Emily Abt, a feminist filmmaker, and Mehret Mandefro, studying to be a doctor, met in London when they were both on Fulbright scholarships. Emily later turned to Mehret and two of her HIV-positive patients--Chevelle and Tara--to star in a documentary film about the epidemic of AIDS among African American women. All of the women involved in the film realized that cultural and social misogyny takes a personal toll, and that regardless of their background, women who have internalized sexist beliefs are in danger of being ill-equipped to protect themselves from the disease. After hearing Chevelle introduce a ten minute trailer of the film at a downtown reading last month, RH Reality Check's Sarah Seltzer called Emily, who's already busy on her next feature film, to talk about the lessons she learned making "All of Us."

SS: So you believe giving women power is crucial to stopping the spread of disease?

EA: Absolutely, examining gender inequity as it plays out in the bedroom and looking at issues of love, trust, intimacy and how those can be factors in the spread of this disease.

SS: I know you mention abstinence-only policies in the film. Do you think the spread of HIV among young black women can partially be explained by a lack of comprehensive sex ed?

EA: Definitely. We end this film with a scene where Mehret and Chenelle go to Brooklyn to talk to teenage girls. The fact that there is no decent national sex ed totally inspired me, the side effects from Bush's approach to abstinence-only stuff. The film is very much a rallying cry for better sexual health education and outreach.

SS: You call the completed film the "emergency edition."

EA: Yeah absolutely. HIV is the biggest cause of death for African-American women ages 18-35. It's unnacceptable that this statistic doesn't merit more public outcry and attention. When making the film we kept thinking that we'd get scooped, that other filmmakers and journalists would get the word out. We kept expecting the New York Times Magazine would do a cover story. That never happened, and it still hasn't happened, even though it has taken us four years to make the film. It's kind of sad.

My last film was about the human impact of welfare reform. That film did very well. Meanwhile, "All of Us" hasn't gotten picked up by a network. We're going to see it through, we're going to do a theatrical release in September.

SS: Did the hoopla surrounding race vs. gender in the election frustrate you as you saw that this problem, facing African-American women, was totally ignored during the debates?

EA: The media in general want to simplify things, we get these kind of dichotomies. This film is specifically about the disproportionate risk that black women face, but there's more here. It relates to all women.

SS: The film was originally titled Mehret. Why did you change it to "All of Us"? How does that parallel journey of the film?

EA: We had to make sure that audience members didn't walk away thinking it wasn't about them, that it was just about people who were already at risk. The two patients in the film had faced a lot of abuse and domestic violence and drug abuse. It was important to us to also look at Mehret's personal life, given that she's Harvard-educated, promoting the film in a way that demonstrated its universal issues.

SS: What influenced the decision to go to Ethiopia and look at HIV there as part of the filming?

EA: That was a perk of having Mehret as a subject. She was Ethiopian and had always returned there, and she has a commitment to doing HIV related work in Africa. There were real parallels between what's happening to women there and here and in the inner city. It's not the same, but there were more parellels than you would think.

SS: What was it like working with the women in the film on a daily basis?

EA: Sometimes it was difficult. I definitely cried a bit and asked a lot of personal questions. Sometimes they didn't like that.

SS: You filmed some happy, almost fairy-tale moments, like Chevelle's wedding.

EA: It was very important to show both the joy and pain in subjects. Like Chevelle always says, there is life after HIV. You can live with the virus, and it's not necessarily a death sentence.

SS: Since Mehret is training to be a doctor and the film shows her interacting with her patients, do you think the film might be used in the medical field?

EA: Yes. We're doing really well with educational sales, and some of the institutes that have purchased it are med schools. I definitely think some people think it should be used in medical school curricula and the like. It could change the nature of how doctors interact with HIV patients because it's different from normal relationships. Doctors know their patients for years and see them so often.

SS: What will men get out of the film?

EA: One of the main messages of the film is to be sexually responsible. There are real costs and on the one side you have the abstinence only movement not explaining things. But on the other side, there's a difference between being sexually independent and sexually irresponsible and that's an important message for men too. I didn't get as much access with men in these women's lives as I wanted. It speaks to how taboo the subject is. People aren't comfortable -- it's challenging to get people to talk about sex in a real way, not just a sexy fun way.

But beyond giving teens their own lingo, lots of health experts are seeing this technology as a massive opportunity to spread information about sexual health resources and facts, and answer questions about the often private conundrums that young people face.

In California, ISIS has launched a text-messaging program called SexInfo, which enables kids to use a coded text message to get resources. For instance, teens can text "1" if their condom breaks, or "2" to find out about STDs. And in New York, a group of obstetricians and gynecologists are testing the effectiveness of text and cellphone reminders as a way of helping women adhere to their contraception.

