STDs

Can Twisted Monk, Graydancer, or Midori on Bondage Safety with Mummies be Far Behind?

Posted by figleaf on Mon, 2011-10-31 09:39

Photo by Flickr user mamamusings. Cached as a bandwidth-conserving courtesy
Photo by Flickr user mamamusings. Used under a Creative Commons license.

First it was the CDC's "Preparedness 101: Zombie Apocolypse," a tongue-in-cheek primer on general preparedness. Not to be outdone, just in time for Halloween, here's Planned Parenthood with advice about the hazards of unprotected sex with vampires:

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: October 31, 2011 Contact: PPFA Media Office

Thinking About Having Sex with a Vampire This Halloween? Planned Parenthood Is Here to Help

Let's face it: vampires can rack up a lot of sexual partners over the years. Your vampire might be the same age as you, or she or he might be thousands of years old. But no matter how old you are, if you're going to jump into bed with a vampire, you're going to need more than a clove of garlic to protect your health.

Here are some things to think about before you enter into a sexual relationship with a vampire:

Vampires might be immortal, but you're not. It's important for both vampires and humans to get tested for STDs. Use this tool to find out if you should get tested for STDs.

Ladies, just because a vampire says he can't get you pregnant*, it doesn't mean he can't give you an STD. And guys, just because a vampire says she's on the pill, it doesn't mean that you can't get an STD. Use a condom correctly every time.

Don't wait until you're in the heat of the moment to bring up safer sex. Vampires have been known to "glamour" people to get their way, so play it safe and make it clear that you won't have sex without protection right from the start.

Remember, a vampire who doesn't care about protecting your health is not the kind of vampire that you want to get involved with. Not sure if you're dating the right vampire? We can help you figure it out.

* Let's not forget, Edward got Bella pregnant in the Twilight series, going against hundreds of years of vampire lore. So even if your vampire tells you he can't get you pregnant, why risk it? Condoms are not only a great way to prevent STDs, they're effective at preventing pregnancy. Even better, use a condom along with another birth control method.

Source: Planned Parenthood Media Office

Very cool when institutions like Planned Parenthood are able to hit the right note when attempting humor with a point.

Via Talking Points Memo


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Speaking of Which, HIV and Other STI Rates Are Increasing With Age, Viagra Use

Posted by figleaf on Tue, 2010-07-06 11:33

In a news roundup Robin Marty of RHRealityCheck.org passes along an interesting tidbit

Remember that whole argument that it’s ok to cover Viagra and not birth control because Viagra doesn’t run up other insurance costs?  Look who’s suddenly skyrocketing up the STI charts — sexual enhancements users.

Read the rest of the roundup here.

The information in the article (Business Week but pretty straightforward reporting) is more interesting, with a number of sensible but counterintuitive tidbits.

First, fairly predictably, people most likely to use Viagra, not to mention people who’s partners are likely to use it, are also likely to have come of age at a time when condom use was not widespread, in part because straight people back then relied on the Pill for contraception, and all known STIs were easily treated with antibiotics.

Less predictably, though, it turns out that STI rates for men who use Viagra tend to go up approximately a year before they start taking it, and actually levels off or drops a bit in the year after!

The risk of getting HIV in the year before taking the pills was 3.32 times higher in drug-takers and 3.19 times greater in the year after, compared with those not taking the pills, they said. Users of the medicines also had higher rates of chlamydia.

Source: Business Week

It’s not an insignificant problem, by the way. According to the article

[P]eople aged 40 to 49 accounted for the largest proportion of newly diagnosed HIV/AIDS cases, 27 percent, in 2007, according to the CDC. Those 50 to 59 accounted for 13 percent, while those over the age of 60 accounted for 4 percent.

I want to reinforce a conclusion from the original report and contained in the article as well: Sex education is just as important for people in their 40s and beyond as it is for those in their teens and 20s. Physicians should be strongly encouraged to in turn encourage patients who request drugs like Viagra to practice sexual safety.

