Sexually Transmitted Disease and Gender Roles

Abstract

In the last 25 years of the 20th century, two events occurred that may affect cultural evolution into the foreseeable future. First, birth rates in a number of industrialized nations dropped below the level of population maintenance, and, second, the HIV/AIDS virus emerged, spread, and became embedded and endemic in many nations. The relationship between the spread of HIV/AIDS and several parameters of a nation's demography is empirically examined. Then, three distinct cultural responses to the incidence HIV/AIDS are examined in three regions of the world: Europe, Sub-Saharan Africa, and a Muslim area stretching from Mauritania to Pakistan.