The Wisdom of Whores: Bureaucrats, Brothels and the Business of Aids Pdf
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FREE THE WISDOM OF WHORES: BUREAUCRATS, BROTHELS AND THE BUSINESS OF AIDS PDF Elizabeth Pisani | 400 pages | 14 Jul 2009 | GRANTA BOOKS | 9781847080769 | English | London, United Kingdom Book review: The wisdom of whores | Pambazuka News This is an utterly fascinating book. I must admit that it's been growing on me since I read it, the arguments and language Brothels and the Business of AIDS in my mind. Elizabeth Pisani writes with enormous verve and acerbity, her prose alive with anecdote and metaphor. There is, to be sure, a certain adolescent touch, delighting in naughty words and vivid sexual description, but all of that is forgiven in the sweep and force of the narrative. The Wisdom of Whores is a great read. The title is meant to convey the variety of sexual experience and the savvy that attaches to it. The text is replete with references to "prostitutes, rent boys, pimps and clients Even in the preface, Pisani talks of a trip through several Asian countries where "I encountered a world The Wisdom of Whores: Bureaucrats women with penises who sell anal sex to men who are completely Brothels and the Business of AIDS. I found men who buy sex from women and sell The Wisdom of Whores: Bureaucrats to men. I found heroin addicts who fly airplanes and Muslim fundamentalists who run protection rackets for brothels. Yes, some of it is designed to shock. But as the pages turn, the interlocking universe of bureaucrats and sex work and NGOs and agencies yields fascinating insights into the pandemic. It would be a great mistake to discard Pisani because of the bizarre or the uncomfortable. There are many home truths to be found in the most unlikely of places. Although the great majority of material is drawn from Asia primarily Indonesia, where the pandemic is relatively smallrather than Africa where the pandemic is a nightmarePisani still manages to wander the landscape of controversy. Pisani is a journalist turned epidemiologist. She's worked or consulted for a kaleidoscope of international organizations in a great many countries, allowing her to speak with first-hand knowledge, and to make a number of frontal assaults on conventional wisdom. Most important, perhaps, is her exasperated assertion - gaining increasing credibility in the argumentative world of AIDS - that the international response has been wrong- headed: The assumption that a generalized pandemic sweeping through a country's population, as in Southern Africa, would necessarily show a similar pattern in The Wisdom of Whores: Bureaucrats country like India or China or Indonesia just isn't true. The pattern outside of Africa is a series of concentrated epidemics among "high-risk groups," men having sex with men, or drug injectors or sex workers, and there is very little evidence that the virus will infiltrate the The Wisdom of Whores: Bureaucrats population. Now nothing is The Wisdom of Whores: Bureaucrats in the world of AIDS, but Pisani's argument, if even marginally accurate, has huge implications for the response. If the resources, especially for prevention, are applied to a population Brothels and the Business of AIDS a whole, where the risk of contracting AIDS is minimal, rather than targeting the high-risk groups, then not only is money wasted, but HIV spreads wantonly through these hard-to-reach categories. There's just no question that the hotshots of the AIDS establishment have resisted Pisani's thesis also advanced by others of repute for many a year. It's monumentally irresponsible. The chapter on injecting drug use is stunning: I have not read before so trenchant a defence of "harm reduction. On the issue of abstinence, she's appropriately savage about the perverse policies pursued by right-wing religious groups and the Bush administration: There is no doubt The Wisdom of Whores: Bureaucrats her mind - and again, the evidence is summoned impressively - that ideology has been permitted to trump science, with The Wisdom of Whores: Bureaucrats results. In truth, it is beyond criminal the way the Bushites, in The Wisdom of Whores: Bureaucrats mindless embrace of abstinence, have undermined the use of condoms. On the issue of numbers, Pisani insists that she never saw any deliberate inflation of the data, as has been charged by others myself included. But she admits to the use of percentages by UNAIDS as a "beat-up" technique to raise international alarm in the hope of generating money. On the issue of testing, she has very little patience for the human rights view that all testing should be voluntary. Where Pisani is concerned, public health transcends human rights, and testing should be far more broadly applied. She effectively argues that there are two "rights" at issue, and the right of the individual