Amanda Hess of TBD says

GUY IN A TURTLENECK thinks he has solved the AIDS epidemic through sheer homophobia, which has been working so well so far: "here's a way we can save the taxpayers a quick $26 billion. Since we know the cause of AIDS and the way to slow down the epidemic, if we spend any taxpayer funds at all it ought to be on education: don't start engaging in homosexual behavior, and if you have started, stop." —Bryan Fischer of the American Family Association, who has previously submitted commentary on the dangerous feminization of the Medal of Honor and Hitler's army of gay soldiers.

Source: Amanda Hess of TDB

Hmmm.  Since at least 1995 HIV/AIDS has been spreading to women faster than any other demographic, and check this out

HIV is spreading fastest among women. Of the estimated 39.5 million people living with HIV, 48 percent are women – nearly 19 million people – and half of all new infections occur among women.

Young women age 14 to 24 in parts of Africa and the Caribbean are up to six times more likely to be HIV-positive than young men their age.2

Source: Women Deliver

So yeah, definitely, the best way to deal with HIV/AIDs would be to... get more gay men to switch to (condom-free, naturally!) sex with women.

Diva of Debauched Domestic Diva notes a current law that one suspects has slightly, um, gendered origins

Did you know that in New York you can be stopped by the police on the street and if you have condoms on you they can be used as evidence that you were soliciting sex for money? Neither did I but I learned about it last night. SWP is working to try to get that law changed and that is what they are about. When Andrea Ritchie spoke last night and said this I thought to myself about the condoms I had in my pocketbook. I like to practice safe sex. I’m a huge advocate about sex safe just as I think all of us should be but I also should not be at risk for something just for the simple fact I carry condoms.

She said it here.

It’s hard to imagine this law ever being invoked against men, given that as far back as World War II U.S. soldiers were routinely provided with condoms, and given that for much of the time since it’s been practically cliché for men to keep a condom in their wallets “just in case” (a bad idea by the way.) And I don’t know how old the law is (I’m assuming Giuliani-era or earlier) but one has to assume they didn’t imagine that women who aren’t sex workers might be brazen enough to have “just in case” considerations of their own.

And to be fair that’s not too big a stretch. If the law dated back to, say, the 1970s before either health concerns about the Pill or HIV became well-known (and when the line in sex-education circles was “condoms are better than nothing… but only barely) it might have been the case that only women sex-workers would routinely carry condoms. Who knows?

But jimminy crickets, if the law is still on the books that’s a bug not a feature.

Follow-up on yesterday’s post about circumcision and HIV: the studies that seemed to demonstrate that at least for African men who were circumcised for the study the rate at which they contracted HIV went down and the rate at which they passed it to their partners appeared to go down even further.

Yesterday I mentioned Kelly Cogswell of A dyke abroad’s bitter point that “Forgotten also are all the circumcised men in the States that dropped dead before ARV’s came on the scene. A foreskin more or less didn’t help them. Or don’t faggots count when you’re counting heads?” And in comments to that post A of A traveling spouse, who’s no slouch when it comes to research, said she couldn’t find an explanation for why American gay men clearly weren’t protected by circumcision.

Quick digression: years before I started writing about sex I participated in the old Usenet pregnancy and parenting forums. While there were lots of things to talk about there were two that, no matter what just. Wouldn’t. Go. Away: breast vs. bottle and circumcision vs no circumcision. My conclusion after listening to way too much of that debate was that we’d leave it up to our (then newborn) son to decide, with the bonus observation that at least in our neighborhood back then tattoo and piercing parlors were opening faster than coffee shops and that I was sure that by the time he was of age piercers would be offering not just plain but fancy circumcisions.

Anyway, thinking about that got me thinking about body piercing in general, and that reminded me of a couple of bloggers who talked about the recovery period for their cock piercings and ampallings (I think I spelled that right.) Anyway the short answer was that recovery for piercings takes months. And months.

Months during which I’m guessing that even with a condom to keep everything from pulling and tugging you’re not going to want to be doing anything where friction’s going to be involved. Like, say, sex.

And so my next questions about the study (and don’t get me wrong, I’m pretty sure the researchers would taken these things into account) are:

- Just how long does it take for an adult man to recover from a circumcision anyway? Enough to be interested in sex again, for instance. Especially in the kind of dry, high-abrasion style intercourse allegedly (and I mean that, allegedly) too-often favored by tradition in sub-Saharan Africa. For instance.

- How long were the studies that led to the circumcision recommendations? (Remember that at least one such study was cut short because the success rate for circumcised men was so high.)

Anyway, the point being that the men in the study were all freshly circumcised as part of the program, and you’d want to make sure the results weren’t skewed by, say, reluctant celibacy while the wounds and/or secondary infections related to the wound heal. If, and I’m only saying if, that was a factor, and I’m not saying it was, then the long-term benefits might not be so high and, especially, it would account for the perceived lack of protection for men (American gay men, North African straight men) who are traditionally circumcised in infancy.

The old punchline has it that we know almost all circumcised infants are unable to walk for up to a year after the procedure. But how long for an adult?