On a recent Saturday night in a trendy Taipei disco, a woman named Paula, a sexually-active 23-year-old, talks of why most Taiwanese women of her generation don't think it's important to use condoms.
"If you're in a long relationship, sometimes you just don't want to [use condoms] anymore," she says. "You're thinking, hey, this is my boyfriend, what's the problem?" How long is a long relationship? "About a year, more or less," she said.
"Sometimes the more conservative a girl is, the more she'll be against using condoms. Maybe she's thinking that she's only had a couple of boyfriends and that she's, you know, very pure. It's the more liberal girls who care more about [using condoms]."
Asked if she's ever had an AIDS test, Paula says she has. One time when she went in for a check-up, she saw the test was available and didn't cost extra, "so why not?" Lee of Light of Friendship calls Paula a brave woman for her honest approach to testing. "Most girls wouldn't dare," he says. Paula agrees. Most of her friends have never been tested.
And to think about Paula's friends, who represent a whole generation filling the nightclubs, one wonders whether the infection rate really is 2000 to 1, as the CDC suggests. One also wonders whether that rate will stay that low, or whether it will rise. There is an echo of Lee's warning in all of this, and though it's been said once already, there's no reason not to say it again: "you know, there might not be a big problem now, but there sure is a good opportunity for it to get bigger."
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