Since the outset of the HIV/AIDS pandemic, behavioral scientists have stressed that sexual behavior including HIV /STD risk behavior must be studied in its sociocultural context. Though our material objective may be to change behavior in the interest of health promotion, we can accomplish this only indirectly-by influencing people's internal psychological states and resources (e.g., feelings, knowledge and skills) or through identifYing and changing features in the environment and/or context to which people with their states and actions respond.

The Republic of Haiti, which occupies the westernmost third of the island of Hispaniola, shares that island with Santo Domingo. Haiti's approximately 28,750 square kilometres (ca. 10,700 square miles) is occupied by a population estimated at 3,400,000 (1959). One recent work suggests that the rural population alone in 1960 numbered 3,500,000.2 Much of the country's land is not arable now, and never was; more than two-thirds of the natural territory is mountainous, much of it unusable for agriculture. Deforestation and erosion have ruined large areas as well.

This chapter aims to analyse the roots and dynamics of the sexual politics and argues that such a counter-power is part of the strategy of resistance/survival, yet it also embodies empowerment. The material basis of male dominance and of the gender hierarchy generally resides in men’s control over women’s labour. This control is exercised by excluding women from access to essential productive resources and by restricting their sexuality. In Haiti, however, patriarchy as a specific form of the sex/gender system is very complex.