[T-Plus 38 Days... I counted]
So this is a topic that I am not going to drop: PrEP is absolutely, unequivocally for women as well and as much as it is for men. Throughout this blog, I tend to focus on the male (and specifically gay male) lens, but only because that's my own perspective; it's the one I know best.
But the fact remains that PrEP information, and ads, and discussions, are all severely lacking. Women are often ignored and forgotten by agencies advertising PrEP. Some might argue, and it's true, that men make up the largest portion of folks at highest risk for HIV infection, but this doesn't excuse the invisibility of women in these areas, and particularly women of color; the same statistics from the CDC show that straight Black women are the fourth most at-risk group for HIV infection.
Some cities are doing better than others at addressing this. Chicago's PrEP4Love ad campaign and website have done a wonderful job of busting up that tradition, with beautiful photos of a spectrum of couples, both gay and straight, with primarily models of color.
The San Francisco AIDS Foundation has an entire site dedicated to women's questions and concerns about PrEP; their site is also focused on communities of color, and has a selection of resources in Spanish as well.
Certainly those two sites and ad campaigns, and the few others out there, don't make up for the horrendous lack of resources for women; every sexually active person can potentially benefit from access to PrEP, and we're hurting ourselves and our communities terribly by ignoring whole groups. This has to stop.
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