Finally I’d like to stress, strongly, that one shouldn’t fall for gendered assumptions about who’s driving “promiscuity” among older people. I can’t put my finger on a link but I’m pretty sure I’ve posted links in the past that suggest up to half of hetero men who seek medication do so at the prompting of their partners. It’s certainly the case that most of the gendered behaviors evolutionary psychologists swear are “innate” or “evolved” turn out to be highly conditional on age and circumstance.


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"Barebacking" vs. Sex Safety: Not Just Protection *From!*

Posted by figleaf on Mon, 2010-04-26 20:01

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…


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Getting Herpes Is Tough Enough Without Making Yourself Bad or Wrong About It Too

Posted by figleaf on Wed, 2010-03-24 01:26

Very good advice from Professor Foxy of Feministing, for a sexually active young queer woman who was diagnosed with herpes she associates (perhaps correctly) with a particular one-night stand.

What comes through in your letter is how much you blame yourself, how dirty you think you are, and how sad you feel. Such strong language putting yourself down “you’re the one people need protecting from.” They don’t need protection from you, they need protection from the disease you have. This disease does not define you, it does not change who you are. And somehow you need to get to a place where you can believe that.

It is really hard to sustain being a sex-positive queer. Everything around you tells you that you should be ashamed and when something happens – someone calling you a slut (when you are not owning the word), a sex partner saying something mean, catching an STD- that throws you off your self-confidence and all those judgments that you have successfully shucked off come rushing back in.

You are not a bad person. STDs are overwhelming the luck of the draw and you could have slept with just one person and gotten it. In all of this, keep in mind you are not [alone], herpes is one of the most common STDs, the stats go from 1 in 4 people having herpes [to] 1 in 6. As cheesy as it sounds, you are not alone.

She said it here.

It’s wonderful advice. And not because illnesses like herpes are “major” or “minor” but because (as one of the excellent commentors on the thread put it) absent the sexual stigma it’s just another communicable skin disease.

Imagine the furor if chicken pox, another member of the herpes family, had sexual connotation. Imagine further the opposition to research into vaccines. Imagine further still how preachers and pundits would fulminate on shingles (a very serious and almost always excruciatingly painful later-in-life re-eruption of chicken pox) as the “wages of sin and youthful folly.”

Herpes is a disease alright. And because it’s painful and unsightly, and because it can lead to secondary infection, it’s very worth making the effort to avoid and even more worth the responsibility not to pass along. But any more than “you’re the flu” when you’ve got the flu, or “you’re cancer” should you have cancer, neither are you herpes if you happen to have it or get it.

And finally, yes, really, you don’t have to be promiscuous to get it. In fact, because it’s transmitted through skin-to-skin contact you don’t have to be sexual at all.


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Hey You IUD! Plus Possible Benefits of Decoupling Pregnancy and STI Concerns

Posted by figleaf on Thu, 2009-07-30 18:57

Megan Carpentier of Jezebel says

Slate’s Kate Klonick wonders why more American women don’t use IUDs. As the recipient of one of the devices as well, I sometimes wonder the same thing.

She said it here.

Carpentier’s a good writer. IUDs are amazingly effective but pretty misunderstood. She does a great job laying out the many pros, laying out the few cons, and laying to rest some of the seriously out of date and never all that true myths about them. I’d say go read it even if you’re not in the market for a different, highly-effective, low-maintenance form of birth control. Because you might know someone who is.

—-

By the way, is it just me or does it seem like the standard “yeah but” objection about how you still need to use condoms to prevent STIs comes up sooner in discussions of IUDs? I mean, yeah, duh, but it’s just as true of every other non-condom form of contraception from the Pill to sponges to vasectomies to… oops… “abstinence-only” activities like oral and anal contact. But why let that be an objection at all? Not to sound too pundit-y but pregnancy and STIs are two different issues both in theory and practice: not everyone who needs to worry about STIs needs to worry about pregnancy, and not everyone who needs to worry about pregnancy needs to worry about STIs. And, again not to sound too pundity-y but STIs can be transmitted a lot more ways than pregnancy can. And not to sound too contrarian but very high-reliability contraceptive measures like sterilization and IUDs might make it easier for heterosexuals to pay closer attention to avoiding giving each other STIs.

