SEX WARS
The New Left's AIDS-Related Scientism

By David Mertz

Rethinking Marxism Spring 1996/1997

The Conceptual Field

In the last decade, the so-called Sexual Revolution of the 1960s and 1970s died. It did not die in the sense that people's sexual habits reverted to some pre-1960 standard of heterosexuality and monogamy. Actual behavior changed very little in the 1980s; and, at any rate, the 1950s and before were never as sexually limited as they are often imagined in contrast to what seemingly "must have" happened with the Sexual Revolution. In a sense, very little has probably changed in human sexual behavior since the advent of mass urbanization in the early nineteenth century.

What has changed dramatically in a decade is the ideological tools and strategies used in conceptualizing sexuality, and the relation of sexuality to broader notions of social power, political struggle, freedom and responsibility. Most of the renegotiation of sexuality has been a determined effort on the part of the right-wing to reinstitute its fantasy conception of "family values," normative heterosexuality, and condemnation of non-monogamy. An additional contribution to such a conservative renegotiation of meaning has come from certain self-identified feminists who have repeated the puritanical strains of 1920s "first wave" feminism in its "anti-prostitution/anti-vice" crusades. Both of these renegotiations have been extensively critiqued and analyzed in leftist philosophical circles, and such shall not be repeated here. What has been overlooked by most of us on the Left has been a third current of renegotiations of the ideologies of sexuality which is associated with the meanings given to AIDS. Or perhaps we have not overlooked it, but have been so completely blinded by its glaring ubiquity that we have not seen the ideological functions of AIDS.

AIDS has succeeded in shifting the left-wing discourse of sexuality away from one of liberation, freedom and resistance, to one of responsibility, danger and obligation - concepts much more at home with a right-wing scheme of social control, xenophobia and authoritarianism than with anything on the Left. "Safe sex" has succeeded in performing this conceptual shift-a shift which would be instantly seen through if it came from traditional conservative forces, and which would be largely resisted if it came from anti-porn "feminism" precisely because the language of "safe sex" is one inextricably signed with the imprimatur of medico-scientific authority. I would be the last to argue that sexual liberation has always been liberatory, sexual freedom always free, or sexual resistance always contrary to broad forms of domination. Sometimes, and in some ways, it has been, in other times and ways not. But at least there was a time, before this last decade of AIDS, when the discursive apparatuses of liberation, freedom and resistance had not been blanched out of sex.

The altars of science-in particular scientific sounding pronouncements about AIDS-have been the one significant form of social authority generally unquestioned-or at least not very deeply questioned-by academic leftists. In our guts we feel we need give no heed to the corrupt and reactionary pronouncements of the politicians and priests; but still, an inner voice rejoins, we must believe the scientists! Somehow science has served in dismantling the language of liberation in the Left more than any other institutions possibly could have, because the Left has not gone beyond an automatic doxastic presumption in favor of moralism bearing the imprimatur of science.

A Factual Gloss

The places where I-and I know my copanelists happen agree on these-think that science and its popularization have gone wrong are rather numerous. At the start of my heresy is the fact I don't believe the HIV-hypothesis very likely to be true. Once you go about reading the actual biochemistry and immunology about HIV and AIDS, it is only by taking a quite gigantic leap-of-faith that you can get to the notion that AIDS is caused by HIV. That so many very intelligent scientist are willing so thoroughly to suspend disbelief on this, basically to assume a conclusion in the absence of any very good evidence, is a very interesting case study in a politicized philosophy of science. For reasons having little to do with the sexual moralities I want to discuss, there is a bias of reductionism and mono-causalism in science which makes the one-virus/one-disease model very appealing, even where the evidence doesn't support it. Beyond that, the "war on cancer" of the 1970's promoted a more limited bias towards explaining disease with viruses, and with retroviruses in particular.

