“I was just learning the ropes”: becoming a practitioner of safer sex

Abstract

On the eve of the 21 st century, diverse communities face a future of continual management of the AIDS epidemic. Changes in sexual activity have become the primary method to curb the continued transmission of HIV. Safer sex has emerged as a collection of practices and ideas deployed to combat the spread of AIDS. Since sex workers make it their business to exchange sexual services for economic compensation, many have become extremely sophisticated in their innovations and expressions of eroticism using safer sex techniques. Based on original empirical research, this paper explores how becoming a competent practitioner of safer sex involves the alignment of particular social conditions and transformations of identity. I'm very angry about the fact that people keep talking about safe sex educators and safe sex control of the sex workers because we're not the problem. If anything, we're one small population where there is a solution going on. There are a lot of people, doctors and health educators included, who don't have a clue and could learn a lot from us. That's true. And see when you're talking to a health educator, they don't have hands-on experience. The tips they give you, they're not things you're going to go home and do, you know? I mean you want to learn it from somebody who actually knows how to have fun doing it. Yeh, I'm so tired of that myth. Excuse me, but if you doctors do know anything about safe sex, most of them learned it from us. So please, stop trying to save us. Come learn from us; let us educate you.-Michelle, 6 year veteran prostitute