In whose hands does the final responsibility and power to use condoms lie? During a field trip to East Champaran, Bihar, a young woman who’d had been married for over a year told us she’d never seen her husband’s face. She knew him intimately though, for he would steal in at the dead of night and leave immediately after sexual intercourse. Since others slept quite near, stealth was of the essence. Where would a condom figure here?Space and privacy are at a premium in most rural and, indeed, urban homes. Talking sex between sexual partners is generally taboo. Informed condom use in such a situation seems unlikely. In middle class Delhi, I found a single woman bemoaning her lack of choice in matters sexual. For her, the new insistence on condoms only accentuates fear and discourages spontaneity. Fear of a scandal, fear of rejection, fear of being used, fear of pregnancy and, now, fear of HIV. “Even if I’m attracted to someone, I now need to ensure that there is a condom at hand. Do I wait until the moment is ripe, and hope my partner is responsible? Or do I forget about sexual ties?’’ Policy makers and public health delivery systems, as well as much of society, have yet to acknowledge that sex exists outside of marriage too, and not only in relation to sex workers. Casual, spontaneous or even long-term sexual relationships outside of marriage are a reality for all classes of society and need to be simply accepted as such. Only then will issues of responsibility and ethics, vis-a-vis HIV/AIDS, be openly discussed. A young couple, both university students, had to seek an abortion although they had used a condom. How did the woman get pregnant? “Well, the condom burst!†they explained, sheepishly. Were they unaware of how to use a condom? No, they’d been buying a branded condom for several months. They were sure they had used it properly this time too. Whose responsibility was this pregnancy? The secrecy surrounding their relationship makes it difficult for them to even complain in a public forum. During a workshop recently organised by a Delhi-based NGO, a participant, Rameshwari, quoted her father-in-law’s advice to her husband, a lorry driver: “Son, our life is full of hardship. We have to remain away from home for weeks on end. A man has to release the heat that builds up in his body, after every 400 miles. Otherwise that heat affects the mind, and there can be an accident.†Rameshwari’s husband had sex with sex workers regularly. No precautions were taken. He fell victim to AIDS and died. Who is responsible for this death? In any case, HIV/AIDS has to be viewed against the general health scenario of the country. Bharati, a health worker, notes that during her travels in rural Uttar Pradesh she finds women and men caught up in such a web of ailments that the question of trying to isolate and identify whether a person is suffering from HIV/AIDs is almost impossible. It seems out of place to introduce people to the notion of a new disease, which may perhaps be killing them, when they are already distracted by a plethora of ailments, ranging from malnutrition to malaria, which they don’t know how to handle. These are just vignettes of the health and sexual ethos of our times. It’s clear that the whole issue of the use of condoms against this backdrop is an extremely complex one. Who is responsible for the spread of HIV and its control? To place the onus of control on the ‘people’, and that too overwhelmingly through condom usage, is to burden ordinary human beings, guilt-tripping rather than genuinely empowering them. Campaigns around the issue are unduly moralistic, and de-contextualised. The focus of the anti-AIDS campaign has been on sexual relationships, there is comparatively little social advertising on precautions regarding blood transfusion, for instance. Why this lop-sided emphasis? Whose ethics are being championed, whose morality placed in the dock? How is it that the ethics of doctors and drug retailers are not being scrutinised with similar zeal? Condoms have many ifs and buts attached to them. It is fairly obvious that they lend themselves to male control, in an ethos dominated by men, often irresponsible men. For this reason alone, it is unrealistic to view condoms as our best defence against HIV It is also strange that nobody seems to be seriously considering woman-friendly, woman-centric alternatives. How come we don’t hear of the diaphragm anymore, or of the female condom?
