The marriage bed, or that of the cohabiting, was considered safe; HIV infections were the fate of those sexually active with multiple partners. New statistics, however, point to a disturbing trend. The film HIV, the Silent Partner in marriage highlights that

Current research shows that, increasingly, marriage is not as protective as previously thought -- for men or for women. In Rwanda and Zambia, for example, an estimated 55-93% of new infections occur within marriage or in cohabiting relationships.

So back to the new adverts on Kenyan television. Jimmy Gathu is on TV and the patrons at a bar are startled that he seems to be talking to someone sitting in their very pub. 'Achana na mpango wa kando,' he says to one of the patrons, who is being groped by a much younger woman. In the ad Gathu warns men against fetching the virus and taking it back to their homes, to their wives, to their beds.

The advert seems focused purely on the men with 'mipango ya kando' or external arrangements. 

The campaign's target can't have been easy to pick. You can imagine how difficult it would be to have an ad campaign asking that wives insist on having protected sex with their husbands (Femiplan do have one although with different motivations). 

All the same, it is not fair or even efficient to target the warnings exclusively at males, especially as there is an increasing number of women with their own 'mipango ya kando'. The world of women as innocent lambs is so last century, and in the marriage bed, more than anywhere else, it takes two to tango.

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