This is a guest post by Echo Zen. Echo is a feminist filmmaker, animator and women’s health advocate, currently deployed in the States to counter the influence of Tea Party moppets. When ze’s not doing ad consulting for birth control, ze tries to blog semi-regularly for Feministe (partly to set a good example for zir sister).
I’m fortunate to work with students in one of the few states in the States where legislators generally respect reproductive health as a fundamental right (unless you’re Rep. Darrell “all male contraceptive panel” Issa). So when the local uni put out a call for people to submit “creative presentations” about HIV/AIDS, these students – all of whom were part of a local feminist/cosplay/anime/ninja/fun group – decided to create this sex education video:
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TRANSCRIPT FOR HEARING-IMPAIRED VIEWERS:
[Younger brother and older sister do stuff in a kitchen]
SISTER (V.O.): Where we live, my brother gets a lot of abstinence-only education, where the teachers are banned from teaching students how to protect themselves. So I teach my brother about condoms, so he can help to stop HIV in our communities. Here’s how I explain it…
[In an abstract representation of a vagina, Condom Ninja and HIV face off]
NINJA: This is your reproductive tract. This is HIV. And I… am condom ninja!
[Condom and HIV fight to the beat of videogame music, with HIV losing humiliatingly.]
NINJA: Fool! Don’t you know condoms are 85% effective at preventing HIV?!
[Back in the kitchen, sister hands condoms to her brother]
SISTER (V.O.): So if you believe in protecting your friends and family from HIV, start promoting condom use in your community today.
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We mostly made this for fun and education (and because we like Scott Pilgrim). But as luck would have it, the video wound up being selected for showcase by a local teen health group. So perhaps feminist/cosplay/anime/ninja/fun groups are actually more substantive than RNC conventions – though admittedly that’s not saying much.
Thanks, Jill, for allowing us to share this. We hope it brightens people’s Labor Day week. :-)
Similar Posts:
- In D.C., New York and San Fran, Carrying a Condom Can Give Cause to Arrest by Kate July 12, 2010
- Stopping Police and DAs from Using Condoms to Convict Sex Workers by On The Issues November 14, 2011
- Bronze Bikinis for Beneficence by Caperton August 28, 2011
- LIBERALS want your CHILD to have SEX!!! by Trailer Park Feminist July 15, 2007
- The Feminist Sibling by Natalia Antonova June 29, 2008
I think that my favorite part is the eye-rolling looks the big sister is giving her little brother in the kitchen. Like, “I will go over this with you as many times as you need, no matter how embarrassing you find it, so deal.”
It’s only 85%? Wow, I thought it was a lot more than that.
That’s under normal usage, where folks leave condoms in the sun, forget expiration dates, damage the condom while opening the package (with their teeth… yep) and dispose of used ones incorrectly. Under perfect usage, they’re 98% effective — and compared to the 60% failure rate for abstinence-only (according to Dec 2003, Vol 6, No 5 of the Guttmacher Report), that makes condoms an extremely attractive proposition.
…And the oh-so-brilliant “try to put the condom on, realize it’s backwards because it wont unroll, then FLIP IT OVER and put it on, kinda defeating the whole point.”
(To anyone reading who doesn’t get the problem with this, imagine taking off a pair of latex gloves mid-surgery/hair-coloring/science experiment, then putting them back on inside out. Totally defeats the purpose of you wearing them in the first place)
Hey Echo, love the video! Your students are very cool. Thank you for clarifying normal usage vs. perfect usage.
Sort of related, but the term “hearing impaired” is not preferred by the Deaf community. It supports the medical view of deafness rather than the cultural view. The preferred term for many is “Deaf/Hard of Hearing”. There’s obviously still debate as to whether “hearing impaired” is offensive, but I thought I’d mention it just in case.
(I hope I don’t come off as a nit-picky asshole!)
On the contrary, I definitely appreciate the info! I’d searched Google a few months back to see if “ableist” and “hearing impaired” turned up anything, and when I didn’t see anything obvious, I decided that would be our chosen terminology.
In the future I’ll use more neutral language that doesn’t single out a particular group. The reason I post on Feministe isn’t (just) to broadcast ideas, but to get feedback on revising existing ones too. So discussions are always an education.
I thought that was for pregnancies?
Oh good, I’m so glad it was helpful! I know that sometimes educating can veer off into nitpicking territory, so I wanted you to know that I enjoyed your post. So many people don’t include captions so I was happy that you thought about it.
In the Deaf community, the specific term is “audist” for ableist thinking and beliefs relating to hearing, in case you wanted to look it up!
Will do! I work sometimes with disabled student advocates on how ableist attitudes lead to rampant sexual abuse, which is how I learn about most ableist terminology — but even advocates themselves can’t know everything about the topic, so I’m always glad to learn from others. :-)
That’s a pretty awesome video :) I’m definitely going to show this to my husband – we use condoms already, and neither of us has hiv anyway, but we’re both martial artists and I bet he’ll love the fight scene!
He gets double points if he recognises the style we used. ;-)
These exist? Where do I need to move?
It helps to live in liberal Asian neighbourhoods where the parents haven’t snuffed the creativity and individuality out of their progeny. And if the progeny are aspiring women doctors who also dress up for Anime Expo each year, you’ve got the foundation of a future feminist ninja troupe.
Okay, so this was badass.
Is this part of a larger campaign? Wouldn’t it be amazing if Condom Ninja was part of a larger superhero team called Ways to Keep Sex Safe (or maybe something less corny than that)?
Seriously, I love this.
I’d absolutely love for this to be part of a larger campaign or web series. Jill has actually posted previous kung fu condom videos we’ve worked on, but they weren’t great — the lighting and lensing were amateur. For this one we made sure to keep everything professional, since for some students this will be their portfolio’s calling card.
The only factors dissuading me from turning this into a series are that 1) there’s not a strong clamouor for viral videos of pro-choice ninjas, and 2) our crew’s only rarely available enough to make these things on the side. Of course if Factor #1 suddenly improves, Factor #2 will certainly follow. It’s just hard right now to justify to them that we should keep making pro-choice ninja films when the demand’s not there. But in the future, who knows? ^_^