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Indian Youth Festival Puts Sexy Back in Dialogue About Safe Sex

<http://www.newsspice.com/> NEW DELHI -- A recent youth festival aimed at
raising awareness about health issues and HIV in India did something unique
to draw visitors. Amid all the sobering talk of at-risk communities, safe
sex and health care, the festival invited bashful attendees to talk about
pleasure.



<http://www.newsspice.com/> At one booth, visitors were urged to leave tips
in a drop box under a sign that asked, "Can safe sex be sexy?" In another
booth nearby, the use of the female condom was demonstrated to curious
onlookers.



<http://www.newsspice.com/> But talking about sex can be an uphill task in
India's traditional and patriarchal society. Even though India gave the
world the "Kama Sutra," the ancient Sanskrit text about sexual behavior,
open conversations about sex remain taboo in the country.



<http://www.newsspice.com/> "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."



<http://www.newsspice.com/> The program was born out of Philpott's
experience promoting female condoms in India, Sri Lanka, Senegal and
Zimbabwe as an "erotic accessory." In the past four years, she has pushed
the pleasure principle at AIDS conferences in Bangkok, Sri Lanka and Mexico,
and she is teaming up with Indian health groups to re-spin the safe-sex
message.



<http://www.newsspice.com/> "Health workers often address the issue of safe
sex in a clinical manner or like a teacher wagging their finger. It is more
effective when they find creative ways to incorporate pleasure and desire
into the sexual-health dialogue," she said.



<http://www.newsspice.com/> About 2.5 million Indians were living with HIV
in 2006, according to a report by the United Nations, and one-third of them
were ages 15 to 24. Fifteen years after India began a national anti-AIDS
program, the government is still confronting the basic challenge of getting
people to even utter the word "condom." An advertisement campaign called
"Condom Bindaas Bol" or "Say Condom Freely" urges people to say the word
without fear of stigma.



<http://www.newsspice.com/> "In our culture, there are so many wedding
songs that are full of playful sexual connotations. Women sing it, but when
you ask them to talk, they go shy," said Rituparna Borah, project associate
for Nirantar, a group that works on rural women's health issues in northern
India. "But once they begin to speak, the walls come down."



<http://www.newsspice.com/> One area in which Philpott's pleasure principle
is being implemented successfully in India is the promotion of the female
condom.



<http://www.newsspice.com/> At the youth festival, held last month and
dubbed Project 19, the volunteers led a game in which they asked amused
visitors to describe their first impression of the female condom.



<http://www.newsspice.com/> "We tell the sex workers to have fun with the
female condom. We tell them, 'You spend money on makeup, jewelry, jasmine
flowers for your hair. This female condom is another ornament for you,' "
said Kavita Potturi, national program manager with Hindustan Latex Family
Planning Promotion Trust, a division of a company that sells the female
condom.



<http://www.newsspice.com/> Two years after a limited introduction, India
will scale up the distribution of female condoms among 200,000 sex workers.
According to a study by the governmental National Aids Control Organization,
sex workers said they often persuaded their clients to use protection by
citing enhanced pleasure from it. The number of nongovernmental groups using
the pleasure rationale to promote safe sex is slowly growing in India.



<http://www.newsspice.com/> "When we begin to talk about HIV and AIDS,
people run away. They think we are preaching celibacy," said G. Krishna, a
gay health worker with a group called Suraksha Society in the southern city
of Hyderabad. "I have now begun conducting rapport-building exercises by
asking people how and what they enjoy."



<http://www.newsspice.com/> At the festival, a giggly group of college
students who stopped at Philpott's stall excitedly wrote down tips, drew
sketches and asked questions.



<http://www.newsspice.com/> "We can totally relate to this. We are tired of
moral lecturing about safe sex all the time," said Swedha Singh, 18, a
mathematics undergraduate at Delhi University.



<http://www.newsspice.com/> Health workers said they faced barriers in
communicating with young people.



<http://www.newsspice.com/> "Talking about disease and fear haven'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.



<http://www.newsspice.com/> "But pleasure," she said, "applies to
everybody."



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