MTV: HIV, FYI

What I’ve come to expect from MTV ‘UK & Ireland,’ as it is nominally known, is American pimping, raiding, smashing stuff, self-inflicted pain, cosmetic surgery, blurred-out nipples, conspicuous and ridiculous wealth, Paris Hilton’s nauseating arrogance, incessant ads for telephone ring-tones, the obligatory Irish ‘howaya’ guy, aberrations of the word ‘news’, and variations on all of the above.

So I was taken a little by surprise to see an understated program that involved some normal (and not ‘TV-normal’) Americans sitting around answering questions in succession about how HIV has impacted on their lives.

There was no presenter and there were no tears. There were no statements of defiance. There was no self-indulgent condemnation about how ignorantly people treat them on learning of their infection. There was no soppy Oprah music or montages of these people in their beautiful homes or having blood tests or playing frisbee with their children. There was no passionate desire to educate the youth of America. No sponsored walks. No celebrity-sponsored funds. No admonition of political or church leaders. There was no talk of cures or plans for the future or bright-sides, or how broken family relationships were mended in the light of the tragedy. They were just given very simple questions and they answered them in turn, and occasionally asked each other to clarify or talk a bit more about a part of their of their story. Answers were short and to the point. It was distinctly (by what I am given to understand) un-American and (certainly) un-MTV.

Coincidentally, I got the results of some tests this week that were taken as a matter of procedure and I was found to be HIV and Hepatitis C negative. I had never seriously thought that the results would be any different, and I had no plans to go and get tested on my own initiative (to be honest I wouldn’t know where to start) but it was not unthinkable that they could have been.

I’ve done foolish things. Even despite that, I’ve had a lot of injections over the years, and I work in an Emergency Department that sees its fair share of Dublin’s lowest down-and-outs and drug addicts. I mean like I say, chances of having picked up a virus were highly remote but it was still reassuring to see it written down on an official letter, and in a way I can’t really fully account for, it felt very good to get the result. But interestingly, it doesn’t ‘put my mind at ease’ on the contrary it puts my mind on alert. I take the risk more seriously now, even though I still resent being assaulted by all the shock-tactic ads about it when I use a college toilet that makes me feel on the one hand like I’m not having as much sex as everybody else, and on the other that having sex would be the most terrifying ordeal I could put myself through.

Trying to make sex scary like that is not particularly helpful in my opinion. Treating your partner as a highly infectious conduit of lethal germs is not really the way we want to be going, I don’t think. Incidentally, there are also ads which use the ‘fear’ of pregnancy as an inducement to get people to rubber-up, which I think is a pretty thoughtless addition to the already discernible stigma that can attach to unplanned pregnancy. It’s also entirely unnecessary. Everyone knows what condoms are for – a simple reminder would suffice in my opinion. On that note, I know what I’d choose if I were offered a choice of a serious venereal disease and a child. An unexpected pregnancy is a biggy alright, but its one of the better bad things that could happen to a person.

Legal footnote:

Contraceptives became legal in Ireland (though very restrictively so) after the case of McGee V Attorney General in 1974 which was the result of Mrs. McGee having her spermicidal jelly seized by customs officers. I’m not certain what the legal situation was with condoms, but from reading of Walsh J’s Supreme Court judgment, it appears that there was a blanket ban on all forms of contraception up to that point when it was found inconsistent with the right to (particularly marital) privacy guaranteed by the constitution. Norris V Attorney General in 1977 (high court) and 1984 (supreme court) almost succeeded in the repeal of criminal laws against consensual anal sex, on the same logic, but his appeal failed as it was held that the legislature was entitled to limit the exercise that right on the grounds (inter alia) of the Christian nature of the nation and the fact that it would be injurious to the institution of marriage and public health. In 1989, the courts were finally obliged by the European Court of Human Rights, to repeal the law.