Last month, Kaiser Family Foundations and MtvU partnered to launch PosorNot, a virtual game and online community that helps erase the stigma around HIV infection. The game also spreads information on testing and resources for those who have the disease. It's modeled, cheekily, after the degrading viral sensation "hot or not" -- but that seems to have gotten the kind of attention a blander site might not garner.

These are just several examples of dozens of hotlines, websites, cellphone services and more that are springing up to spread sexual health information around the globe. Using technology to promote health education is hardly new, but as new media tools gallop across income groups and geographical areas, so do efforts to capitalize on them, particularly since the private but interactive nature of technology suits the issue of sexual health.

"Everyone has questions about their sexual health, reproductive health, sexuality, relationships. Everyone doesn't have places to ask those questions," says Deb Levine, president of Internet Sexuality Information Services (ISIS), who has been working to integrate technology and sexual health for almost two decades. "New media provides this sense of anonymity, comfort, and privacy, but at the same time people can really find community and discuss issues."

Texting For Success

Levine and ISIS conceived of SexInfo when they noticed the ubiquitous presence of cellphones in California teens' hands. They partnered with the San Francisco Department of Public Health, and got local organizations that worked with kids to help with the process, as well as talking to teens themselves. In the first 25 weeks of this year, 4,500 teens accessed the service, texting in numbers that stood for particularly popular questions they had about sex, such as finding out about STDs or info on pregnancy testing.

Since SexInfo's launch, ISIS has labored to make the interface simple and compatible with the media teens already love and the most pressing concerns they have, based on surveys done before the launch. "The most important thing is that we give them a place to voice concerns, to interact with them on their terms," says Levine. "It's not just experts answering questions, but experts saying ‘what are your questions?'"

Isis' efforts to advertise the program ranged from flyers and bus shelter ads to getting a popular local hip-hop artist to help spread the world -- but their community partnerships with clergy, juvenile justice groups, and health educators were particularly vital. They plan to spread the program, with variations, to DC and Toronto within the next year, and further after that.

The Buzz on Sticking to Contraception

On the other side of the country, a group of doctors at Columbia Presbyterian hospital recently conceived of a similar idea. Says Dr. Paula Castano, an ob/gyn at the hospital: "It was a combination of myself and other clinicians in our practice noticing when they asked routine medical questions such as when was your last menstrual period, patients would pull out their cellphones to check calendars."

Realizing that patients were latching on quickly to new technology, Castano and her colleagues saw a chance to use the trend - reminders via cellphone - to prevent unplanned, unwanted pregnancies. They did an initial survey in 2005 to decide whether a clinical trial on the topic was feasible, with promising results. They surveyed women of all ages in four inner-city family planning clinics, a racially diverse group of women with incomes largely below the poverty level. They found that 77% of women under 20 used a cellphone, and almost 90% of those used text messages. The survey subjects expressed interest in the idea of text messaging as a way of helping them adhere to contraceptive methods.

Castano and her colleagues are currently working on a clinical trial to explore the usefulness of text reminders on contraceptive adherence, which isn't easy for any woman but can be particularly difficult for women in distressed circumstances.

"Cell phone use is skyrocketing," she says. "And even though users have gone up, the monthly bill has stayed the same."

Challenging Stigma, Virtually

Using pop culture to endorse do-good initiatives is nothing new for the folks at Mtv U, Mtv's college station. Their viral "Darfur Is Dying" game snagged the attention of their longtime partners at Kaiser Family Foundation, who hoped to do something similar with AIDS-related issues. The folks at Kaiser realized that their target audience had shifted the media they consumed, and are "not always watching TV or looking at billboards or listening to radio." Rather, says Meredith Mishel, senior program officer at Kaiser, "they're gaming."

Kaiser joined forces with Mtv U and Poz magazine, the magazine for those living with HIV and AIDS, and sponsored a contest to design a game that would both combat stigma and spread health information. From the contests, the seeds for PosorNot, which launched April 31 with fanfare from pop artists like Will.i.am and Fall Out Boy, were sown.

PosorNot features a group of incredible people -- Mishel is full of grateful praise for their courage and conviction -- who have agreed to create surfable online profiles. Based only on appearance and a few initial details, participants are asked to guess whether these people have HIV or not, in the process learning to question their own assumptions about who is at risk for the disease. After they click through, users learn more about those who are affected by HIV either directly or indirectly, and are pointed to information about the disease and testing.