More germane to what I want to do today is the way that popular conceptions have cast the epidemiology of AIDS. Quite independent of what is causing it, something is going on with some new kinds of deaths in the last fifteen years. The two dogmas, as it were, of the folk-epidemiology of AIDS seem to be (1) that it is an ongoing epidemic; and (2) that it is poised on the verge of afflicting non-traditional groups (basically non-drug-injecting heterosexuals). These dogmas have been held pretty firmly by just about everyone since about 1984: both scientists and laypersons. As odd as it might sound in the context of a paper criticizing scientism, what I recommend everyone do is skip through all the articles, scientific and popular, which excitedly, almost reverently, declare an explosion of AIDS cases amongst heterosexuals, and go straight to the raw data. This information is happily available in the CDC's HIV/AIDS Surveillance Reports. What you will find is that AIDS is mostly a gay-male disease, and those persons with AIDS (PWAs) who are not gay-men, whether male or female, are overwhelmingly IVDUs. I have argued using some statistical analyses in another paper that even those few cases which reportedly have to do with heterosex are largely false reports; but that's not the main point here, since the numbers are small to start with in proportion to the cases in gay-men and IVDUs.

The other dogma, about the plague-like epidemic, doesn't do to well with the raw numbers either. In 1994, the total number of new AIDS cases in the U.S. have declined by about a third. They will continue to decline at roughly the same rate, year by year, that they increased prior to 1994. Actually, the increase in cases in 1993 was purely a statistical artifact of yet another definition change in January 1993 which defined a lot of people as having AIDS who would not have been defined as having AIDS had they presented to doctors in 1992. If you look at only the cases under the 1992 definition, 1993 also showed a decline in cases of about a third. If you look at deaths, rather than at new diagnoses, the peak was reached sometime in 1991 or 1992. Whenever the normal distribution reached its exact maximum, the fact is that AIDS is not going to be fundamentally different from every other new disease in human history in following a bell curve of initial incidence.

As terrible as it is that as many people have died as have, the worst is over, and this worst doesn't come close, for example, to the three million people who died in a much shorter time of so-called Asian Flu in 1917 and 1918-when the U.S. had about half its current population. My point is not insensitively to dismiss AIDS deaths on the grounds that they lack the magnitude of influenza, but rather to observe that however many more people died of influenza earlier this century than will die of AIDS, influenza never carried the same pretense of its very numbers making moral and political arguments. Those were merely deaths: tragic, regrettable, unfortunate, but not able to convince us to compromise a language and hope of political liberation. Similarly, a lot of things like cancer, heart-disease and auto-fatalities kill a lot more people than AIDS-but leftists do not insistently and obsessively lecture on the techniques for prophylaxis against these deaths. On the other hand, there was another disease of the early 20th century which wore the same shady deontic veil that AIDS does now: syphilis. I will talk about syphilis a bit later in this paper.

Abjection and Moralism

Whenever I have mentioned writing this, or related papers, to friends and colleagues on the Left, the very first reaction is inevitably a sort of gasp, followed by an exasperated warning that I better be careful to emphasize the importance of "safe-sex." For speaking before this group of leftist academics, their implicit premise remains that lest I admonish you all explicitly on the virtues of condoms-and perhaps of monogamy-you will all rush from this room during my lecture, and fuck around so furiously as forthwith to contract AIDS (or perhaps lack even the discretion of leaving the room prior to such activity). Still more, this ritual is insisted upon for speech before the "hapless" and "innocent" undergraduates whom we teach. The magical powers attributed to a simple lack of obedience to the idol of safe-sex is quite remarkable. Prior to teaching a course in medical ethics which was to focus on AIDS issues, I had a well-known leftist academic angrily insist he could not serve on my dissertation committee because I might fail to warn my students staunchly enough against unsafe-sex. A friend of mine has been fired from a post-doc position at Princeton, by a nominal leftist with a lot of federal money, for essentially the same reason. Leftists have been amongst those who vilify HIV-dissenters like Peter Duesberg on the grounds that insufficient dogmatism about the HIV-hypothesis might somehow lead to insufficient respect for condoms and monogamy-even though etiological doubts are quite orthogonal to epidemiological facts. It is not just those who denounce safe-sex, like some crazies of the Xtian right, but those who fail to preach safe-sex with sufficient enthusiasm, who raise the ire of safe-sex'ers.

