We can just be careful, right?

Wrong.

A new study shows that HIV has no problem gaining access to a woman's body though completely healthy genital tissue, contradicting earlier beliefs that the virus was only capable of transmission through broken skin. The study suggests that the virus takes advantage of areas where skin cells have recently been shed, and reinforces the knowledge that, baring abstinence, condoms are the best way to prevent against HIV infection.

Aside from deepening our understanding of the virus and reconfirming the notion that a vaccine is our best hope in combating the disease, this new information helps to explain why women are more vulnerable to infection than men.


... and now it's time for me to run my mouth.

Hey, you feminist bloggers and talkers and activists. No, not all of you - not the rational ones, just the loud ones that pipe up with calls of gender bias at the drop of a vaginal ring. Yeah, you. You know who you are.

Remember when you were screaming about HIV transmission rates and how they were so much higher in women than they were in men? Remember how you were complaining that this obvious bias in services was being ignored because our "patriarchal society" didn't care about women's health? Remember how a few of you even went off the deep end and suggested that women weren't being protected from HIV as well as men were in order to punish them for having sex? Or about how the transmission rates were proof that men disregarded the comfort of women to such a degree that they routinely ripped the hell out of them during sex, leaving open wounds?

This new information regarding the transmission of HIV is a prime example as to why we should approach our causes with logic rather than knee jerking. Next time - sit down, shut up and think. When you're done thinking, look at all the evidence and think some more. Then, when everything has been processed and you actually have a case - THEN step forward and make it.

Seriously. You're not doing us any good, as a gender or a species, when you jump up and down and scream patriarchy every time a new statistic is reported. In fact, you're doing us harm. It's easy for the majority to dismiss the claims of fanatics, but it's hard to convince the majority that the fanatics don't speak for the rest of us when you're so freakin' loud about it. Yeesh.