The UNAIDS 2009 AIDS Epidemic Update indicates that the number of people living with HIV worldwide continues to grow. Analysis of HIV prevention programmes reveals that integrating measures to address gender inequality and norms - including violence against women and exploitative forms of sex work - are critical in long-term solutions to the global HIV/AIDS epidemic. One of the main reasons is because unequal power relations between women and men make it harder for women to negotiate for safer sex and condom-use with their partners. The risk of not having this conversation however, is very high. HIV can stop with each and everyone of us. Exercise control over what happens to our own bodies, and claim our right to define how we choose to engage in sexual relations. My body, my terms. Let's talk about safer sex! Spell out the terms on when and how you want to have sex, and break the stigma around HIV - get tested!

Digital technologies have blurred some of the lines that we think of as dividing what is private, and what is public. When you are in a cybercafe, having an online chat with your boyfriend, is it public or private? When you put something up on Facebook, to be seen only by people who are in your network, is it private or public? When you shoot a picture of yourself with your mobile phone, and MMS it to a friend, does it become public because you lose control over how the image might continue to be circulated? You decide what is public or private. Draw the line. Make it known.

We are often judged by our appearances. Sometimes what we wear, the way we carry ourselves and even the length or visibility of our hair in particular spaces erases who we are as individuals. We become instead, stereotypes that fit into particular ideas of how women and men should be. Instead of people with different thoughts, opinions, experiences and lives, we become convenient paper dolls that call for certain types of responses. These visual markers do not just run on the lines of gender, they also cut across categories such as ethnicity, sexuality, able-bodiedness, age and more, which is turn shifts according to contexts. Challenge our own stereotypes and the images that perpetuate them. Make an avatar!