Safer Sex for the Non-Monogamous by Jess Mahler

Author:Jess Mahler
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: polyamory, non-monogamy, sex, safe sex, safer sex, STIs, consent
Publisher: Jess Mahler
Published: 2019-03-14T00:00:00+00:00

Risk per 10,000 Exposures

Receptive Anal Intercourse

138

Insertive Anal Intercourse

11

Receptive Penile-Vaginal Intercourse

8

Insertive Penile-Vaginal Intercourse

4

Receptive Oral Intercourse

Low

Insertive Oral Intercourse

Low

Breaking down the numbers, if 10,000 people have receptive anal sex with someone who is HIV-positive, only 138 of them will get HIV. Another way to put that is 1.38% risk each time you have receptive anal sex with someone who is HIV positive.

The reason they don’t show it in percent? Because the risk is so small, percent stops making sense. For instance, receptive penile-vaginal intercourse risk (that is, someone with external genitalia who has HIV inserting their genitalia into your internal genitalia) is 0.11% each time you have sex.

Now, if you are having unprotected sex with an HIV-positive connection every day, that risk goes up a lot. According to my on-call math experts, if you have receptive penile-vaginal sex with an HIV+ connection every day for a year, you have a 33% chance of getting HIV by the end of the year.

Condoms reduce the risk of transmission but do not eliminate it. Condoms are commonly said to reduce the risk of HIV infection by 80%. If you don’t know the real risk of HIV infection, this sounds like using a condom makes your risk of getting infected 20%, or 1 in 5. Nope. Remember that for receptive vaginal sex there is a 0.11% risk of being infected. Using a condom drops that 0.11% chance by 80% to 0.022% or about 2 in 10,000.

This is usually the point where people ask “If it’s so hard to get infected, how did HIV become a pandemic?”

HIV spread for decades with no one being aware of it. An 11 in 10,000 risk is pretty low, but when a couple million people are having sex over half a century, that shit is going to spread. Add in folks reusing needles (not just drug users, but doctors and nurses in many places) and the inability of doctors to even recognize HIV until it had been floating around for longer than most people have been alive, and you get a pandemic.

HIV spread more quickly through communities of gay men because it spreads more easily through anal sex and the frequent sex in the gay bath scene. But it had been around and slowly spreading from sometime around WWI.

My point isn’t that you don’t need to worry about HIV. Personally, I always worry about things that might kill me. But I worry a lot less about sharks than about car accidents. Sharks are rare and usually don’t kill people. Car accidents are common and frequently kill people.

My point is that you don’t need to live in fear of HIV. If one your connections has HIV and a condemn breaks, get tested! But don’t panic. If you learn that one of your connections has been diagnosed with HIV, again, get tested, but don’t panic and don’t judge. And if you find out you are attracted to someone who has HIV, then decide what risks you are comfortable with based on the facts. Not the decades-old panic.

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