Both the Moral Majority, who are recycling medieval language to explain AIDS, and those ultra-leftists who attribute AIDS to some ...sort of conspiracy, have a clearly political analysis of the epidemic. But even if one attributes its cause to a microorganism rather than the wrath of God, or the workings of the CIA, it is clear that the way in which AIDS has been perceived, conceptualized, imagined, researched and financed makes this the most political of diseases.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
[If a woman athlete who had contracted the AIDS virus admitted that she] had been with one hundred or two hundred men, they'd call... her a slut, and the corporations would drop her like a lead balloon.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
AIDS occupies such a large part in our awareness because of what it has been taken to represent. It seems the very model of all th...e catastrophes privileged populations feel await them.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Like the effects of industrial pollution ... the AIDS crisis is evidence of a world in which nothing important is regional, local,... limited; in which everything that can circulate does, and every problem is, or is destined to become, worldwide.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The AIDS epidemic has rolled back a big rotting log and revealed all the squirming life underneath it, since it involves, all at o...nce, the main themes of our existence: sex, death, power, money, love, hate, disease and panic. No American phenomenon has been so compelling since the Vietnam War.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Electronic aids, particularly domestic computers, will help the inner migration, the opting out of reality. Reality is no longer g...oing to be the stuff out there, but the stuff inside your head. It's going to be commercial and nasty at the same time.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
A "snapshot" feature in USA Today listed the five greatest concerns parents and teachers had about children in the '50s: talking o...ut of turn, chewing gum in class, doing homework, stepping out of line, cleaning their rooms. Then it listed the five top concerns of parents today: drug addiction, teenage pregnancy, suicide and homicide, gang violence, anorexia and bulimia. We can also add AIDS, poverty, and homelessness. . . . Between my own childhood and the advent of my motherhood--one short generation--the culture had gone completely mad.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Prostitution is the supreme triumph of capitalism.... Worst of all, prostitution reinforces all the old dumb clichés about women'...s sexuality; that they are not built to enjoy sex and are little more than walking masturbation aids, things to be DONE TO, things so sensually null and void that they have to be paid to indulge in fornication, that women can be had, bought, as often as not sold from one man to another. When the sex war is won prostitutes should be shot as collaborators for their terrible betrayal of all women, for the moral tarring and feathering they give indigenous women who have had the bad luck to live in what they make their humping ground.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »