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March 2, 2009
Indian Youth Festival Invigorates Safe-Sex Talk
A recent youth festival in India raised awareness about HIV and other health issues by inviting attendees to talk openly about the pleasures of safe sex, The Washington Post reports. Talking about sex can be a difficult task in India’s traditional and patriarchal society, where open conversation about sex remains taboo.
“The whole debate about safe sex has been conducted around fear, danger, disease and death. It is negative. We forgot the pursuit of pleasure. We have to put the sexy back into safer sex,” said Anne Philpott, the British founder of the Pleasure Project, an international educational program that promotes safe sex that “feels good.”
About 2.5 million Indians were living with HIV in 2006, according to a U.N. report, and one third of them were ages 15 to 24. Since India began a national anti-AIDS program 15 years ago, the government is still struggling to get people to say the word condom. An advertisement campaign called Condom Bindaas Bol, or “Say Condom Freely,” encourages people to say the word without fear of stigma.
“Talking about disease and fear hasn’t worked very well. People believe they are in a safe relationship and that disease does not apply to them,” said Arushi Singh, a resource officer for the International Planned Parenthood Federation, which trains health educators in South Asia. “But pleasure,” she said, “applies to everyone.”
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