Introduction

The Hoopla is an online news and commentary magazine for an audience of politically engaged and ‘predominantly older’ women (Bodey, 2013).  Recently it has published a couple of pieces on sex work that troubled me and I challenged its editor, political journalist and comedian Wendy Harmer, to reconsider its implicit stance against sex work as a profession.  ‘That’s bullshit, Daniel’, she wrote in reply, ‘the Hoopla canvasses all opinions, do a cursory search, you’ll find them.’

The site is notable in the Australian publishing sector for paying its writers, and it has the best paywall in the business — really low friction and a reasonably priced day pass at 99c per day.  The Age and Black Inc, if you’re reading this, nota bene!  So I took Wendy up on her invitation and used the search tool to undertake a quick and dirty content analysis of its articles.

Content analysis is a methodology “by which the researcher seeks to determine the manifest content of written, spoken or published communications by systematic, objective and quantitative analysis” (Zito 1975, p73).  It assumes that patterns in the subject matter reflect the attitudes of the people who create it (Berger, 1998, p23).

These days, the language around “systematic, objective and quantitative” sounds a bit quaint — most researchers are more likely to acknowledge that we bring perspectives and commitments of our own to the analysis, and that textual material is capable of being read in multiple ways, although these readings are themselves patterned by power relations and ideology.

As a writer and researcher around stigma and sexual health I have a particular concern for the way stigma operates to normalise discrimination and inequity in legislation regarding members of marginalised groups (Parker & Aggleton, 2003).

The Lancet shares that concern: in a special edition launched at the AIDS2014 conference in Melbourne, it published a series of studies supporting full decriminalisation of sex work as the best approach to promote the health and wellbeing of both sex workers and their clients.

As then-Prof (now Justice) Marcia Neave found in her inquiry into Victorian laws against sex work in the 1990s, criminalising sex work makes sex workers vulnerable to violence and extortion by both clients and police.

The same dynamic is found in laws criminalising sex between men: if consensual sex is illegal, and you are beaten up or blackmailed in connection with it, you can’t seek help from the police without making an admission of criminal wrongdoing.

In places where the law prohibits purchasing sexual services, as it does in many American states and Nordic countries, it creates an incentive for clients to drive with sex workers to places where police are few and far — an unsafe environment for workers if the client turns violent.

Laws that prohibit making any kind of a profit from another person selling sexual services also tend to apply to managers, cleaners and security staff.  The presence of ‘pimps’ and protection rackets is more likely when it is not possible to treat sex work as a legitimate business with all the administrative, security and occupational health and safety overhead support.

Finally, criminalising sex work creates a bigger ‘haystack’ in which to find the needle of people being trafficked.  This is one reason why Denmark, which decriminalised sex work in 1999, apparently finds four times as many trafficked people than Sweden, which has a much larger population and criminalises the purchase of sex.

I got that last factoid from an article by Gabrielle Jackson in The Hoopla (2/9/14) titled “The real cost of selling sex”, but I used my training in epidemiology to flip it around: more reported cases doesn’t mean Denmark has a worse trafficking problem; it could actually mean they’re better at finding trafficking cases.  (For the same reason, you can’t look at an increase in HIV diagnoses and ‘read off from the numbers’ what it means for rates of new infections.)

In her book Sex and the Margins (2007) Laura Agustin points out the many reasons why it’s tricky to nail down hard facts about so-called ‘trafficking’.  So hard, in fact, that the main index on trafficking actually measures worldwide media reports on the issue, rather than any primary data source on persons found to have been trafficked.  In due course, Jackson’s article and the many, many others like it — articles reporting on other articles — will be taken as proof that trafficking is on the increase.

Methods

Every time a journalist and her editor write about sex work on The Hoopla, they make word choices that reveal underlying attitudes and value judgments towards that topic.

I’m using a tactic I developed in my work around ‘sexual racism’ in the gay community, where many people argued that saying “No Asians” in their profile simply reflected a diversity of opinion their preferences for a particular body type.

Since it costs literally nothing to choose a more neutral phrase (“Prefer white men”) over the other (“No Asians”), I conclude they must have intended the negative judgment implicit in the latter, even if they don’t admit it to themselves.

I use market theory a lot in my work on sexual racism and in technical terms this is the linguistic equivalent of “revealed preferences” in the economic analysis of purchasing behaviour.  Yep, word choices are purchases: they buy different amounts of grief from different audiences with different material and symbolic interests in the subject.

In the analysis that follows I’m looking at patterns in the word choices made by The Hoopla in its coverage of sex work.  Given that it has multiple writers, I want to know what its average way of describing sex work is, as well as the range of different stances it takes on sex work, as signalled by those word choices.