Essentially, "safe-sex" has become a sort of secular scientistic religion of the Left. Certainly many non-leftists share in the faith, but the fundamentalism is greatest amongst us. The cardinal sin according to this religion is an old Catholic one: accidie, the failure to perform one's duties with sufficient zeal. Under this sin, silence becomes death, or more precisely murder; wherein everyone not mentioning condoms in every context becomes culpable for AIDS deaths. The absurdity of the imperative only witnesses its structural importance. Condoms are now made to be exhibited, in a kind of paean to the regulation of sex. Condoms serve as talismanic objects for the feel-good "do something about AIDS" testifiers, amusingly safety pinned onto clothing in a manner to render any functional potential void, and advertised on buses and billboards underlined by homilies intended to affirm the political radicalism of the passive viewer who assures herself that she knows their importance. The content of this regulation is a bit ethereal: it doesn't prescribe all that much, and what it does prescribe is hardly ever followed by its proponents. The percentage of heterosexuals in any demographic group who use condoms with any regularity hovers below twenty. The percentage of gay men who use them is higher, which is fortunate given that it is gays who are at a real risk; but this religion is quite catholic: its prescriptions, like its grace, apply equivalently to all the devout.

Two related points need to be drawn out to see where the officially positivistic reasoning of leftist AIDS discourse breaks down. Overtly, leftist safe-sexers have no more than a purely objective concern with public-health. However, those whom we most forcefully and frequently try to "educate" about AIDS, are precisely those at the smallest-and in fact quite minuscule-risk. Basically the message of "safe-sex" is one we preach to our undergraduate heterosexuals. It may have a magical power to proclaim that "everyone is at risk!"; but on the facts, not everyone is. The arguments in favor of AIDS catholicism, and arguments on the greater ease of convincing everyone than convincing those who matter, are simply so many "Noble Lies." The second point in critiquing the official legitimization of our AIDS ideology is that the many risks which are greater than that of heterosexual AIDS are treated with absolutely none of the moralizing quality which is given to slogans on safe-sex. Nor is the insistence ever so great; nor the almost compulsive quality present.

Our False Catholicism about Who Is At-Risk

A correspondent of mine has asserted that only 5% of all U.S. AIDS educational materials are directed at gay-men. I don't want to put too fine a point on that particular fraction, since it is very difficult to trace even the federal funding of AIDS, let alone all the local efforts. I will even confess that not every safe-sex pamphlet and billboard not specifically targeting gay-men thereby automatically exclude them. But the overall pattern is clear: a sizable majority of safe-sex material is specifically targeted to young, white heterosexuals. Injecting drug use receives similarly short shrift in these materials. When, occasionally, the actual demographics of AIDS faintly tugs at the consciousness of safe-sex pamphleteers, gay-men and IVDU's might receive a passing footnote for their specificity of risk. The tone here is generally one where in a pamphlet warning of the dangers of unsafe-sex, one might read a parenthetical allusion to the fact that gay-men are at particularly high risk, or that sharing-needles should also be avoided. These pamphlets never contain a frank acknowledgement that, depending on how many men you think you are having sex with men, the risks are different by powers somewhere between several hundred and several thousand - on par, for example, with the difference in risk that men and women face from breast cancer.

It is easy enough to dismiss a few examples of heterosexually targeted pamphlets. By nature, the examples are anecdotal. What I would like to ask instead is how the leftist academics here approach discussion of AIDS risk with your students, or with others with whom you talk. You may not carry on such discussion at all-in which case this part of my talk really is not much about you. Some of you might tell your students that insofar as they are men having sex with men, and insofar as they share needles, they face relatively high risks of developing AIDS. I want to talk a bit later about what I think is a false normativity often accompanying such statements; but this suggested statement, by itself at least, is quite fair. Basically, this talk is also not about those of you giving such prosaic advise.

