Martin Henry, Contributor
IN THE cartoon of award-winning cartoonist Las May last Thursday, Miss Erotica, obviously not a bedroom slave but rather business-like condoms at hand, is ready to engage her next 'client'.
The 'client' is HIV/AIDS, otherwise known as Death the Grim Reaper, judged from his skeletal frame, his attire and his tool. In the tragedy of HIV/AIDS, the number of innocents children, women, and men is rising. Although, from the gender-biased dirges for World AIDS Day, anybody would think that men are simply the evil perpetrators of HIV/AIDS genocide against the rest of the human race and never themselves victims and innocents. Conscious of fellow humanness and our shared vulnerability, we mourn the afflicted.
FROM LUNCH TO LEXUS
But while we mourn, we must recognise the truth, that the spread of AIDS in Jamaica is driven by the sex trade in all its many dimensions. We are a free sex people, 'Free' in the sense of being unrestrained, certainly not in the sense of not attracting a price. There is a price: from lunch to Lexus.
In the blinding mass of HIV/AIDS statistics hurled at us we must not fail to see that the epicentres of the epidemic have been, in the main, tourist centres and parishes. The licentious character of the culture and the commercial transactional nature of most of Jamaican sex in which even children freely engage are at the heart of our version of the epidemic, not the subordination of women to bedroom slavery which, of course, cannot be dismissed as a reality.
Death prefers to ride bareback too. He refuses Miss Erotica's offer of a condom with a resounding 'Nooooooooooo!' The cartoonist's text is explicitly clear: "Use a condom to fight HIV/AIDS." His underlying sub-text, perhaps unintended, is more penetrating. Miss Erotica is willing to be copulated by Death if he wears a condom. That hard and virile four-letter word for copulate would, with its double meaning, serve much better here, but conscience and editorial restriction do not permit!
PROTECTIVE ARMOUR
The French refer to orgasm as la petite morte, 'the little death'. The big death now lurks in every sexual encounter with only the thinnest of rubber sheeting for protective armour worn with deadly suspicion. Or not bot-hered with at all by a daredevil, risk-taking, it can't happen to me set of people.
In Greek religion (conceitedly referred to as Greek mythology by modern people with their own myths), Eros and Thanatos, Love and Death, were brothers. Eros to the Greeks was the god of both heterosexual and homosexual love without distinction. Libertine bisexuality, like the Greeks', has played a very important role in the spread of HIV/AIDS. From Eros comes the word 'erotic'. Thanatos, the god of Death was portrayed robed in black and armed with a sword. Now you see where Las May's image is coming from!
Eros and Thanatos were sons of Aphrodite, the goddess of fertility, love and beauty. But, in true Jamaican style, it is hard to say who could be their father. Aphrodite was married to Hephaestus but was also in sexual relationships with Ares, Poseidon, Adonis and Diony-sius!
Reflecting the close connection between love, sex and fertility on the one hand and death on the other in Greek thought (and now forced back into our thoughts by HIV/AIDS), Aphrodite had names which meant Killer of Men (Androphonos) and She Upon the Graves (Epitymbidia). Pan with the horns and legs of a goat, the product of bestiality, without moral or social scruples, the personification of raw instinct, was the god of male sexuality. Pan could make men and animals suddenly go mad, hence 'panic' a feature of our Age of AIDS as Eros and Thanatos, Love and Death, join in fraternal embrace.
Martin Henry is a communication specialist.