I do this by counting the word choices: sex work or worker vs. prostitute (noun or verb) or prostitution, taking care to differentiate between authors using a term themselves vs. quoting an interviewee or secondary text using the term.  I created a spreadsheet where you can view how I coded the articles and the key quotes from each one.  I used the search tool available on TheHoopla.com.au with a 99c day pass and I coded every article it returned.

In particular, from a semantic perspective I’m interested in what differences do their writers observe between sex work and other practices like trafficking, child abuse, and rape? — given that many anti-sex work advocates like Kajsa Ekis Ekman argue there is an essential continuity between paid sex work and human trafficking since, in their view, humans are ‘bought and sold’ in both.  This analysis is inherently more open ended than the quantitative analysis of word choices; reasonable people could disagree on the interpretation so I spell it out here and I welcome constructive responses in the comments below.

Findings

Word choices

I found 45 articles making a word choice between ‘sex work’ or ‘prostitution’.

• In three articles (7%) the author used ‘sex work’ or ‘sex worker’ exclusively.
• In one article (2%) the author quoted someone using ‘sex work’ or ‘sex worker’ exclusively.
• In nine articles (20%) the author used both ‘sex work/er’ and ‘prostitute’ or ‘prostitution’.
• In six articles (13%) the author quoted someone using ‘prostitute’ or ‘prostitution’ exclusively.
• In 26 articles (58%) the author used ‘prostitute’ or ‘prostitution’ exclusively.

Takehome: these numbers do not support Wendy Harmer’s view that The Hoopla canvasses diverse opinions on sex work.  By an overwhelming majority, the articles on The Hoopla represent sex work as prostitution.  This is discussed further below.

Two articles either by or featuring Gabrielle Jackson went full flush: the author used and quoted people using both forms.

Themes and differences

1) Dead prostitutes as entertainment for The Hoopla‘s readership

In my tweet about ‘rough cut results’ last night I drastically undercounted the number of times the site mentions ‘prostitutes’.  I thought there was something hinky about the search function; it was returning a whole bunch of book reviews in error.

Turns out… not an error.  Eleven results for ‘prostitute’ were for synopses of novels reviewed by Meredith Jaffe, who might just need PTSD counselling by now.  Have a read and see if you can spot the theme.

“In the Newgate prison, four young women are allied by their need for friendship and protection in a world where life is fragile and, if no one is there to watch you back, it’s short as well. Loud, brave prostitute Friday Woolfe is their protector.”

“Bestselling, award-winning mother/daughter writing team P.J. and Traci Lambrecht aka P.J. Tracy are back with another nail-biting thriller, Two Evils. A group of young Native American girls are abducted from their reservation, fresh fodder for under-aged prostitution.”

“A suburban madam is found dead in her car supposedly having committed suicide and a few suburbs away, Heloise Lewis has more than a passing interest in the woman’s death. Heloise is very careful about blending in. As far as her neighbours are concerned, Heloise is just another suburban mum, a young widow who works as a lobbyist for pay equity for women. No one knows that Heloise is also a suburban madam, she’s just a lot more careful about how she runs her business than the dead prostitute.”

“In the late 18th century in the south of India, a daughter Maya is born into a family of devadasi, the temple dancers who are married to Shiva and thus regarded as a higher caste even as the priests and brokers prostitute them to wealthy patrons.”

“Because she is the daughter of the town prostitute, she does not seem to be an especially valued resident, and many of the locals are dismissive of what has happened.”

“Into their circle enters a stranger, the Scottish lawyer Walter Moody, himself travelling under a false name and escaping a past that has transpired to follow him. At question is a murder, a prostitute found half dead on the road to Arahura, a missing trunk, a stolen identity and the whereabouts of one Emery Staines, a wealthy gold digger cum business man.”

“At question is a murder, a prostitute found half dead on the road to Arahura, a missing trunk, a stolen identity and the whereabouts of one Emery Staines, a wealthy gold digger cum business man.” / “On the Gulf Coast of Texas after the American Civil War, a prostitute called Lucinda steals out of the bordello in which she has been a virtual prisoner, and sets course for Middle Bayou.”

“Some weeks after Angie’s death, a girl was found dead in Kings Cross, killed in the same manner. Kelly was a homeless teenage prostitute, a heroin addict and there was nothing to link the two murders except the killer’s use of a scarf tied in a distinctive manner. But Erin knows the murders are connected and she is determined to find out which member of Jane’s family holds the secret.”

“Jade’s mother is a drug addicted prostitute and when she dies of an overdose, it is Banjo’s family that takes the wild teenage orphan in.”