In my experience, however, these prosaic accuracies are not what most of you are telling your students. What I think you are doing is telling your predominantly heterosexual and non-needle-sharing undergraduate classes that they had, sui generis, all better be careful so as not to contract AIDS. Occasionally, I think, you are getting scared young heterosexuals coming into your office hours after having had their first one-night stands, terrified that they have now contracted AIDS. What you are probably telling them is exactly what gets you off the hook most easily: that they should go to the local health-clinic for HIV testing, and use condoms in every future sexual contact. The first part I think is rather bad advice inherently. The second, however, while not harmful of itself, reflects a backing down from a radical stance, and a failure of leftist pedagogy. What we are doing in giving this "safe" advice is granting the legitimacy of our students' irrational fears because of their sexual contents. Thereby we fail to critique the systematic regulation of sexuality in the maintenance of a repressive social order. Even if the content of the regulation-at least of condoms, if not of abstinence or monogamy-is fairly uninteresting, our facile advice simply affirms the necessary primacy of regulation itself. We ourselves embody a sort of psychoanalytic Paternal Law, for which it matters not so much what is commanded as that something, at least, be so commanded. I think the failure is easily understood by analogy with places we, hopefully, do not fail. If a young woman student despairs, to us, of ever "finding a man," I hope we do not formulaicly assure her of her future marital bliss-but rather say a few (gentle) words on the dependent position women are cast into by patriarchy. And if a young Christian becomes convinced of his future damnation, I hope we do not tacitly mutter a few words about redemption of sin-but rather a few about the absolutization of ressentiment in Xtianity.

Our Lack of Catholicism about Risky Activities

While the notion that "everyone is at risk" from AIDS is dogmatically prescribed by the Left, our concern for risks is oddly curtailed to those accompanying sex. Let me use a hokey example, which although unfortunately reminiscent of papers about "lifeboat ethics" is also about something I happen to have done personally. If I say I am going out rock-climbing, my lefty friends might say "be careful" or "use precautions" offhandedly; but they probably would not say anything besides "have fun." If, on the other hand, I say I am going to go fuck around heterosexually and promiscuously, without condoms, they will react angrily with accusations of my foolishness and moral irresponsibility. But in fact, the rock-climbing-even with ropes and such safety measures-poses significantly more actuarial danger (to myself, or also to my climbing partner). Of course, a lot more people fuck than rock-climb, so the totals are a bit higher for heterosexual AIDS, despite the percentagewise greater mortality risk of rock-climbing. Part of the difference in reaction is simply a misappraisal of the relative odds-but I think there is a much larger part which is symptomatic of an adoption of a normativity of sexual regulation.

Even clearer examples of differently preached risks come with other diseases. Heart disease is every bit as much behaviorally related as is AIDS, but recommendations for its prophylaxis are seldom stated so moralistically by the Left as are those for AIDS. For non-drug-injecting heterosexuals (or lesbians), dietary-linked deaths are a good bit more numerous both proportionally and absolutely than are sexually-linked ones. This is not the case for gay-male sex, nor is it for drug-injecting-but as I have said, our proselytizing is not directed solely, or even primarily, at those activities. One might get a word of friendly advise from a leftist about the health dangers associated with fatty foods, lack of exercise, or smoking. But if one persists in these activities, our good leftists will probably shrug to themselves over the foolishness of fat-eating, but recognize that such a risk is simply each individual's to take. Such magnanimity over the self-endangerment of others does not generally extend to sexually incurred risks. Rather, one clings to the supposition that those indulging in "risky" sex (however small the actual risk) must be doing so out of lack-of-information, self-deceit, or because of some sort of repressive imposition of the sexual acts upon them. Here the Left seems to subscribe to a fairy-tale ontology of squeaky-clean sex, never sullied by something so base as desire. I do not wish here to state as the contrary some high romanticist poeticism about untamed passions; it is just that I think the Left has curiously overlooked the rather commonsense point that people generally have sex because they want to. Within feminism, a lot of this never-neverland heterosexuality harks back to some familiar refrains of cults-of-true-womanhood, and to the moral pureness of women. Perhaps now women maintain their purity through condoms rather than marriage, but either is ritualistic at best as far as the near-nonexistent risk of heterosexual AIDS is concerned.

Naturalistic Fallacies

The unequal treatment of sexual and non-sexual risks leads to a philosophical observation. An ontological error, I think, has been committed by the Left in its derivation of a political ought from an alleged biological is. This naturalistic fallacy reasons that since AIDS is pandemic, there exists a moral obligation for each person to minimize her risk of AIDS. Failure to utilize prophylaxis is thus cast as a ethical failing. It happens that even the factual premise is rather weak for heterosex, but amongst gay-men AIDS is indeed fairly prevalent, albeit not actually epidemic since the incidence is decreasing. It has been suggested to me that underlying the Left's naturalistic fallacy about safe-sex is an enthymatic moral principle according to which avoidance of disease is good. There may indeed be such a moral principle to which leftists subscribe-although more likely the valuation is mostly pragmatic-but the problem is that we simply have no right to impose this moral principle on the unwilling. Deep down we all value other's autonomy enough to recognize that we should not try to impose our moral valuation of health and risk on others; but most often that respect for autonomy is paved over with the specious rationalizing claim that all those others are merely ignorant of the risks they face. This claim is facile. Very few people, gay, straight or lesbian, drug-injecting or not, are really much unaware of the health risks of sex-how could they be after a century of constant barrage on this, and after 15 years of this barrage having the name 'AIDS'? Indeed, those who misevaluate risk almost universally believe their danger greater than it is.

