This is a question that I've begun to ask myself lately more and more. I'm wondering when will it happen that the folks in my community will begin to band together and take action against those issues that are most detrimental to our families and our culture. We need to have some real talk about these real issues.
I've recently begun some studying on women's issues. My initial plan was to major in Communications and pick up a minor in Marketing, but right now I really don't know for sure where I'll end up. Partly because I'm finding that a lot of the societal issues that women are facing today, we faced hundreds of years ago as well. Some issues are just more in our faces than others.
For example, women put up with a lot and we sometimes take a lot crap off of our men too simply because we love them so much. The result is that we forgive them sometimes too easily. The terms "wifey" and "baby daddy" have managed to somehow make the state of no commitment alright. And then the media and hollywood move in to brainwash us and glamorize the rest of the world into believing that we have no worth. Afterall, our men are all thugs and as for African-American women we're just a bunch of hoes and booty shaking bitches, right?
Making it real easy for someone to say pack your bag and leave him girlfriend! But when a woman has got children to care for and that man is the sole provider...she's got a whole lot of soul searching going on. She is somehow able to justify in her mind that for the sake of her children, things aren't so bad or that things will get at least better. The death trap lies not in her infinite denial that her man is cheating, but rather in her refusal to protect herself from being exposured to his multiple partners and sexually transmitted diseases.
I read somewhere that when you believe wrong, you think wrong and when you think wrong you act wrong. As a result people believe that HIV & AIDS cannot happen to them, so they think safer sex is not needed in their bedrooms or where ever they are hooking up. Therefor they don't make good choices such as consistant use of condoms or making abstainence a part of their everyday lives.
I surveyed some of my classmates (approximately 18 students) and a large number of them said that it would take believing that they had been exposed to the virus to motivate them to get tested! If that doesn't tell us that something is terribly wrong with how STD's are thought of. How do you protect yourself from HIV after you already have it? Well?
#1 sex is overrated and #2 we seriously need to get a handle on our thoughts and sexual behaviors. If not now...when?
