I thought it was pretty obvious.
Was also a tad annoying as because she was liberal and anti war and was a sexually liberated woman...well then she is a whore that will get her payback by being given aids.
I thought it was a good movie but it had touches of right-wing propaganda.
First, women are just 20% of all AIDS victims. Mind not blown, Mr. Un-PC Dude.
Second, that shows a fair degree of missing the point of fiction. Sure, in real life, where everything happens according to cold statistics, promiscuous women will tend to get more AIDS than non-promiscuous women and non-promiscuous heterosexual men. Granted.
But this is fiction, a work of art which has an audience and a message, where everything happens because the author wants to. Even if you don't want to, even if you're scared shitless of communicating a Message, you are in fact, as an author, putting a point across. It might not be a message that you as an author subscribe to, but the work is there, and the point is made; and you're just a bad author. And people are naturally adept at finding the core message of works of fiction; we as a species seem to like narrative a lot.
We look at those Nazis melting at the end of the first Indiana Jones movie, and we instinctively get it: they were punished because of their arrogance and evilness (in this case Naziness). Even one Nazi got stigmata, as a symbolical punishment and marker of his inherent badness, that is, Naziness. It's all narrative, and a message gets made, namely that being Nazi is kind of a bad deal. Take Elon Musk, he's the hero in a narrative that pits the Startupy Original Innovators (good) against Sclerotic Big Corporations like Boeing (bad); and it's hinted that badness will be punished at the end and good will prevail, as it is defined in the (narrow, a bit unfair) context of that narrative. A very common and crude narrative structure; and very powerful, by the way.
So, this guy watches Forrest Gump in a culture that tends to shame women that have casual sex, and sees that it just so happens a woman that has casual sex then has (is punished with, the mind readily answers, since it's just too much of a coincidence...) AIDS, because this author just decided for it to happen. And this guy then infers the writer has made a moralizing tale where sluts get AIDS. Now, maybe this author was just clueless and didn't think through the implications of his, or her, decisions; but I wouldn't blame the GP for looking at Forrest Gump that way.
lolcraft says some of my thoughts better than I could.
It is funny that after my two sentence post I am accused of being PC (whatever that even means these days) and wanting to deny that some risky behavior and drugs could lead to problems and that I think all anti-war people were angels.
In Forest Gump everyone who is anti-Vietnam war is presented as bad and the woman who choose not to stay in her home town and make house and goes to protests get aids. It does seem like a message.
Some pointed out LT Dan does get his legs blown off. True but it is from no fault of his own, its a random event not him being punished. His gets on prostitutes (who of course are shown an horrible people) drinks a ton, but yet in the end, his life turns out good and he marries an Asian women (you know 'cause he was fighting against them, so this some how is fitting). No punishment for his reckless behavior unlike that slut Jenny.
Yes, unfortunately science is rarely PC. Behavior and genetics are by far the strongest determinants of your risk for acquiring HIV. No parade, protest, or law will change that.
Physician here: maybe you could enlighten us all on studies showing "genetics" are "strongest" determinants of "your risk for acquiring HIV."
Are you actually trying to advance the theory that the "genetics" of a particular minority group is a "determinant", rather than social class?
A lack of socioeconomic resources is linked to the practice of riskier health behaviors, which can lead to the contraction of HIV. These behaviors include earlier initiation of sexual activity and less frequent use of condoms (Adler, 2006).
Unstable housing has been linked to risk for HIV infection, including IV drug use and unsafe sexual behaviors (Aidala, Cross, Stall, Harre, & Sumartojo, 2005).
Individuals who are homeless or in unstable housing arrangements are significantly more likely to be infected with HIV compared to individuals in more stable housing environments (Culhane, Gollub, Kuhn, & Shpaner, 2001).
Lack of socioeconomic resources is also associated with risk factors for neuropsychiatric dysfunction, such as exposure to environmental toxins and injuries. These factors can make persons with HIV more vulnerable to the central nervous system effects of the virus, including more rapid cognitive decline and onset of dementia (Satz, 1993).
HIV status often has a negative impact on socioeconomic status by constraining an individual’s ability to work and earn income. Research indicates that up to 45 percent of people living with HIV are unemployed (Rabkin, McElhiney, Ferrando, Van Gorp, & Lin, 2004).
The effects of HIV on physical and mental functioning can make maintaining regular employment difficult. Patients with HIV infection may also find that their work responsibilities compete with their health care needs. Individuals infected with HIV are often discriminated against in the workplace, leading to their termination or forced resignation (Dray-Spira, Lert, Marimoutou, Bouhnik, & Obadia, 2003; Kass et al., 1994).
Children infected with HIV often exhibit cognitive deficits when compared with their uninfected peers (Martin et al., 2006). These deficits can adversely affect learning and earning ability later in life.
SES status often determines access to HIV treatment. Individuals of low SES have delayed treatment initiation relative to more affluent patients, reducing their chances of survival (Joy et al., 2008).
Patients of lower SES with HIV have increased morbidity and mortality rates. Research suggests a correlation between low SES and earlier death from HIV/AIDS (Cunningham et al., 2005).
Accordingly, individuals of higher SES levels experience slower progression of HIV infection (Schechter et al., 1994).