“The wealthy and powerful Cavanagh family has put a price on Mak’s head. She asked too many questions about the dead Thai girl found in a dumpster and the Cavanagh heir Damien’s involvement in the illegal, under aged prostitute’s death. “

“But when prostitute Jane Delaney turns up in the morgue murdered and detectives Butch Bonnie and Rick Landry identify her as Lucy Bennett, Amanda and Evelyn decide to risk their almost non-existent careers and investigate the crime.”

Prostitute. Dead prostitute. Half dead prostitute. Underaged prostitute. Prostitute on the run. Missing daughter of town prostitute. Homeless teenage heroin addicted dead prostitute.

Seems The Hoopla are plenty happy to recommend as light entertainment a book in which a dead prostitute is a plot device.

More seriously, all of these hackneyed plots reinforce a single Judeo-Christian moral: the wages of sin is death.

2) Blurred lines

Articles in The Hoopla repeatedly fail to distinguish between sex work — sex between consenting adults for money — and rape of children or adults.  There’s something particularly obscene in referring to ‘underaged sex work’.  That’s child rape.  Likewise, ‘forced sex work’ is multiple rape.  Examples include:

“They talk candidly – *intimately* – to camera about their issues of the moment: getting married, having a baby, graduating from school, being forced into prostitution, living with violent oppression.” and “In Cambodia, child prostitution, in the projects of New York, drugs and gang violence, in Sydney, the lure of suicide.” (The Hoopla, 30 Aug 13, “I am a girl. I need to be seen.”).

“Bestselling, award-winning mother/daughter writing team P.J. and Traci Lambrecht aka P.J. Tracy are back with another nail-biting thriller, Two Evils. A group of young Native American girls are abducted from their reservation, fresh fodder for under-aged prostitution.” (Meredith Jaffe, 1 Feb 13, “January’s top 5 Aussie books”).

“In the late 18th century in the south of India, a daughter Maya is born into a family of devadasi, the temple dancers who are married to Shiva and thus regarded as a higher caste even as the priests and brokers prostitute them to wealthy patrons.” (Meredith Jaffe, 28 Jun 13, “The silent book club”).

‘Just like the Australian man who married a woman from Iraq and brought her back with the promise a “new life”. “When she came to Australia she was locked up in a hotel room and the husband then started bringing his friends and acquaintances and forcing his newly acquired wife into sexual servitude, into prostitution.”’ (Antoinette Lattouf, 25 Oct 13, “No say in her future”).

One quote in particular demonstrates the conceptual slippage that occurs when anti-sex work advocates paint consensual sex work and sexual slavery with the same brush:

“Would women choose sex work if they had well-paying options with real work flexibility? It is difficult to think about sex workers in the west without thinking about sex work in developing countries, and how many girls and women are traded/forced/raped/abused sexually. Often, for them, being in the sex industry isn’t a choice.” (Catherine Walsh, 18 April 2014, “Should we turn off the red light?”)

In fact, at the recent International AIDS Conference in Melbourne, a sex worker from Africa said in a plenary, “please stop buying me sewing machines. I could afford to buy ten sewing machines — if I cared to get paid $3/hour.”  For many women, sex work is the well-paying option with real work flexibility.  

But the author quickly skates away from her own question to raise the more emotive issue of “girls and women (who) are traded/forced/raped/abused sexually”.  When emotions are raised, our guard goes down, and perhaps we don’t notice that a paragraph that begins talking about “sex work” ends with “being in the sex industry isn’t a choice” for some women.

It matters to use terminology that recognises a difference between sex work and rape or trafficking. For many people who support decriminalising sex work, a key reason is that it makes it easier to spot illegal practices. Research shows that when sex work is not illegal in its own right, male clients of sex workers actively participate in reporting suspected coercive practices.

Lastly, I’d note that all five quotes above concern non-white women being forced into sexual slavery.  There is absolutely zero demand for narratives about a highschool teacher in California who has been sacked and now lives on minimum wage because she has a rap sheet for an arrest for soliciting, even though she was never tried or convicted.  

On the other hand, there is so much demand for narratives that tug at the heart strings and feed into White Saviour Complex, they have led to moral entrepreneurs like Somaly Mam creating the narratives and coaching people to recite them for Oprah.  This is an example of what Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie calls “the danger of a single story” about the developing world.

3) Prostitution as pejorative

Another article by Meredith Jaffe (12/10/12, “The Hoopla Literary Society”) talks about how a publisher loses its $500K advance when Julian Assange decides not to go ahead with a book deal, announcing “All memoir is prostitution”.

This illustrates the pejorative moral connotations of the word “prostitute”, which have their roots in Judeo-Christian morality, and underpin the argument of neo-conservative feminists like Kajsa Ekman and Gail Dines.  They express the idea that sex work is “selling the self”, rather than being paid for a skilled service for a particular period of time on terms and conditions. 