Upate: About that STI link: In comments here Sugarmag explains that possibly dated information associates IUDs with greater chances of STI-derived pelvic inflammatory disease. But further down in comments here Kaija says more recent research says STI-related complications seem to come mostly from pre-existing STIs rather than infections transmitted after the IUD is in place.

[Note: 24 hours later I realize the title sounds awfully insistent. My titles are often a bit goofy or free-associative — possibly because I do them last thing after I’ve written the post. In this case I was thinking about the subject matter and the English vowel sounds, AEIOU, kept coming up, and then AE-IUD, then Hey Hee-IUD, and then Hey You IUD. So it was totally random but, I realize now, it sounds awfully bossy too. If it’s just me then forget about it, if it bugged you too then my apologies. —fl]


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Past a Certain Percentage "Stigma" Stops Being the Right Term

Posted by figleaf on Fri, 2009-05-01 17:41

AlwaysArousedGirl asks the approximately 25% of Americans who would test positive for the Herpes Simplex Virus’s I or II

But maybe it’s time to stop the slut-shaming in regard to an infection that could easily creep into any of us on any day.  Maybe it’s time to think of it as no more to be desired — and yet no more to be feared — than any of the countless other viruses ubiquitous in our daily lives.

She said it here.

I’m obviously self-interested here since, again like roughly 25% of the population I test positive for herpes too. And I’m not saying at all that we should disregard herpes. Or any other STI. It’s just that past a certain point there’s not much sense stigmatizing it.

Not least because people who take the stigmatization seriously don’t just transmit the stigma. They transmit the STI.

Herpes might be incurable. Denial isn’t.

It’s here. It’s theere. Get used to it.


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Now Even More Doubly-Standardy Than You Thought

Posted by figleaf on Mon, 2009-03-30 21:32

Jill of Feministe says

Now that boys may be getting vaccinated for HPV, we’re suddenly worried about the vaccine’s safety and efficacy – and not a peep about how vaccination may turn boys all slutty.

Read the quote in context here.

(The Washington Post article she links to is pretty sharply worded as well.)

Ever wonder why people never peep about things that turn boys all slutty? I actually do. Because, seriously, even if they really cared about girl virginity they have to have noticed they’re way into diminishing-returns territory on pressuring girls. (And no, I’m not talking about that purity-ring-auxiliary thing where boys are encouraged to protect girl chastity. I’m talking about talking boys into protecting their chastity.) But nope, no dice, they don’t worry about boys turning all slutty.

Ever wonder why people never peeped about girls and safety and effectiveness? Even though, y’know, the whole theoretical reason for opposing the HPV vaccine for girls and women was to “keep them safe” because they’re such delicate flowers? I wonder about that too.


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Radically Redefining Vanilla

Posted by figleaf on Sun, 2008-02-17 10:43


Photo by Flickr user Saffanna. Used under a Creative Commons license.

Part A: Observation
So Sam Sugar of SugarBank reports that

The Mainichi Daily News, my breakfast read, reports that vaginal ejaculation disorder affects 70% of Japanese males… Supposedly it’s a byproduct of masturbatory techniques which don’t feel like a vagina.

See the rest of Sugar’s take on the story here.

And here’s a bit more detail from the actual Mainichi Daily News article

Tsueno Akaeda, a doctor who runs a clinic in Tokyo’s Roppongi, agrees with urologist Nagao.

“There are definitely more people with vaginal ejaculation disorder than there used to be,” he says. “There has been incredible progress made in masturbation goods and there are plenty of people who can ejaculate into an artificial vagina, but not the real thing. I get more than a few men come to see me about that. And those in their 20s and 30s have grown up watching adult movies. They find masturbation easier and more satisfying than intercourse.”

