Amanda Hess of Washington City Paper points out yet another one of those fascinating cases of gender blindness. This one’s over an article in the blog of well-established but new-to-me LGBT Just Out Newspaper. Hess quotes the article and says (emphasis mine)

“For all the flack gay men get for their sexual antics, it turns out the ladies have them beat for an oft-chastised but ever-present-in-porn act -— barebacking.” Hey, way to get personal! It takes two to bareback, so why focus all the shaming on the receptive partner?

Read the quotes in context here.

Before jumping all over the Just Out author’s assumptions I’m going to agree with the underlying message: heterosexual partners are at least as inclined to practice “barebacking” as are gay partners. But I have to agree with Hess that thinking about condoms and sex safety in general only in terms of the “receptive partner” isn’t just phallocentric and one-sided, it increases the risks for all concerned.

You might think it also takes two to transmit a sexually or socially transmitted illness. Instead it actually takes at least three since whoever gives the STI to the “recipient” (who, by the way, isn’t necessarily the sexually “receptive partner”) by definition will have received it from a previous partner.

You saw that, for instance, from both sides of the recent HPV vaccine debate. It was touted as “protecting girls” from cervical cancer, which is in fact a very real risk and which in fact the vaccine offers protection from. And yes, unlike many forms of HPV which can be transmitted from any skin-to-skin contact the varieties the vaccine was designed to stop are transmitted primarily sexually, and especially though penis-in-vagina insertions. And so in one way it made sense to focus on “receptive partners” to the exclusion of, I guess, “penetrating partners.”

But on the other hand the debate largely overlooked HPV in terms of women’s partners. Well, that’s not completely true. Most opponents of the vaccine were abstinence-only advocate who argued with passion verging on hysteria that the only way “real” way women could be safe from HPV was complete and thorough avoidance of Teh Cock. But even more rational proponents tended to miss that with STIs it always takes three or more to tango: every heterosexual man who gives a woman HPV pretty necessarily first got HPF from a different woman. Who, in turn, got it from a different man who in turn… through thousands, or tens of thousands or millions of turns!

That same focus on the “receptive partner” also disregarded the minor point that the same virus that causes cervical cancer also causes cancer of the penis, of the throat, of the anus, and very likely other parts of the body not normally associated with sexual activity.

HPV, like HIV and other STIs, isn’t a unique event of concern only for “receptive partners.” Nor is it something only one partner “gives” to their current partner. Instead it’s a chain with those same thousands or millions of prior links.

The point of practicing sexual safety isn’t just to protect one partner from another. It’s to protect everybody by breaking those chains. Not just the “receiving partner” but their next partners too. And not just the “receiving partner” but their current partners: infections aren’t all one-way — one partner who has HIV or syphilis will still need protection if his or her partner has herpes, or HPV, or chlamydia, or another strain of HIV, or…