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Black Swan & HIV
I
finally managed to see Black Swan, which is one of those movies I was
excited to see until it got overexposed, as if something popular somehow
loses it's ability to be any good. That just isn't true, but my
subconscious movie buzz does seem to suffer if I hear too much about a movie before seeing it, or see too much when a trailer reveals every decent scene or character's intention.
So, consider this sentence my spoiler alert. SPOILER ALERT. There, that's better.
Not
much to spoil by now. Black Swan is the tale of a dancer, Natalie
Portman, trying to make the best of a wonderful opportunity as the lead
in Swan Lake. Since my blog really shines when I make everything about
HIV, I'll focus on why this movie is really about new HIV infections...
huh?
Portman's character is a very sheltered young woman, probably in her
early twenties. She still lives with mom, has a lot of dolls in her
room and even a little ballerina music box by her bed. As she becomes
obsessed with her new role and strives for perfection, she rebels
against her coddling mother and her own self-image by cutting loose one
evening with a fellow dancer. Things get way out of hand, and
Portman is left the next day with a hangover and wondering whether or
not she slept with two men or her friend.
Or all of them.
Oh, and mom- she's really pissed off, too.
Her
character's dramatic metamorphosis from sheltered girl to risk-taking
party animal does provide a glimpse into how quickly a sexual awakening
can occur. In terms of HIV, there's an assumption that the newly
infected, particularly if they are under the age of 24, are all just
wild party animals asking for trouble. But it only takes that one
weekend of dropping your guard- or a pill into your drink as Portman's
character did- to put yourself at risk..
The movie made me
think: a lot of parents lock their children up, thinking it will keep
them safe from the world. But you can't lock a human's own humanity out
of them. Those thoughts and a curiosity about sex are going to happen,
and the best way to protect them is sharing important information at
each appropriate place during their emotional development. I can't
imagine it's easy to figure out the right time to have the right
conversations, but a gradual building of trust and a comfortable and
non-judgmental attitude about talking about sex shouldn't be as hard as
it seems to be for a lot of folks. The idea should be to create that
trust, and hope the child comes to you with those questions instead of
just firing out lectures hoping that one or two take.
There's no
follow-up on whether there were any consequences to that wild night in
the movie, of course, but it did make me think as an HIV educator. When
sex education in public schools has been removed, and parents in
general aren't having the conversations they need to be having to fill
in those gaps, what can be done to make people less inclined to engage
in risky behaviors as a way of discovering the unnecessarily guilty
pleasures of sex?
The whole issue of sexual health
isn't a black swan, or a white swan. It's gray. And by sharing our own
experiences (as positoids and negatoids, and also as parents who were
once teenagers and need to remember that) we can help each other add
some color to that dreary gray swan.
Positively Yours,
Shawn