Experts say one of the main reasons men develop vaginal ejaculation disorder is that they learn how to masturbate using methods that feel distinctly different from vaginas, such as rubbing up against pillows or lying face down and moving back and forward for stimulation until climax.

“Naturally picking up somewhat unnatural methods has to be the main reason,” Nagao says. “Or, some guys obtain pleasure from some method they’ve happened to discover almost by accident and keep on doing it that way. It used to be that your bad buddies would tell you the best way to jerk off.”

Source: Mainichi Daily News, which appears to be the online, English-language version of Japan’s oldest newspaper but may or may not be its most respectable.

Sometime last year I think I linked to a post by a young man recounting to other young men how actual sex with actual women isn’t so much what one might expect when one’s entire prior experience has been masturbating to porn.

Which, now that I think about it, might explain the otherwise inexplicable popularity of porn-style “money shot” masturbation during real, actual sex with another person.

And this actually makes sense. Male masturbation really doesn’t feel very much like vaginal intercourse, and depending on how long one has been doing it then it really might take a little practice to learn to have orgasms another way. (Take that, evolutionary “male-orgasms-are-easily-tied-to-reproduction” psychologists!)

Oh, and while I’m at it, men obviously aren’t alone in this. My newsfeed reader informs me that “Slut Machine” of Jezebel just posted her own variation on a very familiar theme

I would read about “mind-blowing” sex in Joan Collins and V.C. Andrews books, passages that likened women’s orgasms to lightning strikes and bells sounding, so I had really hyped up sex in my mind. I knew I wouldn’t come on my first couple tries at sex with a boy. Finally, after fooling around with my boyfriend for a month or two, I came while he was going down on me, and I remember being like, “Oh! That’s what that is? I can do that better and faster by myself!” By then, I realized that what would happen when I touched myself was an orgasm, but for some reason I thought it would be different — or better — with a partner. And sometimes it is.

Read the quote in context here.

Part B: Inquiry

But here’s an interesting question: to what extent is the notion that penis-in-vagina intercourse as the inevitable, “natural” conclusion to heterosexual sex a social construct and how much of it really is biologically imperative? Seriously! For real! Totally serious question.

Because it seems to me that while some men and women obviously take to it like cats take to landing on their feet, and while many others figure it out sooner or later, and while pretty much every story anthropological or erotic, dry as dust or tongue in cheek, assumes that intercourse is the natural, the inevitable, and the quintessential erotic experience for men and that women’s “problem” is that their architecture just isn’t “designed” to “properly” or “naturally” enjoy intercourse. Heck, the “fore” in “foreplay” is a contraction for the “playing around” men are supposed to do to “help” get our partners ready do before getting down to the… what?... the serious work of intercourse?

And yet along comes word that, left to their own devices men’s ability to have “vaginal” orgasms (ok, orgasms in their partner’s vagina) can easily approach the same rates commonly attributed to women.

But…

See…

Not to put on my tinfoil hat about evolutionary behaviorism again or anything but here’s one of my big problems with their most fundamental assumptions: all flatworm sex might be reproductive sex but not all human sex is reproductive sex. Instead much, in fact nearly all human sex appears to be recreational. When left to our own devices anyway. And, as Tsueno Akaeda in the Mainichi article or pretty much every Babeland page will tell you, the devices we can leave ourselves with demonstrate incredible progress in masturbation goods. Which, contra sociobiology, isn’t a issue at all unless a species becomes so incompetent at sex for reproduction that we manage do it at less than 2.2 times in our sexual lifetimes.

And…

Meanwhile…

I actually enjoy intercourse quite a lot, especially when a partner and I have been together long enough to be able to learn each other’s rhythms and rhymes well enough to both have orgasms that way. And given the subtle signals I’ve sometimes gotten from my partners (“I want you *here,” with a pull and a push, for instance) I’m not the only one who enjoys it.

