dhruv as a place to come in and post what they were wearing while they were harassed. This led to a tremendous amount of virality as it was tackling a very pertinent issue of victim bashing as described above.
People from all over the world started posting pictures of the clothes that they were wearing when harassed and the flow of entries still hasn’t stopped as everyday there is more proof of the fact that no matter where you are, the only thing that will cause the harassment is the perpetrator and his intentions and nothing else.

The world would be a better place if everybody would:
  - See something new every week.
  - Listen to The Beatles, Pink Floyd and the list goes on...
  - Read The Story of My Experiments with Truth, Poor Economics, Think, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid.
  - Try being genuine and humane.

Before I'm 80, I'd like to... travel the world.

Let the bodies be!

Yes, somehow we have ended up speaking about the Dove campaigns again...

Stumbled across a post in BBC News called Five photos that sparked body image debates. Fair enough. The message? The usual one. Do what you want people will never like actual bodies. The bodies not being allowed to be what they actually are - vehicles. Very diverse vehicles if you look for differences. And very similar vehicles if you compare them to anything else. Facts of life.

They have to be about something else. Like, sexualization of the pregnant. Or being too fat, too thin, too short, too hairy... blah, blah, blah.

Mind that the only male among the 5 cases reviewed is a person with disability that took the Body for Life challenge and ended up with a body many people did not believed to be real.

All the women featured have suffered media-storms of not being perfect enough (as they say, "only decades earlier maternity dresses tended to sport large bows at the neck to direct attention away from the baby bump - and the mother's femininity"; no the naked pregnant famous lady photos were not normal before 1991).

It's about being too real. Too exposed. Too vulnerable.

And, yes, the story is about media and fashion industry as those are cases of outrages about people with public female bodies. As Demi Moore. As Lizzie Miller. As Isabelle Caro. And not yet touching the question how that spirit of body-watch, that constant scrutiny affects all of us.

While it's perfectly fine to take pictures while you are pregnant. While we are happy about every model that have some body fat (although it's unclear why they are specially marked as +models). And while anorexia might certainly be a dangerous and very painful thing to deal with.

...it is not OK to police bodies.

IPPF ♥ - YSAFE SC - Thomas

Name: Thomas Goyvaerts, member of the YSAFE Steering Committee.

I enjoy taking challenges, traveling and going out with friends.

I became aware by being active in the social circuit since I was 15. Every opportunity or challenge I faced helped me grow and helped me get more aware about all kinds of social topics that were now to me. For example, right now I'm doing an internship with male sex workers, something I recently learned about and immediately wanted to know some more.

I joined my IPPF Member Association, Sensoa, because to me it was one step up in the whole social staircase; I tend to travel a lot between organizations so to learn and grow even more.

The world would be a better place if everybody would:
   - See a starry midnight sky in the mountains to make you feel small, the view from a high mountaintop to make you feel big and the look of love in that one special person's eyes just so you really know how special you are. If you can do this and be happy with yourself, you can face any storm.
  - Listen Everybody's free to wear sunscreen by Baz Luhrman.
  - Read the stuff you wrote when you were young; love letters, diaries, school reports, cards, letters... So you can see how you've grown, see what possibilities you had but didn't know about and realize that you still have so many possibilities right now that you don't know about.
  - Try many new directions, and if they don't turn out to be like you wanted then at least you made one step in the right direction.

Before I'm 80 I want to have traveled a lot, I want to be able to say that I found true love (even if I lost it by then) & I want to be proud of who I am and stick by it for the rest of my life.