to voluntary testing Brothels and the Business of AIDS not be permitted to compromise the rights of the community against infection. I will concede that even though it strangles me to say so, I see increasing legitimacy to that view. On the issue of the tension between treatment and prevention, she comes down firmly on the side of prevention. Pisani argues that while treatment brings down viral load the amount of the virus in the body so that transmission from the infected to the uninfected is dramatically reduced, the fact The Wisdom of Whores: Bureaucrats that transmission can still occur, and over the long run this will continue to drive up the number of cases. It's an interesting point, but it's thin gruel, and I'd take issue with the theory. There's no reason why treatment and prevention can't be done in tandem if the powers-that-be determine to do so. It's not a Hobson's Choice. On the issue of Africa, the argument becomes complicated, and unfortunately Africa receives short shrift in The Wisdom of Whores. In Africa, we've made every mistake in the book. Nuts, she says almost literally. It's a problem of sex, a collectivity of simultaneous sexual partnerships, uncircumcised men and untreated sexually transmitted infections. And because African leaders won't face up to sex, and the international community, for fear of being called racist, won't challenge Africans on matters sexual, everyone hides behind poverty and development. There's a touch of truth in that, although the African leadership has graduated from its state of denial, and confronts sex and stigma much more openly. The real problem lies in the lackadaisical and incestuous international AIDS establishment that has lost the energy and creativity to wage the battle. But where Africa is concerned, Pisani doesn't stop at one critique. She makes a point rarely made, and I must admit that it gave me pause. Using an artful epidemiological calculus, she argues that it's by no means just men who have several simultaneous The Wisdom of Whores: Bureaucrats relationships; it's also women. And to say, therefore, that the pandemic is driven solely by male sexual behaviour is to miss a large part of what's going on. Now, I don't think that Pisani gives nearly enough credence to the absence of female sexual autonomy in relationships, married or unmarried. Nor does she come close to sufficiently acknowledging the malignant role of gender inequality it's a lamentable lapse that nowhere in her chapter on Africa is there mention of rape and sexual violence as vectors of transmissionbut she does have a point, and in the bizarre construct of AIDS, every postulate must be examined. The Wisdom of Whores ends with the desperate question: "What the hell difference are we making anyway? The sad, sad truth about the The Wisdom of Whores: Bureaucrats book is that the rude language and controversial nostrums will allow it to be dismissed by policy makers at all levels. But it should be mandatory, not voluntary, reading: Pisani is lucid, colourful, insightful and impatient. In her last chapter, she says quite plainly that we know what to do and we're just not doing it. She's right. The worst thing that's happened to AIDS is that the same tired, intellectually ossified bureaucrats in international aid agencies, in many governments, in multilateral financial vehicles and above all in the United Nations, are calling the shots. Skip to main content. Brothels and the Business of AIDS review: The wisdom of whores. Stephen Lewis. Jul 23, Elizabeth Pisani is a far straighter shooter than most of them put together. Log in or register to post comments reads. Discussion Forum. Africa in 50 years. Subscribe for Free! From the Archives. First African Forum on Mining: A civil society perspective. 'The Wisdom of Whores' | The Tyee Elizabeth Pisani born is an academic researcher and the director of Ternyata Ltd. She currently focuses on the forces that drive the markets for substandard and falsified medicines and has in the past worked extensively on Brothels and the Business of AIDS. Together with many academic publications, [2] she is known for her books about Indonesiaand about HIV. Indonesia Etc. She was born in the The Wisdom of Whores: Bureaucrats States and educated in several European countries. She is fluent in French and Spanish, and has learned Chinese and Indonesian. After her first degree, Pisani joined Reuters as a foreign correspondent, [11] working in Hong KongIndia and Indonesia. The Wisdom of Whores: Bureaucrats her times as a journalist she covered major political events such as the Tiananmen Square demonstrations, [12] and the civil war in AcehIndonesiaas well as a wide range of business stories. Her work has focused on HIVsexually transmitted infections and sexual and drug-taking behaviour, and on building robust disease surveillance systems.