But intercourse is a bit problematic orgasmically for me. It took me a couple of tries the first time I had intercourse. Later I had the opposite problem and had to wrestle with coming in the first moments which, platitudes about machismo not withstanding, deprives the victim as well as his partner of quite a lot of longer-term, slower-to-develop, deeper sensations and eventual orgasms. And even when I was experiencing prematurity with some partners there were others with whom I never came at all either because of fit, or degrees of lubrication, or how they would grind into the relatively sensation-free upper length instead of the highly sensitized bottom or sides of my cock.

But…

Then…

So if with just a little masturbatory habit-formation men as well as women can learn to have better orgasms without intercourse, and if vaginal intercourse is, on aggregate, the highest risk activity as far as pregnancy and social/sexual disease transmission (funny how the CDC never reports “honeymoon cystitis” as a sexually-transmitted disease even though it’s caused primarily by intercourse), then…

Part C: Recommendation

Why not make the heads of the Abstinence-Only/True-love-Waits/Virginity-Pledge/social-control-through-sexual-scarcity crowds explode (not to mention the heads of their minority-viewpoint “all heterosexual intercourse is rape” bedfellows) by recommending that young heterosexuals not bother with intercourse till marriage. Oh, heck, not to bother even after marriage except for procreation!

But not to avoid it because intercourse is precious, or special, or the seat of sexual oppression but because…

...once you strip away all its socially-constructed significance intercourse is actually kind of boring compared to all the other things one or more people can do with each other!


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Request For Help With Homework: Best Seattle-Area STD/STI Test Assignment

Posted by figleaf on Fri, 2008-02-08 00:21


Photo by Flickr user hugovk. Used under a Creative Commons license.

So one of the extra-credit assignments for my integrated communications theory / women’s studies / sex education class is to get tested for sexually transmitted infections, a.k.a. sexually transmitted diseases.

So what I’m wondering is, if you’re from the greater Seattle area, anyway, if there are any great, iconic places to go. For instance when I was at the peak of my sexual activity back in the mid-1970s, on the rare occasion our extended circle of friends in the Boston area had a “VD Scare” (which in those pre-virus days was far more of a major inconvenience than an actual scare) we’d spread the word and head out in mass for the local health department. I was never there for it but on at least one occasion friends told me the group was almost big enough to fill a Green Line subway car.

If it didn’t sound so in-retrospect unsanitary I’d wax nostalgic about the days the worst consequence of STIs was a sore butt from a big wallop of penicillin. But in retrospect? Eww.

But that was then and this is now, so…

Where does the responsible kinkster go to get screened?

Also, there used to be a blogger called TwiddlyBits who had a great post up years ago about all the ways, places, and things she insisted she get screened for. She got blood work, genital cultures, throat cultures, rectal cultures, visual inspections… in other words, da woiks.

I sort of assume you’d want to screen for HPV these days although if you were really being diligent (and assuming the screenings work that way) you’d obviously want to have your cervix screened if you’re a woman but men might want to have penises screened and everybody might want to know if they’re at risk for cancers of the ass or throat.

Any others spring to mind right away?

Now as it happens since the last time I had sex with a new partner (many years ago now) I came down with a bizarre and very scary set of symptoms that included cyclic fevers and (yikes!) classic “night sweats” when the fever broke where I’d sweat through my pillow! Since that’s evidently a classic symptom not only of HIV but of quite a few other horrible diseases I wound up having just about every kind of screening test you can imagine, including all the standard STDs (in case I’d had something for a very long time and hadn’t know it) plus quite a few others like various lymphomas and leukemias, liver diseases, and, I swear, rabies, TB, and leprosy!

Luckily, but nerve-wrackingly, all those tests came back negative (lemmie tell ya, you’re feeling pretty sorry for yourself when you feel let down that you don’t have HIV or leprosy either and you’re still sick. Anyway, I eventually got better, and a month or two after that my doctor called to let me know that a deep antibody assay had turned up active antibodies for cytomegalovirus — a disease that shows up as nothing but a case of the sniffles in the 99.999% of you who get it in early childhood but produces cyclic fevers and night sweats for adults who either have compromised immune systems (it’s a classic symptom for AIDS patients) and the .001% of non-immune-compromised adults like me who are just slow learners.