The relative security of the online interface, combined with the deeply personal experience of seeing human stories in front of them, enables a more thorough self-examination process. Younger generations tend to know there's something inappropriate about voicing their own assumptions when it comes to HIV. But without voicing those assumptions, it's hard to have them debunked -- which makes the beauty of an online, anonymous game obvious.

But more than just fostering personal discovery, the site provides constant opportunities to send users towards information on getting tested. In just one April day, they sent the entire month's sixth-highest number of visitors to the CDC's HIV page.

"People are staying for a while, exactly what we're hoping they'd do," says Caroline Herter, a program associate at Kaiser.

Ring It Up

Clearly, the use of technology to spread health info in the US is on the rise in a major way. But in other countries, where poorer infrastructure leads to an increased reliance on cellphones -- or where better technology introduced cellphones earlier -- the implications are equally exciting.

The UN Foundation and Vodafone recently released a report including multiple case studies of groups using cellphones to improve health conditions around the globe. SexInfo was spotlighted as one such intervention, but their case studies included NGOs using cellphone technology in Nigeria, South Africa, Argentina and beyond. In these countries as well as in the US, the benefits from using technology are the same: efficiency, anonymity, a chance to explore the wider world, and interaction with already beloved technology. In the near future, the buzz of phones or pings of a new e-mail may offer more than a social hello -- they can also provide vital, life-altering health information around the globe.

It's a powerful month for the movement, but I always haves to sigh over the "awareness" part. We shouldn't have to be raising awareness, but we always are. The problem is obviously a multifaceted one, but it stems from widespread misogyny. Our cultural arbiters have an inability to accept acquaintance rape as part of the problem of rape, which it is. And the media has an unwillingness to pay attention when the victims of stranger rape or conflict-zone rape are anyone but white and middle-class.

Part of the tide we have to swim against in order to raise awareness is embedded in our popular visual culture, and the images of sexual assault and violent sexuality it produces, images that trivialize and misrepresent the truth about sexual assault. When we watch scenes of rape and attempted rape, we often tend to see the moment of the assault itself, in a highly titillating, artsy context, the same way an edgy scene of consensual sex would be filmed. Sometimes, we see rape as a mere symbol of who has the power dynamic at a particular moment-when a man holds the woman, he holds the cards, so to speak. And in most cases, movies and television rarely show the deeply traumatic aspect of rape, the unpleasant flashbacks, nightmares, physical repulsion that women feel, save for a few token tears or a gun-toting revenge plot. It's this "rape culture" that makes it hard to raise our voices without having to raise awareness first.

One of the biggest problems with the way rape is portrayed in pop culture is as a glamorous product of male desire-as tiny step beyond the seduction and manipulation we love on soap-opera plots. One culprit in recent years has been rich-kids-drama Gossip Girl. Its first few episodes drew criticism on the internet for interspersing and blurring scenes of attempted date rape and consensual sex, and for featuring a serial date-rapist as a standard-issue sneering villain without addressing the trauma his attempted victims would be going through.

Another problem with the way rape is portrayed, particularly in action movies, is as a stand-in for a power-struggle. In The 300, the rape of the queen of Sparta is all about the competition between two men over the throne. In Kevin Costner's Robin Hood, Prince of Thieves, the Sheriff of Nottingham's abduction of Marian is a stand-in for his rivalry with Robin.

And finally, there's a widespread ignorance of the trauma of attempted assault. Over and over, women are victims of assault or attempted assault, they are rescued by a male protagonist, and then they invariably engage in some nooky with the hero-Mary Jane's famous upside-down smooch with Spiderman occurred after an attempted assault, for instance. Chances are in real life these women would be heading to a police station, a hospital, or the bathroom to throw up, not towards a makeout session.

These are just a few of the myths about rape perpetuated in pop culture. But with all the "bad" scenes I've witnessed, only two accurate and thoughtful portrayals of assault come to my mind, and both are therefore pretty painful. One is in the recent Romanian film, Four Months, Three Weeks and Two Days. I already discussed its depiction of abortion, but it also showed rape in an entirely accurate light as well. The kind of rape involved in the film isn't violent rape, but rape as abuse of power. We only see the protagonist taking her shoes and socks off. Then the camera moves to her friend sitting in the bathroom, knowing what is happening, knowing her turn is next. After it is over, the victim runs into the bathroom, naked from the waist down, and turns the shower on herself with such grim ferocity that it's viscerally sickening for the audience. There is absolutely nothing sexual about this scene, no gorgeous shots of female torsos, no unbridled lust. It shows rape as what it is: an exercise in power, domination, and cruelty.

