A good friend of mine and I were chatting over beers this week and he suddenly said that he had a “Stanton Thought”. I was confused, because this is never a term that we’ve used together before.
He started explaining that there needs to be more education and systems in place to protect against sexually transmitted diseases in China, especially for non-straight people. There is definitely a lack of information on this front and it’s even worst for non-straight people because many of them might still publicly be in the closet, meaning that they would not be able to ask about this in public hospital settings. We imagine the number of people with STIs, or HIV even, might be much higher than we think. And many people might just be living with it without knowing that today’s medical solutions, when implemented early enough, can minimize most of the risks around it.
We started brainstorming ideas around apps that we could build, how to aggregate and post information, what systems could be set up in clinics or hospitals to help these people, etc. For example, at private hospitals, there are some triage nurses that knows how to ask the right questions to isolate the potential medical problem, but others will complete forget that there is a possibility that you are not straight, so would forgo any line of questioning that doesn’t not align with that reality.
We also looked at all the reasons why this does not exist yet. Obviously, information is widely available today, so there’s no reason that people cannot find it. Are there risks to, let’s say, building an app with this information and pointing to the proper clinics? Why wouldn’t it exist out in the open? Well, in China, there’s more restriction around pride related stuff nowadays. One of the hypothesis is that the city government has a KPI for tracking down drugs, so one of the targets became pride adjacent parties. Another hypothesis is around public disruption. Most of the older generation are still very socially conservative, and having pride adjacent public displays is too disruptive. Basically, they are trying to be anti-woke to maintain the current societal structure with as little ripples as possible by sacrificing pride freedom. So why not build that app? It might be that if you did build it, there is a possibility that you will be asked to take it down once it’s published.
What we never got to was the business case for this, because whatever you put your effort into doing, you should at least make sure it can sustainably continue running.
At the end of this conversation, that’s when it clicked as to what a “Stanton Thought” is. With a lot of my friends, these are my most favorite conversations, where we dive into exploring something that might change or make the world into a better place. So some of my friends have associated this type of conversation or this type of a thought as a “Stanton Thought”.
I do this all the time. Maybe, I’ll start writing more of these down.