Bumping Uglies: Louisiana Squeamish on Science, Boasts Country’s Highest HIV Rate

It’s a testament to my relatively sheltered position in the country and the world that I didn’t start hearing about HIV on a regular basis until after college, when I spent several months in South Africa. The year was 2010 and I was working as an intern at a winery in the country’s stunning Western Cape province, the tourism hub of the country. Alongside the luxury of picturesque wine farms, world-class restaurants, glamorous beaches, and gorgeous homes ran a current of overwhelming poverty that touched the vast majority of the country’s population––a vestige of the pervasive inequality institutionalized by apartheid. Perhaps the most glaring symbol of that inequality was the HIV infection rate––around 0.3 percent among South Africa’s roughly 5 million whites, but around 16 percent among South Africa’s non-white majority (80 percent African; 10 percent “coloured,” or mixed-race; and 2.5 percent Asian), Avert.org reports. Furthermore, while the wealthy Western Cape has a 4 percent infection rate, the numbers get most alarming in the less developed and extremely poor areas of Eastern Province and Kwa-zulu natal, where HIV-positive individuals make up more than 15 percent of the total population.

Bumping Uglies: The Olympics, Science, and Gender

The Olympics marketing campaign has always focused on simplicity: the joy of sport. The thrill of victory. The anguish of defeat. The time-honored tradition of athletic competition. The idea is that for just a few weeks every two years, the nations of the world set aside their differences and come together, setting forth their best athletes to represent them on skill and skill alone.

But the ugliness of the world has a habit of sneaking into the Olympic Games. In the case of South African distance runner Caster Semenya, whose female identity was called into question in 2009 due to her phenomenal performance at the 2009 African Junior Championships in Mauritius––where she beat her personal record in the 800m by more than four seconds––as well as her extremely muscular body, the black-and-white nature of the Olympics was thrown for a loop: if Semenya was a man posing as a woman, it would give her, in theory, an unfair advantage over her competitors. But the very public process of confirming her gender amounted to a worldwide orgy of rubbernecking speculation, humiliating Semenya and exposing some very fuzzy science. Now, the media is once again fixated on Semenya for her appearance-–this time noting that she looks “more feminine” due to hormone therapy.

Bumping Uglies: Science “Prudish,” says Catholic Writer

I stumbled upon a recent column on the Catholic News Agency site by Catholic writer Brian Caulfield, editor of the website Fathers for Good, and found fascinating insights into the mindset of the sexually active Catholic (in other words, a Catholic parent). Caulfield’s column title, “Saving Sex from Science,” caught my eye right away, and each sentence was more eye-catching than the last in its determination to first dichotomize “science” (awareness of reproductive health, options, and rights) and intimacy and subsequently equate science in with both pornography and reproductive-rights activism in its destruction of the “true” pleasures of sex.

Bumping Uglies: The Church, The State, Science, and Fiction… between the sheets

Religion, like sex, should be consensual. But sometimes the Church sneaks into our beds unwanted and unannounced. All too often, it jumps under the covers with government, and government’s desperate enough to give it a sad, pathetic snuggle.

In the meantime, while science is always welcome in my bedroom, sometimes fake science tries to slip in––sometimes in hilarious ways, and other times more insidiously.

When religion and woo poke their determined junk at our sex lives, things can get a little ugly. Welcome to my column.