Comments on From Now On, Oct 12 Is Syphilis Day...

NICE the old VD ad's from the 40's. But I think the movie "Teeth" is a better deterent.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0780622/

so you are equating native women with the dirty girls from an old school vd poster....nice, think before you speak

women who were more than likely raped as described by Miguel Cuneo who was on the crew.

There also weren't antibiotics. But hey, you could take some mercury! I heard that worked really well for the Lewis and Clark expedition.

We should make this our Christmas.

A syphilis for the rest of us?

What ever DID happen to Winona LaDuke?

@2

I think including the poster is more an indictment of outdated beliefs surrounding STDs and the PSAs about them than anything.

Every day is Syphilis Day!

Need to do somethin 'bout that.....

@7 she still works with Honor the Earth Fund, White Earth Recovery Project, and Native Harvest...

@8 the line "Too bad there weren’t PSAs back in the 1400s." may be tongue in cheek but it becomes less funny when you look at the long history of rape and colonization in the new world, begun by columbus and his men...especially when the article states that syphillis probably only reached its virulence in europe. on these continents it wasn't the deadly disease passed on by dirty men/women.

so even if it is a humorous attempt, the author is still equating the women that pinzon raped as girls who "may have looked clean but..."

@3 -- wow...it was BAD.

Columbus and his men also used the Taino as sex slaves: it was a common reward for Columbus' men for him to present them with local women to rape. As he began exporting Taino as slaves to other parts of the world, the sex-slave trade became an important part of the business, as Columbus wrote to a friend in 1500: "A hundred castellanoes (a Spanish coin) are as easily obtained for a woman as for a farm, and it is very general and there are plenty of dealers who go about looking for girls; those from nine to ten (years old) are now in demand."

While Columbus once referred to the Taino Indians as cannibals, a story made up by Columbus - which is to this day still taught in some US schools - to help justify his slaughter and enslavement of these people. He wrote to the Spanish monarchs in 1493: "It is possible, with the name of the Holy Trinity, to sell all the slaves which it is possible to sell…Here there are so many of these slaves, and also brazilwood, that although they are living things they are as good as gold…"

http://www.commondreams.org/views04/1011-27.htm

Bartolome de Las Casas chronicled the darker side of this conquest...more can be found here

What ever DID happen to Wynona Ryder?

I thought it was Anne Frank.

A tawdry, syphlitic Anne Frank....

@3, @10, and @11

I'm not exactly sure the point of the article or the tongue in cheek expressions was to do villify or justify ANYTHING Colombus or his crew did. Our generation in particular has grown up with the notion that Colombus was an idiot at best and MOST inhumane at worst. I mean, do you want to use this article as another excuses to berate him some more?

I guess as far as I'm concerned... Colombus was a douche ... he failed as a colonist or even a decent human being, but he is dead and it's over.

What I want to know, what does it say about the rates of syphilus in the new world BEFORE Colombus came? Sexual culture, etc. etc. Was this how the Mayans became extinct?

its about how this virus was picked up and brought to europe, more than likely through rape. knowing that history, the vd poster seems to be in bad taste...pinzon shouldn't have assumed the girls he was raping were clean.

@12 - you should also read that cool book about Argentina, as written by a woman at the time of the founding ... now that opens your eyes.

Define clean.

What little I know about native american sexuality was from the excerts I could stomach from pacific northwest native american romance novel that was supposed to be cultured that came across as trashy that my girlfriend was reading....

therego ... not a much.

Still, anybody that knows anything about infectious diseases knows that evolutionarily the LAST thing a disease wants to do is kill the host. Killing the host eventually kills ALL the hosts, what kind of environment and culture breeds syphilis? Maybe this fact can offer clues about native american sex?

'Now we know—it’s “the American disease.”'

Excuse me, but this is not exactly correct.

http://www.pbs.org/wnet/secrets/case_syphilis/

So is Columbo no binking americano girls no can disease happen yes, please.

@19

OR perhaps the more historic version is another variant. Diseases often die out when they kill too many of their hosts ... Like I said, we may never know.

@19

OR perhaps the more historic version is another variant. Diseases often die out when they kill too many of their hosts ... perhaps Mayans

OR Matt...ummmm. the maya are still around, quite alot of them in fact. still your interest in other people's sex lives reminds me of the earliest anthropologists...maybe you should get out a bit more, get that girlfriend to put down the novel and start living some of the fantasies in the real world. other than that i'm sure it's safe to assume that natives have had sex for quite awhile...

I see OR Matt you want to see whether or not early Natives were sex crazed nymphos...like i said, some cold baths...gettin out in the fresh air, this might help you get past this.

Mmmm, sex-crazed nymphos. I knew a sex-crazed nympho once. Wow! She was...oh, wait, wrong blog.

Yes there are plenty of Mayans around ... but not well ... not living like the "advanced" Mayans just prior to Colombus (god is it dinner yet?). No I'm not necessarily implying or seeking that the Native Americans were sex crazed nymphos (although that novel seemed to imply it a tad ...)

But I guess what irks me is the whole my ethnicity/culture is holier than though mentality. After we agree that it probably was NOT the anglos, I don't really think it matters ... and lets face it sex sells, has been sold and most likely will always be sold, and stories about sex are interesting.

@26,

Since indigenous peoples had likely been living with syphilus for generations, they developed an immunity to it, just as Europeans developed an immunity to smallpox. Of course, smallpox did a hell of a lot more damage to Native Americans than syphilus did to Europeans.

huh? where did the anglo's come in... and no one has discussed this through their own ethnicity till you...somebody got issues

My high school biology teacher 30 years ago told us syphilis was first spread to humans by sheep. He didn't mention the ethnic origin of the animal lover.

All you supercilious jerks oughta try out Lyme Disease, the other spirochete. Take my word for it, it sucks.

I've experienced it in the UK, and in Germany. You think you get rid of it, but uh-uh. It's a bitch.

If Leif Ericson had been a better marketer we'd all be speaking Old Norse, reading the Elder Edda, and worshiping Thor. He got around, instead of just vacationing in the Bahamas and calling it a day.

Oh, and NapoleonXIV@14 wins.