Who is Shelia Johnson you ask? She's the Executive V.P of Corporate Affairs for BET & wife of Bob Johnson of the same network fame. Why you ask is her name so important that she's included in the title of this blog? Suprisingly, she was featured yesterday during the opening day panels held at the International HIV/AIDS conference in Toronto. Mrs. Johnson held the stage for a panel on the status of women and HIV along with Melinda Gates of the Gates Foundation, Dr. Nadik,gender inequality specialist and UN Special Envoy for Asia, and Musa Njoko, an HIV advocate from South Africa.
The panel commenced with insightful commentary from each woman's perspective of AIDS and it's impact on women,family, and future country's stability. Women currently represent 50% of those infected with HIV/AIDS and are the population in which the disease is most rapidly increasing. Check other stats on women here.
I watched the broadcast of the conference on CSPAN as I was not in attendance this year. Melinda Gates, whose foundation, co-chaired by husband Bill Gates, has millions of dollars going into HIV prevention and treatment programs all over the globe, spoke very plainly with evidence-based research with women as her platform. She spoke of gender inequality, poor and disempowered women difficulty in negotiating condom use, and the role of girl's education in the fight against AIDS. The Gates foundation is a leading funder of programs designed to combat women's vulnerability to HIV, namely microbicide research. Microbicides are products applied topically that contain anti-HIV meds that can block the virus from entering the vagina.The products are odorless and can be applied without need for permission from a woman's husband or a sex worker's clients. More Microbicide info is here. ( Microbicides are the newest developments that can potentially turn the state of HIV around for women and I can go overboard when it comes to them....Let's just say they are my favorite in the works prevention tool...other than a vaccine)
Dr.Nafis Nadik, specalist on Gender inequality in Asia, also delivered a well informed platform on the realities of child marriage in the developing world, and spousal infidelity in patriarchial societies and their relation to increasing HIV infection for women.
From the advocate position, Musa Njoko a 34-year young woman from South Africa, previously featured in the stellar HIV documentary A Closer Walk, provided the viewpoint of an infected woman and her struggles for support in modern South Africa. Musa talked about her ideas for building more interventions and programs centered around living HIV positive and empowered.
Now enter Mrs. Shelia Johnson, who was introduced by her position at BET and her youth involvement experiences. ............Her comments were pitiful at best. She spoke from a clearly inexperienced researcher. I could tell you how many times she said "we just need to educate them" but then you'd probably feel sorry for her and Bob ( if one could feel sympathy for a millionaire with a monopolizing social & cultural influence on the African American community.) Her responses were overly simplistic in nature and when she spoke, she looked like a deer in headlights.
Mrs. Johnson clearly was mistaken in what she assumed was her target audience. She must have thought her audience a group of novices; uninformed paraprofessionals. In actuality, Mrs. Johnson was presenting to an informed global audience ( in Toronto and simultaneously translated & broadcast all over the world), well suited to criticize overly simplistic thoughtless one liner approaches to the issues of Women & AIDS. She was really doing a diservice to herself when she stated "women are constantly being challenged to be sexual beings"....WTF???? BET?? Sexual Beings?
Don't just take my word for it, see the deer in headlights for yourself and through the eyes of reporters....Excerpts from reporters comments on the meeting...
I'm sorry, Mrs. Johnson women need more than your summer youth basketball team to keep women out of the reach of HIV/AIDS. We need stronger methods to counteract the booty-fication of television and society. She even mentioned the role of the media in preventing HIV, not with much elaboration of course.
Who does this woman thinks she's talking to? I don't want to sound condescending on anyone who is making an effort, but any exec.VP whose network further fuels the degradation of women, needs to get a clue. It seemed that the overarching theme escaped her. When you realize that women's role in society is directly correlated to their risk for HIV, the reasons for increasing HIV prevalence among poor, uneducated,disempowered,marginalized, and obectified African American, Eastern European, Indian, Cambodian, and African women is clear.
I wonder if Mrs. Johnson would be willing to show 30 minutes of her network's programming to women seeking to empowering messages that protect them from a society that sets them up for AIDS. Likely they'd see more ways to put themselves at risk....continue to lower yourself to bitches and hoes, put more emphasis on the way your ass looks in those jeans, objectify yourself and have others do the same, and don't forget to "let a man be a man".
Why is this woman representing the fight against AIDS?
signed,
a real activist..not buying it.....
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