People, in full awareness of risks, decide to engage in "risky" sex. Both heterosexuals and lesbians whose risk is minuscule, and gays whose risk is much greater, choose the psychological, physical and political benefits of "risky" sex to be more important than the associated risks. It is easy enough to say that had the eventually afflicted amongst them known the result, they would have acted differently. That might well be true most of the time. Similarly, that subset of pedestrians who are struck by cars almost universally retroactively evaluate their injury as more serious than the purpose of their errand. This reasoning is quite a bad argument for avoiding walking, and just as bad for avoiding unsafe sex. It is only by abandoning a possibility for the discursive construction of notions of liberation and freedom in sexuality that we have come to believe every virtue associated with non-risk-free sex to be outweighed by the potential for harm also accompanying it. In the end, this is a perfectly legitimate choice for each of us to make for ourselves, but it is not one we should try to impose on others, as we have so univocally done.

Syphilis and History

It happens that AIDS is nothing like what is widely believed in it's epidemiology or causality; but there was a disease, not so long ago, which fit almost to a 'T' the current misconceptions about AIDS: namely, syphilis. Progressive groups of the nineteen-teens, such as the American Social Hygiene Association, produced stunning estimates of syphilis affecting as much as 10% of the adult U.S. population. While such estimates were, no doubt, exaggerations used to support a political agenda-much as are most projections of AIDS cases today-it is nonetheless quite believable that several percent of U.S. residents had indeed contracted syphilis. Mortality and crippling morbidities were common in the disease. What I find most interesting in the history of syphilis is that virtually every argument made today about AIDS was made almost verbatim prior the 1930's about syphilis: the arguments of the public-health authorities, of today's feminists, of today's gay-press, of leftists and liberals, and the arguments of today's rightwing Xtian fundamentalists. I cannot recommend highly enough Alan Brandt's book on the Social History of Venereal Disease in this regard. I had hoped, in writing this paper, to trace the parallels in the ideological construction of syphilis and AIDS in some detail; but I have not managed to fit that within the time constraints. What I would like to do instead is merely gesture to a few observations.

Disappointingly, the Left suffered all the same failures in its ideological construction of syphilis as it has with AIDS. It was largely self-identified progressives, and especially self-identified feminists of the nineteen-teens who led the anti-prostitution and anti-vice campaigns which were some of the most widely orchestrated state-repressions of 20th century U.S. history. The victims of these repressive campaigns were, of course, poor women. Aside from a language of "female spirituality"-often invoked also by feminists nowadays-the chief argument for these police-state measures was syphilis. The very same derivation of moral laws-and thereby state actions-from epidemiological facts was the centerpiece of much progressivism and feminism of the early century, just as it is today. Then, as now, it was only a specifically sexually-related disease which convinced leftists of the need for police action. Other diseases, then as now, never seemed to carry such an imminent demand for the forfeit of freedoms.

Let me conclude with an Hegelian remark on the history of venereal disease. Despite the analogies I suggest, there has also been a developmental process in the language of venereal disease. The dominant ideological construction of sexual disease had a religious framework in the teens. The language concerned moral failings and corruptions, and mentioned the essentially ethical dangers of unsafe-sex. By the 1940's, when treatments for syphilis had become much more effective, a much more medicalized language became dominant. A positivistic discourse of public-health and biology was the rhetorical strategy one used in understanding sexual dangers. With the emergence of AIDS as a discursive phenomenon the positivism was not abandoned, rather the very language of science was recycled into the construction of a fully scientistic theology of disease. The language of science, remaining on the surface value-neutral, became the framework for conceptualizing moral necessity! *

VIRUSMYTH HOMEPAGE