Cory Silverberg of Sexuality.About.Com has a genuinely wonderful, thoughtful, and informative post up this week. The nominal topic is about sex of course, anal sex generally, and lubrication used during anal intercourse in particular. While I’m not going to call any of that part superficial (it’s informative, relevant, thoughtful, and positive in both the attitude- and the sex- senses) what really draws my attention, and makes me like Silverberg very much, is his wonderful sense of journalistic, scientific, public-health, and (most important, considering the topic) sexual/erotic ethics.

But more about that in a moment. The subject at hand is a pair of studies measuring the role popular sex lubricants play in tissue damage and STI transmission during penile/anal intercourse. If you were to just skim the headline/teaser versions of the story you’d conclude that it’s risky to use lube when having anal intercourse.

Perhaps because he’s comfortable enough talking about sex that he doesn’t have the distraction of squeezing his knees together and giggling, and perhaps because he’s just a darn good science reporter, Silverberg explains what it means, what it doesn’t, some good takeaways, and (my favorite) some nice analysis of the pitfalls of over-interpreting individual study results.

Anyway, here’s Silverberg

Taken together, these two papers seem to be suggesting that using lubricants, or at least some kinds of lubricants, might actually be a bad idea when you’re on the receiving end of anal intercourse. And if you listen to the press conference that followed the presentation of the data, it sounds like at least some of the researchers are comfortable interpreting this very early data with some significance.

But don’t put away that lube bottle just yet (and probably you won’t be putting it away ever). Remember that collecting data, interpreting it, and reporting on it are three very different activities. While some blog posts have suggested this is radical news, consider the fact that all of the reporting from the researchers themselves and from IRMA makes it clear that this is very preliminary research, and should be interpreted as such.

He said it here.

So far so good. Here’s a great caveat for assessing not just sex-related research but almost any-related research.

Risk is never absolute and it never exists in a vacuum. The clinical study seems to suggest that using lubricant increases risk of getting an anal STD. But it doesn’t consider the risk of infection without lubricant. Sex educators have said for years that lubricant makes anal sex safer because it reduces friction and tearing, and therefore reduces the risk of STD transmission. This new data doesn’t contradict that because it doesn’t address it.

So that’s the first cool part: Even if there are some risks to using lube for anal intercourse those same risks are even greater if you don’t!

A scandalous oversight? Not really. The researchers are pretty clear they’re offering preliminary research, not final recommendations.

Another non-scandal that’s… probably more closely related to problems with technical and “folk” use of words like “findings,” “risk,” and even “safety.”

Similarly, the lab study of lubricants, which does seem to draw conclusions that some lubricants may be “safer” than others, needs to be contextualized, lest we forget how slippery the term “safe” is. When a researcher says that a silicone lubricant was found to be safe, what they mean was that it didn’t do the one or two bad things they were looking at. It doesn’t mean that if you use silicone lubricant you will be safe, or even safer, if you don’t also consider other factors.

Cool, eh? They’ve drawn some conclusions related to very specific questions they were trying to answer: if you’re worried about, say, lube-induced dessication of surface cells in the rectum then yeah, they’re your guys. Those aren’t the only concerns, though, so as Silverberg (and most likely the researchers) you’d want to assess all the risks before making decisions.

And best of all? The paragraph I’m about to quote makes not one but two really cool, really related points: first that to be really helpful such studies need to take sexual enjoyment into account, and second of all he explains why enjoyability is relevant. (Emphasis mine.)

As usual, sexual pleasure isn’t being talked about at all, and this too needs to be addressed in both the conducting and reporting of future research. The end goal of all this research is awareness of risk and behavior change. We aren’t talking about dental hygiene here. We are talking about activities people engage in for a reason, and sexual pleasure is often part of that reason. To talk about anal intercourse and lubricant, particularly to talk about lube as a risk factor, outside of the context of pleasure makes sense only in the lab, only in theory. It doesn’t matter how good the research is, if you want to affect change in people’s lives, you have to speak to us in a way that we can connect with. If the only argument you make for behavior change is numeric, it might scare us for about three minutes, but it’s not likely to help us at all.

Yup. If something feels good enough to want to do in the first place, even good enough to want to do over and over and over, you need to take that into consideration.

All in all a nice, thoughtful post.