Another scene I recall was from corset and cleavage period drama The Buccaneers, broadcast on PBS over a decade ago (It's an adaptation of an Edith Wharton novel, and Wharton understood the oppression of women). The rape occurs within a loveless marriage of convenience, and the director takes time to zoom in the shock and horror on the victim's face, not to mention highlighting her physical pain. It also focuses on the violence and rage of the perpetrator rather than the body of the victim. Just to make it extra clear, the camera, and the victim's gaze, turn to a soft painting of lovers on the ceiling, contrasting its image of sensuality with the violence taking place beneath it.

The problem of course, is that both of these scenes are intensely disturbing and also realistic, and most directors must think public probably doesn't want to be confronted with such images. But it's cyclical-if media depicted rape more honestly, it could help combat rape mythology. And if movie and television directors are unafraid to show more and more disturbingly honest images of violence (look at the Academy Award winners in the past two years), we can lobby them to make rape realistic, or not include it at all.

"Horton Hears a Who!" is the tale of the eponymous elephant, one of Seuss' most gentle and heroic characters. He encounters the Whos of Whoville, a group of people living in a miniature world on a speck of dust. Horton must defend their existence to a group of dismissive jungle-dwellers. In the end, all the Whos join their voices together and shout, and the animals finally hear them, believe in them, and agree not to harm their infinitesimal home.

The book was written in 1954, long before Roe v. Wade and the modern framework of the abortion debate. If Seuss' simple rhymes do contain social commentary, they appear to be a condemnation of Cold War era paranoia. But context doesn't matter to the anti-choice crowd -- in fact a quick internet search reveals that there are many out there who believe that God spoke through the decidedly liberal Seuss' pen, willing him to write this line that can now be used to justify a movement he didn't support. They are undeterred by Seuss' widow's support for Planned Parenthood and an interview with Seuss Scholar Philip Nel, who said that the author threatened lawsuits against anti-choice groups: "It's one of the ways in which Seuss has been misappropriated. He would not agree with that." Death of the author, indeed.

This past Saturday a group of anti-abortion protestors filtered in to the Hollywood premiere of the "Horton" film, voiced by Jim Carrey, Steve Carrell and Carol Burnettt, and others. They interrupted the screening with a coordinated protest, shouting during the film and then walking around with tape over their mouths. It was a bizarre stunt, onsidering the fact that most of the audience was made up of children who doubtless missed their political message, and Hollywood journalists who made fun of them.

But these kinds of shenanigans, while frustrating, weren't exactly shocking. Despite lawsuits and voiced disapproval from Dr. Seuss and his widow, the "a person's a person no matter how small" line has snowballed and is now a de facto motto for the anti-abortion movement. Just google the line: some pro-life sites show up above Dr. Seuss.

Is there anything lovers of reproductive justice (not to mention classic children's literature) can do to reclaim Dr. Seuss' inspirational story, or should we content ourselves with reading more obviously lefty Seuss fare like the Lorax and the Butter Battle Book?

We definitely shouldn't abandon poor Horton, even if we feel stymied by his persistent misuse. Let's start with a little basic literary analysis. The Whos are not groups of cells, after all: they are sentient, independent people with their own society, even a mayor. Their small size is a metaphor, you see (trust the anti-abortion crowd to take a parable literally). Seuss is making a point about people who are different, and the ignorance that keeps others from metaphorically not seeing or hearing them. My guess is the kids in the audience absorbed the actual symbolism onscreen, the whole bit about accepting each other, more than the zealots with red tape over their mouths ever will.

The anti-choice protesters, incidentally, were happy to ruin the afternoon of hundreds of those kids, too busy advocating on behalf of blastocysts to pay attention to real people -- real "small people," in fact. This kind of behavior sums up the hypocrisy of a movement that would give personhood to a fertilized egg while denying health care to children and physical autonomy to women.

The problem is that those who are particularly proud of saying "a person's a person" don't care about actual persons. Unfortunately, that means any attempt at reasoned discourse about Horton's message will likely fall flat.

But there's plenty of inspiration that pro-choice women can get from the book on our own terms. "Horton's" climactic moment is when all the Whos, even Jojo the youngest and smallest, join their voices together. At that moment, the Whos cease to be inaudible. While the book is a critique of prejudice and misunderstanding, it's also about the importance of collective action, the power of a group to make itself heard and understood.

So we can take away our own message and speak up as one for the rights women deserve. And to paraphrase another Dr. Seuss book, let's tell the anti-abortion movement, which is so fond of simplistic slogans, that we don't like their hypocrisy. We do not like it in a house. We do not like it with a mouse. We do not like it here or there. We do not like it anywhere.