This is apparently a problem exclusive to sex work and not, say, working for a major law firm, or in immigration detention.

Further, in one of the quotes under (2) above, priests and brokers prostitute the temple dancers to wealthy patrons.  This points to the inherent ambiguity of saying ‘prostitution’ as opposed to ‘sex work’.  You can prostitute someone else to a third party; the term is inherently transitive. 

Sex work is by definition paid and consensual.  If the sex is not consensual, it isn’t work, it’s rape.  The concept of work comes with expectations around free agreement to a contract, a fair wage and safe working conditions, all of which can and are currently protected for sex workers by the institutions of workplace relations and occupational health and safety.

That’s why it’s so disappointing to read this by Caroline Baum:

“Whether you call that semantics or simply rebranding it’s a bit like prostitutes calling themselves sex workers. It’s true, but it’s not the whole story.” (17 July 2012, “Don’t dance at my funeral”).

Also, frankly, I call it a bit weird, in an article about funeral arrangements.  

Conclusion

The results and discussion here suggest The Hoopla needs to have a think about how it talks about sex workers.

Calling sex work prostitution is at best hopelessly loaded and ambiguous.  At worst, proposals to criminalise it smoosh together sex work and rape/slavery — as if sexual consent didn’t make a difference between them.  That might make sense in some neo-conservative feminism informed by Judeo-Christian values that see a sex worker as a ruined woman, but it doesn’t make any kind of sense within progressive, sex-positive feminism — the kind I was brought up to practice and believe in.

I’ll leave it there.  Please feel free to leave constructive responses in the comments section below.  

It seems like mainstream society has finally caught on to the way HIV treatments brought an end to the AIDS era and ushered in the age of living with HIV.  Eighteen years late to the party, but to borrow a great line from the The West Wing, let’s just celebrate the fact they showed up at all.  

As I noted in my last post about the “Bareback Backlash”, it has been hard, in the meantime, to do prevention messages about sex without condoms when our funders can open The Age and find Karen Kissane talking about unprotected sex as “Dancing with Death”.  

As Dion Kagan notes in Kill Your Darlings there has been a recent wave of films and television events, for a combined gay and heterosexual audience, in an emerging genre of “AIDS nostalgia”.  I’m thinking of films like Dallas Buyers’ Club and television series like Angels in America and The Normal Heart.  

I’m not sure these are unprecedented; there was The Hours before them and Rent and Philadelphia, etc, but I agree there’s a sense of a moment around the recent crop — a recognition that the AIDS narrative is out of date and something new needs working through.

In a panel discussion talk at the Emerging Writers Festival, Dion described the way these televisual events function as cultural handles on the phenomenon of AIDS for those who live at some considerable remove from it.  He’d mention at a barbecue writing his PhD on AIDS and barebacking and people would ask “Oh, have you seen ______?”  

This made Dion the perfect person to host another discussion, provocatively titled “AIDS is Dead; Long Live HIV!” at the Melbourne Writers’ Festival, featuring Elizabeth Pisani, author of The Wisdom of Whores and Indonesia Etc and Colin Batrouney, Director of Health Promotion, Policy and Communications at the Victorian AIDS Council.

Dion asked Colin Batrouney what people ask him at barbecues; Batrouney got a good laugh by saying “People put on their compassion face” (he mimics this) “and say, Oh, that must be very hard.”  

Elizabeth Pisani said she proposed the session title out of the desire for people to recognise how the reality of HIV has changed.  She tells of asking a friend of hers, a Frenchman, on third-line treatments that occasionally interfere with his life, what was the greatest hardship he suffered last year.  He thought for a while and said, “Some friends of mine were going skiing and it was the day of my appointment with a doctor, so I had to miss a day of skiing.”

Pisani snarkily imagined an HIV prevention campaign message: “Don’t get HIV or you’ll miss a day of skiing.”

Dion asked Batrouney if he was nostalgic for a time when the prevention message was simpler: “Use a condom every time”. Colin recalled an answer he gave at the Understanding What Works and Why workshop at AIDS2014, noting there has never been some Arcadian moment of the AIDS epidemic when everything was simple; every moment has always been the most complex moment ever.

This remark is right on the money: it nails what’s most pernicious about that heterosexual AIDS nostalgia — the symbolic violence of the wistful imagination of a time when those naughty gay boys were scared straight, frightened by the threat of death into using condoms and forgoing their perversions.

This desire is visible in the support of many conservatives for marriage equality: AIDS as stick, gay marriage as carrot.