Decreased access to health insurance and preventive services is a major contributor to health disparities between high- and low-SES individuals. Low-income individuals are not likely to have health coverage or receive optimal treatment and care for HIV/AIDS, such as Highly Active Antiretroviral Therapy (HAART) (Wood et al., 2002)
Actually it's really simple. Risky behavior is called that because it increases the risk of STD transmission. It is also borne out in the statistics that people of certain races are disproptionately affected by HIV.
i don't understand. heterosexual women are way down the list. what are you trying to say? (i haven't seen the film so perhaps i am missing something, but i thought the argument from the original comment was that being a sexually active woman wasn't a major risk factor).
She was a promiscuous drug user. Sharing needles, engaging in high risk sexual activity, etc. The original comment is saying that they were annoyed that the movie perpetuated the stereotype that these activities increase the chances of contracting HIV. Those of us that are annoyed by this person's annoyance are saying that indeed these behaviors are scientifically proven to increase risk of HIV infection.
or that they receive fewer opportunities for education and distribution of said protection (eg, a richer school may have free condom distribution, but a poorer one does not?). Maybe because cultures of "Abstinence" (eg, teach them abstinence and dont give them condoms/protection, then wonder why they get diseases)...
This is all supposition, I'll let others lay down the facts.
Are you saying anti-war protesters can't be women beaters? That liberated women can't get AIDS? That in the late 70's prostitutes were guaranteed ways of getting this disease that wasn't widespread yet?
Forrest Gump had very real characters. Jenny had a shitty life, which continued to be shitty by her choices. This really happens to people from shitty backgrounds because they don't recognize shitty situations as shitty, but as normal. Had she stayed with Forrest, her life wouldn't have been that way, but she still could have been the strong woman that was part of her personality. She just didn't recognize when a good thing came her way.
Lots of people did heroin and hookers before AIDS was everywhere, not all of them contracted HIV. That's the nature of a mystery disease. Lt. Dan also fell into a depression that Forrest helped pull him out of, just by being a good influence. Lt. Dan had the life Jenny could have, Forrest made the lives of people around him better by being a good person. Between that and the rapid changes the world went through from 1950 to ~1985 is what the movie is about.
It's not a propaganda film, despite your strongest wishes that it were.
"Are you saying anti-war protesters can't be women beaters?"
can you really not see the argument being made? the original post was not saying no women got aids, or that no anti-war protesters are wife-beaters. it was arguing that there is a systematic bias.
i don't know if that's true or not, but wilfully misunderstanding or misrepresenting the argument doesn't help anyone.
It's a non sequitur. It does not follow that because the anti-war protester that Jenny hooks up with beats her that the movie is trying to portray anti-war protesters as woman beaters. It can only be a shocking bias if it's so shocking for it to occur.
It also doesn't fit the actual movie. The movie has Jenny making the same poor decisions over and over because that's what her background leads her to. Her personality leads her to protest the injustice of Vietnam, her view of normal gravitates her to the worst of the other protesters. Her personality leads her to being a liberated woman of the 70's, while at the same time drawing her into the culture of abuse and self-abuse that put her in the position to be one of the early contractors of HIV.
There is no bias, this really happens. Jenny was a complex character that was controlled by her demons.
The major characters of Forrest Gump are really portrayed quite realistically.
Propaganda or no, our brains do have a tendency to mix up correlation and causation (most notably because many times, correlation does come from causation), and a tendency to draw conclusions from fiction as well as from reality.
Someone who notices both her AIDS and her left-wing behaviour will likely be a tiny bit more confident that one causes the other.
(Now, I do see her as a prisoner of her shitty situation, and not as a "liberated" woman.)
> Someone who notices both her AIDS and her left-wing behaviour will likely be a tiny bit more confident that one causes the other.
So just because some people are woolly headed, artistic endeavours should show only one-dimensional characters? Reality is filled with Syrian rebels who eat hearts, rapists who were nice to their mothers and computer programmers who pray to god.
To some extent, everyone is "woolly headed" as you put it (did you mean holly headed?). While it's not a good reason to limit artistic endeavours to one-dimensional characters, it is a good reason to pay a little attention to it. I mean, a story full of weak cute girls whose sole purpose is to be saved by strong, muscular, male heroes does kinda sends the wrong message. I mean, girls often can and should defend themselves. Let's not teach them otherwise.
On the other hand, the fact that we tend to see correlations everywhere also mean we should be more forgiving when one happen to irk us. For instance, I once noticed in a season of 24 that "proprietary" was mentioned twice as an excuse for being harder to crack. The Stalman in me translated that by "proprietary -> better", and wondered if there was some kind of agenda behind that. Then, in season 8, I noticed that "proprietary" was used as an excuse for being harder to get used to. Which gives "proprietary -> worse". So much for the agenda. (By the way, 24 features much stronger and much more objectionable correlations. Noticed how human rights stop where Jack Bauer begins? —though again, season 8 doesn't seem to endorse torture any more.)
I'm afraid that if you think PG will continue to tell you to stop after this time, you are wrong. The next step is probably you being hellbanned by one of the admins, or by software.
I thought it was a good movie but it had touches of right-wing propaganda.