In Paul Farmer’s reading, the author showed the correlation between poverty struck women and AIDS. These women did what they had to in order to survive in poverty, some willingly, and some willingly.
The women in the reading were living lives of poverty, not able to fend for themselves. They all relied on the men to provide for them. I don’t believe the times have changed in this aspect. There are still thousands of sex workers enslaved, as well as women that marry because they have no other choice, often due to family obligations, but what else could they do when they had no opportunities to stay healthy and/or heal themselves?
Farmer shared that women were then left without their main provider, while also infected with this disease. Women in some situations of extreme poverty feel that they have no choice but to use extreme methods to survive; other women are not given a choice. They were trying to provide for their families themselves, and in turn, handed over the responsibility to a man, who in the end was the most harmful in the situation.
He argues that women were not given the proper care when they were infected. They had no means to provide for their families; if there was even anyone else left to care for. They had no one to take care of their children, no doctor to turn to, and of course, a reliance on men to take care of them. Before the reading, I assumed that, by the title, poverty alone would be the blame for AIDS in women’s lives, but it’s so much more than that. They were neglected by society in every way.
When it comes to AIDS in today’s society, I think it’s easy to blame women for “sleeping around” and being provocative, but not getting to the actual source of the problem. In this article, https://www.pri.org/interactive/2017/08/awl-hiv/ a study has been done on women in South Africa, and how poverty is the main reason for AIDS destroying women’s lives. In this article, they display that because of the poverty struck society they’re a part of, more women and young women are being raped and being taken advantage of. If the women don’t have the means to take care of themselves because they are in such low socioeconomic standing, and are forced to rely on a caretaker, they are more susceptible to being taken advantage of. If these women had the health care means to get support, it would change everything.
I want to be able to discuss the roles that poverty and sexism play when it comes to AIDS, and our society’s reaction towards AIDS in the media.
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