As the Social Aspects of the Prevention of AIDS study showed, way back in the early 90s when deaths from AIDS were at their peak, gay men were still having sex without condoms — in the name of intimacy, resistance, survival.

So it was frustrating that the only prevention message that Elizabeth Pisani can imagine is one based on fear.  

Pisani spoke favourably of the New York Department of Public Health campaign “It’s never just HIV”, which threatens an audience imagined to be unafraid of HIV with side effects and co-infections.  Watch for yourself:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d0ANiu3YdJg

Every time Pisani talked about “a prevention message”, it was about motivating people through fear of negative consequences.  If you share that view, it seems a huge problem that the consequences of HIV are now much less serious than they were.  

Indeed, Pisani described the role of AIDS service organisations in developing prevention campaigns and promoting awareness of the modern lived experience of HIV as “diametrically opposed”.  And she thought the NYDPH campaign was pulled because “poz orgs objected it was stigmatising”.  

I can assure you many HIV-negative people voiced strong objections to the New York ad; I was one of them.

It’s pretty fucking fluffy logic to imply, as I heard Pisani doing, that people living with HIV have some conflict of interest when they object to a message targeting HIV-negative people as stigmatising.  

HIV-negative people are affected by stigma too.

When a campaign depicts us all as party boys who don’t think about our health — reproducing that ‘naughty boy’ stigma I describe above — there are two options:

1. react against the ad and reject the message as well;
2. or — believe it.

There’s hard research evidence of people doing option (1) when fear campaigns are too graphic.  I’ve argued this effect is likely to apply to messages that provoke shame or reproduce stigma too obviously.

But option (2) is the real worry.  It acts against the most crucial variable in health psychology: self-efficacy.  It also challenges the idea that gay people might work together — in the bedroom or sauna cubicle, or in organisations and online, to prevent HIV because we care about ourselves and others.

If you’re hosting a writer’s festival, you should definitely try to book Elizabeth Pisani.  She is a dream guest.  She is funny, gorgeous, she tells a cracking yarn, and yet she is simultaneously infuriating.  The ingredients of the perfect twitterstorm.

Her book The Wisdom of Whores displays her ability, as a journalist turned epidemiologist, to tell a yarn that conveys an understanding of some pretty complex concepts.  I just loved her description of a night out in a red light district in Indonesia, the chicanery needed to keep fat, corrupt policemen from impounding her blood tests, her canny knowledge of her research assistants and the role a tight pair of jeans can play in recruiting participants.  And I especially love and admire how, by the end of the chapter, the reader knows more than they realise about sampling bias in research.

This ability was on display at the forum.  And so was its dark side: the way a yarn, a canned tale developed in advance and trotted out on cue, is the opposite of ‘thinking-through’.  At the end of a good yarn, all the loose ends are neatly tied up.  But that’s not what we needed.  At this particular ‘moment’, we need talking through.

In the lovely words of a friend from Zim, with some issues you can tug on a loose thread and the sewing machine falls out.  One such issue is Pre-Exposure Prophylaxis — taking HIV meds when you are negative, so that if you’re exposed to the virus, it can’t get a foothold and you’re protected from infection.  

Evidence shows it works if you take it everyday.  (File under ‘obvious’?)  It changes everything, though, to have something to offer gay men who gave up “use a condom everytime” as personally and relationally unsustainable.

When the topic of PrEP came up, Pisani nodded, smiled wrily and told a self-deprecating tale about her own inability to remember to take the pill on time everyday to prevent the life changing consequences of having a baby.  She noted that PrEP uses Truvada, which she called a three drug combination that’s commonly used in first-line treatment in the developing world.

Except that’s not Truvada, that’s Atripla.

If gay men were as ‘sloppy’ in her words as she is about the pill, she worried, this could lead to resistant ‘strains’ of HIV developing and circulating in the developed world, putting the global response to HIV at risk.

Except that’s not how HIV resistance works; that’s a bacterial resistance model.  (More in a future post on this.)

The problem with a yarn is the way it crystallises the time when first you tell it.  Everytime you repeat it — and for an author on a book tour, I’m guessing that happens a lot — you’re taking the audience back in time.

A tale is a TARDIS.  Telling tales is time travel.

Quite frankly, Pisani told an audience a bunch of tales that were easy to understand but more or less out of date.  

This happens easily when you’re on the fringes of the HIV response: you miss out on the fast-moving central current of prevention science and policy development sweeping away old understandings of treatment and prevention.  

Thus the challenge for people working in prevention is to engage with journalists and policy-makers to ‘spin out’ new understandings in formats that non-experts can get their teeth into.  My money is on personal narratives and feature journalism for the job; 500 words with a news angle isn’t space enough to challenge anyone’s assumptions.

