Safe Sex, Lies, Deceptions, and other Wishful Thinking
With
the advent of AIDS in the 80s and 90s, Free Sex was replaced with Safe
Sex. Government-sponsored TV ads, Magic Johnson and rap groups alike
warn us to remember our rubbers. High school health teachers lecture on
the need to practice safe(r) sex and school nurses or guidance
counselors give out mint-flavored and no flavored condoms depending on
what type of sex you're having.
But
then we found out that safe sex wasn't all that safe. A National
Institute of Health study of the effectiveness of condoms in preventing
the spread of the AIDS virus is canceled because the study's director
says it would be unethical to expose so many to the risk of infection,
even with condoms.
A leading advocate and practitioner of safe
sex who was not infected when he began propagating the safe sex
message, dies, from AIDS, in his forties.
In Los Angeles, a
young AIDS educator who could recite the rules of safe sex like a math
table becomes HIV-infected before he reaches the age of 20.
A Johns Hopkins
Medical School journal reports that among couples in which one partner
is already HIV-infected, 1 in 4 of the female sex partners become
infected despite using condoms every time they had sex (cf. graphic
left).
Selections from Relationship Intelligence: Why your RQ is more important to your success and happiness than your IQ
