Love, sex and AIDS : Report from South Africa.

In August, the Pretoria High Court ruled that antiprostitution provisions in the Sexual Offenses Act were unconstitutional. If the Constitutional Court confirms that decision, the door to legalized prostitution in South Africa will open a little wider. "Sex industry" representatives and a sympathetic media welcomed the decision. The current-affairs television program "Carte Blanche" treated viewers to a tour of an up-market brothel and an interview with two articulate white women who affected perfect contentment with their profession. They might have been lawyers or parliamentarians, had they not been naked and sipping champagne in a spa.

By contrast, the statement on hiv/aids released the same month by the Catholic bishops of Southern Africa was greeted with media hooting. The punchy Daily Mail & Guardian compared the bishops' opposition to condoms with the church's condemnation of Galileo. Though the sentiment was foolish, the image was perfect as anticlerical propaganda: The bishops were living in the Dark Ages.

What the bishops said was not beyond criticism. They get into a mess trying to accommodate the ideal of sexual love that makes condoms questionable with the need to dam the flood of death. The bishops conceded condom use to be a matter of conscience for married couples where one is infected, but denied this liberty to the unmarried: an inept compromise that seemed close to endorsing what they sincerely denied--aids as punishment for sin.

Still, it is disproportionate to stress this point without reporting the episcopal statement's positive message: that aids is spread by promiscuity and our best defense is the chastity and fidelity which express the profound connection between sex and love. The Daily Mail & Guardian called this fantasy. But it is far less fantastic than expecting a permanent defeat of sexual disease from a merely technical campaign of medical prophylaxis and treatment. And with aids now the leading cause of death in South Africa, it is certainly less injurious to the dignity and beauty of humanity. We are not machines for intercourse and reproduction. The sexual act has a meaning, as real as the meaning of a smile, a frown, or a glare, and every bit as dependent on the mystery of our embodiment. That meaning is love. We are fragile mortals whose sense of one another as fellow human beings depends on recognizing a bond of kindness, patience, and tenderness, a bond most perfectly visible in intimate physical union.

This reality is not contradicted by rape, pornography, or prostitution. These derive their terrible meanings from their perversion of sexual love, when one human being deliberately denies to another what is most deeply wanted: recognition as a fellow human being. Sexuality has sometimes been spoken of most deeply by those who have suffered most from its deformation. Some prostitutes have articulated its meaning in ways that would put many a churchman's banal waffling or self-righteous priggishness to shame.

They were not, however, the women on "Carte Blanche," whose job was to titillate while remaining the girls next door. The program strained to show that there is nothing about prostitution that cannot be fixed by judicious regulation: Every working girl can be a Julia Roberts in Pretty Woman. Similarly, the prevailing wisdom holds there is nothing to concern us in sexual promiscuity that cannot be corrected by skilled condom use. That the show's producers could so glamorize prostitution in a country with an hiv rate of more than one in ten is staggering.

The "condomania" of anti-aids policy in South Africa and most Western nations is another expression of the view of human sexuality as a biological urge needing release. At an extreme, this view of human beings can reach the point where some no longer care enough about themselves or others to use condoms at all. A public policy on aids based almost exclusively on condom use and other medical strategies, and refusing to address questions of the meaning of sex, threatens to saw off the branch it is sitting on. We can only care enough about others to use condoms at all if we first see in them the soul which requires that their and our own bodies be respected.

One need not agree with the bishops' stance on condoms to see the weaknesses of the present South African policy. Any such policy is likely to fail if not nourished by a deeper sense of the weightiness of human sexuality. How that weightiness is expressed in public policy is a matter for judgment about political, cultural, and medical feasibility. Nothing I have said means that condoms have no role in public-health policy (or that prostitution may not be best regulated under a legalized regime). The so-called "ABC" policy to slow the spread of hiv/aids--abstinence, and failing that, "being faithful," and failing that, condoms--has had some success in Uganda.

But this too may fail if the recommendation for self-restraint in the slogan degenerates into censorious moralizing. Moralizing is one side of the coin; its other side is libertarian orthodoxy. Libertarianism denies that human sexuality has weight; it tries to make of sex something trivial. Moralizing recognizes that sex is weighty, but attaches the wrong kind of weight by tainting it as something dirty: hence its prudish discomfort. So while the media have drenched society in an endless, sleazy trivialization of sex, a worse reaction would be to recoil into indiscriminate sex censorship. The pornographer and the puritan both read Lady Chatterley's Lover through similar lenses: they see the physical sex but not the love of the world that Lawrence tried to show was the meaning of sex. The pornographer and the puritan, Lawrence thought, had killed all their true emotional response to sex and substituted an inward-looking preoccupation with copulatory sensation. "Sex is the one thing you cannot really swindle," he wrote, meaning that the falsification of our emotional lives that distorts attitudes toward sex must eventually take its toll, resulting in self-hatred and misanthropy. Deny it as we may, it remains true that when we touch another human being, it resonates in eternity.

Andrew Gleeson, an Australian academic, has lived in Grahamstown, South Africa, for the last two years.