Personal narratives work too because, as research into mental health stigma shows, it only takes a small amount of personal contact to enable people who consume stigmatising media narratives to ‘triangulate’ them with reality.

A trickier challenge is getting people who see themselves as ‘hard’ scientists (or hard-nosed ex-journalists) to appreciate the ‘soft’ science of community-based health promotion.  

For example, to convince them why fear isn’t a useful messaging strategy, or why targeting HIV-negative people’s self-interest and identity might not work as well as more relationally premised messages.  

Or, hell, just to understand that ‘stigma’ and ‘community’ are both concepts about emergent causes and the inability to provide a pat one-sentence definition doesn’t make them fluffy and useless.

“We need to talk about fucking and getting high” is a great line, but prevention was never that simple.

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Edit:  if you’d like to read more about stigma, I have an article about the technical challenges of defining and measuring HIV stigma in this week’s Eureka Street, the Jesuit Publications e-journal of current affairs, social justice and social policy.

This is a low-frequency blog so please click Subscribe in the left-hand column to get an e-mail when there’s a new post!

Scott Abrahams, outgoing CEO of Star Observer, makes this timely observation:

When someone in the community finds the courage to take a stand, we bitch about them, belittle them and hide behind the cloak of online anonymity to to take personal swipes at them. I know it is true — I’ve been on the receiving end of plenty of these attacks, and almost every community leader I know has been through the same cycle. They are disturbing, vicious, gutless attacks designed not to further debate, but to hurt and wound. And they do us no favours.

I agree, and I would love to know why we’ve reached this point. Any thoughts?  Thanks, Scott.

Next Friday I’m taking three weeks off.  Last year I used up all my leave for study, just to get myself graduated.  The piece of paper, the black cape and the photo with the blue background, it’s all about making Mum happy, but it was a relief to finally get there.  My last holiday was in 2009, and that was two-parts conference, one part leisure, so it was not that relaxing.  This year I’m going to KL for three days, Bali for four, then Vietnam for a week.  A busy itinerary but lots of interesting experiences I hope.

I’m flying Malaysian Airlines to KL and from Saigon back to Melbourne.  Those flights are the backbone of my trip.  The limbs are shorter flights, from KL to Denpasar, and Denpasar to Jakarta and onward to Saigon.  I’ve been hoping to fly AirAsia for those flights.  But for weeks, their site has repeatedly declined my Westpac Mastercard.  It turns out I’m not alone.  I’m a classic Gen Y – I will exhaust every other option before I get on the phone – so I tried their e-form, their online chat, Twitter accounts (@airasia, @askairasia, @tonyfernandes) – before finally calling.

The online information services all gave me unhelpful advice or canned lines.

In response to your email, we are extremely sorry to hear that you were experience difficulties while making online booking with us. We would like to inform that we currently having difficulty in verifying some card issued by certain bank. We recommend that you to use another credit card to make your purchase.

@airasia Hi, suggest you try to book with a different card 🙂

e-Chat:  Try signing into ‘My Account’ on our website and registering your card as a 1-Click payment option, or use one of our Direct Debit services.

AirAsia claim that Paypal can be used for transactions from Australia, but they seem to determine your country of origin based on the currency you select or your destination, and AUD is no longer listed in their currencies list, so that left me with Indonesian and Vietnamese bank options.

Finally I called and the operator I spoke with confirmed that AirAsia has been having a problem with Westpac Mastercards.  So this afternoon I hit up Australia Post, picked up a prepaid Visa debit card, loaded it and used it successfully to book my flights.

I used to like AirAsia.  They’re quick and efficient with a friendly public image.  Now, I’m not so sure.  There are two possibilities:

• They might be incompetent as a learning organisation, so that knowledge available to their call centre doesn’t get passed onto their online team.
• Or more likely, they don’t want to admit a failing in an online environment, fearing it will ‘go viral’ and get RT’d all over Twitter.

But let’s look at this from the customer’s point of view: what is the value of having online contact methods if you get bad information from them?  You’re just wasting my time inviting me to contact you online if you’re not going to be honest and upfront in that space.  And you’re wasting my money; in the time I spent trying to fix this issue, three or four weeks, the price of the flights increased.

AirAsia got my money and my custom, but lost my respect in the process. Isn’t that what online engagement is meant to strengthen – the customer relationship?

If there’s one thing Australians hate, it’s companies who treat us like idiots.  It was instructive when National Express – who operate large chunks of the train system in Britain – quit their contracts in Melbourne because the operating environment was just too difficult.  We’re meaner than Britons, for god’s sake.