So anyway, the point of the homework isn’t to discover STD/STI’s (although if one has them it’s obviously a very good side benefit.) Instead it’s so we can understand the process and write a two-page paper about our experience.

Anyway, unless someone has a better suggestion I was thinking about picking one of these places. Specifically I’m thinking maybe the Public Health Department’s main STD Clinic at Harborview Hospital, although for years I’ve also driven by one of the neighborhood health clinics and it would be a nice excuse to drop by.

One way or another I’ll let you know how it turns out.


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Circumcision, tonsils, and HIV

Posted by figleaf on Sat, 2007-07-28 15:08

So I was just reading a nifty article in ScienceDaily that says the surface of people’s tonsils, with their high levels of immune cells, may facilitate oral HIV/AIDS infection.

Last winter there was a big brouhaha over a finding that male circumcision substantially reduces HIV transmission. Which is great for those who are too stupid, irresponsible, uneducatable, or prohibited by social or moral “reasons” to use condoms, but otherwise highly inferior compared to, well, using condoms.

And putting two and two together I was wondering if we’d start to hear calls for pre-emptive tonsillectomies from the (largely judeo/christian/islamic, homophobic, and/or doesn’t reduce my enjoyment so go for it) groups that were endorsing compulsory circumcision earlier this year. (Note: many of the sources cited point to, but don’t necessarily support, the represented positions.)

But since it’s been a while I needed to go find a link. And while I was Googling around I ran across a remarkable new post from Kelly Jean Cogswell of A dyke abroad (It also appeared as an editorial in Gay City News)

Cut It Off – And Stop AIDS
By: KELLY JEAN COGSWELL
07/26/2007

Women are dying of AIDS while some researcher bends over his penis, smiles at it fondly, and imagines what little alteration would make it an all-purpose tool safe to use again.

He’s not the only one with his dick in his hand. Each new report on male circumcision pumps up the protection believed to be provided by that little snip, snip so that pretty soon I expect to see the numbers not only show the procedure will stop HIV dead, but also reduce global warming, and maybe slow the Iraq war, too.

...

In the real world of South Africa, there’s very little difference in HIV rates between communities that snip, and those that don’t. In Northern Zambia, the difference only lasts until the young men move to the big city with its bright lights and Manolo Blahniks, metaphorically speaking.

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?

...

Women aren’t factored in at all except as a vector of disease. While millions of dollars are already pouring into circumcision programs even if only men have foreskins to whack off, women are struggling for equivalent funds for female condoms and microbicides – never mind programs with as vague a goal as girl power, the real key to HIV prevention.

It’s young women getting AIDS these days. UNAIDS says we already make up 60 percent of the 15 to 24-year-olds living with HIV/AIDS.

In sub-Saharan Africa girls of that age are three times more likely to be positive than their male peers. In the Caribbean it’s 2.5 times. Why? Because in most places we still don’t own our own bodies. Men think we’re dirt and they treat us that way.

...

It’s time for AIDS activists and researchers to shift their attention away from the penis and see the connection between hate and HIV and dead women. Only power will save us, not cuts, not even condoms unless we can make men wear them.

And if somebody still insists on tinkering around with men’s dicks to stop spreading HIV, maybe they should do a more comprehensive procedure, call it the Bobbitt and cut the whole thing off.

Read these excerpts in context here.

At last! Someone who can’t possibly be accused of mere anti-circumcisionism who’s nevertheless unimpressed by the yet-another-latest-and-greatest-bestest reason why we always have and always will need to circumcise men…

...but not, evidently, tonsillectomise them.

Whatever. Again, I’m not particularly fanatic about circumcision one way or another (for instance Circumcision may not impact sexual sensation, also from ScienceDaily, sounds perfectly plausible.)

It’s just that if it were any other body part but the foreskin, for far less than half the benefit of condom use, the conversation just wouldn’t be happening. Or certainly not happening under the same terms.


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