Jack Nicholson on the 'AIDS' puritan fear campaign.

From an interview in the Playboy Fiftieth Annirversary Edition

PLAYBOY: Are you suggesting that menopause, presumary along with Viagra, opens up new possibilities for sex as we age?

NICHOLSON: I'm not sure if I am an expert on that, but I can tell you that I've noticed another phenomenon related to Viagra. These have been troubled times in the area of sexual expression. I rank the publicizing of AIDS right up there with the atomic bomb as events that impacted our culture for the worse. We were moving toward a more feeling, freerer society until AIDS, which came along and gave the right wing the chance to reinstitute its idea that sex is negative. Anybody who owned a bar in the 1970's can tell you it was the en of the bar business period. It was a sign of society reversing itself in term of the enjoyment of freerer sex, because sex was associated with death.

PLAYBOY: There was always safe sex.

NICHOLSON: But safe sex became the equivalent of "I won't kiss you" for a girl. It became just another obstruction. Most people who investigated this knew that if you were not shooting up or getting fucked in the heinie, you were as likely were as likely to get AIDS as have a safe fall on your head while walking down Wiltshire Boulevard. But you could not proselytize this view. The facts were almost useless. You coulden't give a woman the facts and have her respond "Oh, all right".



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"The people need wholesome fear; they want to fear something. They want someone to frighten them and make them shudderingly

submissive."

- Ernst Roehm, gay leader of the Nazi SA Brownshirts

"We have created our myth. The myth is a faith, a passion. It is not necessary for it to be a reality."

- Benito Mussolini, The Naples Speech, 1922

"The power of such a method to force changes in cultural values is based on careful manipulation of fear. Ideally, health promotion

messages should heighten an individual's perceptions of threat and his or her capacity to respond to that threat, thus modulating the level of

fear...What is not yet known is how to introduce fear in the right way in a particular message intended for a particular audience. Acquiring

that knowledge will require planned variations of AIDS education programs that are carefully executed and then carefully evaluated".

Pages 267-8 and 373.- 1989 National Research Council/CDC Internal Report