A few years later, Connex got the boot for essentially similar reasons – everyone knew they weren’t responsible for the rolling stock and track work that was causing the delays, but their inept public relations pissed us all off.  I’m betting Tiger Airways is next – they’re mean, obsessed with rules, and their ‘lounge’ is little more than a cage on the tarmac.  To date AirAsia has done a struck a good balance between friendliness and efficiency in the Australian setting – but this experience creates doubt about their ability to sustain it.

Postscript.

@AirAsia Hi, we will highlight your feedback to the relevant team for improvement. Thank you 🙂

Update:

Couple of intriguing developments in the referrer stats for this blog post.  A number of visits came via http://standard.cotweet.com, which I’m guessing is the Twitter CRM platform used by AirAsia.  Another visit came via a Google search for the blog title and my full name, which feels a little bit invasive – but then again I do put myself out there.  Most intriguing is a visit via a Google search for “airasia”.  My first thought was “Aha! Proof that blogging about bad customer experience can help create pressure for change.”  Until I ran the search myself… I stopped looking after twenty pages of results.  (My guess is that AirAsia has invested in a huge amount of SEO; for example, the Skytrax customer review page for AirAsia doesn’t appear until page 18 of the search results.)  Some poor numpty has had to keep clicking until they found it, probably to ascertain where, and then (god bless ’em) they clicked that link and let me know they were looking.

In a meeting, recently, I asked about how a particular media story had come into being. Mostly out of curiosity, because I do a lot of work analysing stories and their impact after publication, but I don’t do much on how they come to be stories in the first place.

Media liaison in community organisations is invariably the exclusive responsibility of executive officers and Board presidents. Mid-range orgs might hire a PR company and the major orgs (like VicHealth) will have their own media team.

Everyone else is counselled not to engage with the media.

Media engagement, in other words, is seen as a matter of organisational risk management.

Yet gay community life has become radically intermediated (Hurley, 2003).

What does that mean?

As a network of personal and social relationships, gay community still exists — but those relationships are inter-mediated, i.e. the connection is made through communications media. And our engagement with gay identity and community increasingly takes the form of consuming entertainment and news media, e.g. watching Glee and True Blood, rather than turning up in real spaces like gay clubs.

Something similar is beginning to happen in ethnic communities, as well (O’Mara, 2010).  In one refugee community in Melbourne, newly-arrived from one of the least developed countries on earth, I recently learned the best way to contact people is through word of mouth via Facebook and SMS. In another community, adult women bypass local health information altogether, and find information and entertainment in their own language via the Internet and cable television.

And all around Australia, agencies are earnestly trying to reach them with printed information, brochures and posters, in simple English and clunky translations.

In other words, if health promotion doesn’t engage with the media — news and entertainment, informative and social — that’s a recipe for irrelevance and ineffectiveness.  But the suggestion I heard was, ‘there’s no point in a bunch of health workers sitting around talking about the media.’  We should leave that to the experts.

So I was very interested to read this speech by long-time Labor Senator John Faulkner, talking about the impact of ‘leaving it to the experts’ on Labor’s effectiveness and relevance.  These words in particular:

Progressive, socially aware activists passionate about social and economic reform must never be outsiders to the Labor movement.

Labor cannot thrive as an association of political professionals focused on the machinery of electoral victory and forming, at best, contingent alliances with Australians motivated by and committed to ideals and policies.

A Party organisation staffed by experienced and competent strategists and managers is necessary to serve the campaign and organisational needs of Labor’s members and supporters, not to substitute for them.

The same is true for health promotion and community organisations.  Risk management is important, but it’s not our purpose.

Project Info Literacy:
Why is search so difficult for college students, especially the first few steps of search?

Peter Morville:
This finding is emblematic of the intimate relationship between search, learning, and decision making, and it brings to mind the paradox of choice. After all, the search box offers unrivaled selection. You can ask it any question. Or at least it often feels that way. For a student, this freedom can be simultaneously exhilarating and totally paralyzing.

Also, most students lack a useful mental model of search. They don’t know how search works or what’s being searched, which may be fine for casual Googling but not for navigating dozens of research databases.

Finally, selecting a topic is inherently difficult. It’s like buying a house or finding a spouse. The process is fuzzy and uncomfortable because we’re not sure what we want. So, all too often, we procrastinate. We wait until the last minute to begin, which is a shame because getting started is half the battle.

The key is to recognize that search can be an iterative, interactive journey of discovery that not only helps us find what we need but also lets us learn what we want to find. When we embrace this more playful model of exploratory search, it’s not so hard to get started.  (source)

Forgive me, please, but I am pissed off to the point of despair.

Doug Pollard, the original ‘Rainbow Reporter’ and for a gay news addict, the voice of God, posted this Guardian article on Facebook.

Simon Papson, an amateur thespian and semi-pro writer of aggrieved letters to the editor, had the following little moment of “I told you so” for yours truly…

No argument from me. I tried to make this very same point right here last year, and was shouted down by a friend of yours as being wrong. “Young gay men only want monogamy and safe sex,” he said. Hmph.

And when I called him on putting words in my mouth…

You didn’t use THOSE EXACT WORDS, but you strongly argued with me when I said the opposite. Even pointed to studies which confirmed that young men were looking only for monogamy and safe sex, to make your point. Any time I mentioned a significant sub-culture of casual unsafe sex among young gay men, you disputed its existence.

The irony here is that I got my head kicked in MCV for weeks by VAC after I raised concerns about HIV infection rates among young men – in particular the fact VAC waited until infection rates began to rise before investing in a prevention campaign that targeted younger gay men specifically.

The problem with what Papson said, in both cases, is the word ‘only’.

As I wrote here, young men have different, age-specific concerns about HIV and sex, relevant to the challenges they’re facing at that point in their lives.  Such as finding partners, forming relationships, dealing with monogamy and infidelity, and figuring out how to have safe, unprotected sex in relationships.

“Not invariably, but generally” <– what I said.

And yes, I cited more than one paper to support that argument.  It’s quite bizarre that people like Papson want to dismiss as unreliable all the research I cite and rely entirely on articles in non-scientific outlets like the Guardian.

Sorry, what the fuck?  How is that more reliable?

Let’s look at that Guardian article.  The headline does all the damage:  “Young gay men fuelling HIV epidemic, study warns”.  Unfortunately, that headline is a close derivative of the headline on the press release issued by the journal that’s publishing the study. The study article itself is not an easy read, so I’m going to try and summarise it in plain English here.

The study analysed the similarity of genetic code taken from HIV in blood samples from 519 HIV-positive patients at a clinic in Belgium over seven years.  This technique is called phylogenetic analysis.  Phylo- means ‘tree’ in Greek, and scientists are basically computing a viral ‘family tree’ showing whose infections are related.

In this study, they found quite a large number of ‘clusters’, where people had viruses similar enough to say they were related. The study found that men in those clusters were younger than men outside of clusters.

Not “young”.  Younger. The median age of those “younger” gay men was 36 years old, compared to 38 years in the non-cluster group.  (PDF p25).

Now, let me get back to Papson.  Papson offers a version of the RYGB meme.  That stands for Reckless Young Gay Barebackers.

When HIV infection rates first started rising, a number of commentators, from Steve Dow to Adam Carr, leapt to the intuitive but wrong conclusion that the rises were being driven by barebacking among young men who never lived through the AIDS crisis and therefore suffered from complacency.

It took a long time for the AIDS Council to get the message across that infections were happening among men in their thirties and forties, and they got their heads kicked repeatedly in the gay press all the while.

As a result, they developed a defensive, kneejerk response to any mention of young gay men and HIV risk, even from their own staff members.

The RYGB meme actually made it harder to raise awareness of the issues facing young gay men.

Papson’s no doubt patting himself on the back for fighting the good fight against a “sub-culture of casual unsafe sex” amongst young gay men;  meanwhile I’m banging my head against a desk…

An intensive policy and practical panel discussion about the possibility of rapid HIV tests being rolled out in Australia

Continue reading “Rapid testing in Australia?”

In my writing about criminalisation and HIV stigma I have been strongly critical of the rational-individual ‘model’ (assumption) that underpins the health psychology and economics upon which so much of public health practice is based. I’ve argued we can learn a lot instead from behavioural economics and bounded rationality.

One of the biggest bounds (limits) on human rationality is the finite nature of what we know, especially with respect to what’s likely to happen in the future or about some newly-emerged and previously unknown problem or technology.

Nobel prize-winning research by Kahneman and Tversky (1979) developed ‘prospect theory’, which shows that in economic decisions, rather a lot depends upon how a prospect is framed — in particular in terms of whether it involves possible loss or gain.

There have been some rather clunky attempts to incorporate this insight into health promotion, such as by framing condom use in terms of what someone has to lose. It’s an important insight but it involves translating health behaviour into economic terms, which as Dan Ariely points out has a suppressive effect on social norms like altruism — not ideal!

Today and tomorrow, I’m attending the NCHSR Social Research Conference at the University of New South Wales. At this morning’s opening plenary, Alan Peterson from Monash University is presenting on communicating health risk in a context of uncertainty. He argues early framing of risks is influential upon subsequent responses: think about the panic about the high death rate in the early days of H1N1 flu in Mexico.

Continue reading “Communicating health risk in a context of uncertainty”