T
The Bellman
Guest
From a recent thread on pre-marital sex...
Pretty scary, huh? Risks of between 1 and 5 (20%) and 1 in 20 (5%). Makes you think...is it worth it? A 20% chance of getting, possibly, AIDS? I think we'd all agree that 20% is a pretty good argument NOT to have sex. Obviously, AIDS is the biggest threat. You get that...you're dead. It'll just take some time. So a figure ANYTHING like a 20% chance of getting AIDS is, indeed, a VERY good argument against having sex outside marriage.
But let's look at that figure a bit more. To begin with, failure rates for condoms are around 5% according to medical (rather than 'right-to-life') authorities. Still pretty bad...5% chance of getting AIDS. But let's keep looking...
How many people actually are HIV positive, to potentially infect you with AIDS? In Australia, it's around 15,000 (out of 20,000,000). In the UK, about 50,000 (out of 60,000,000). In the USA, about 400,000 (out of 280,000,000). That's a total, for those three countries, of 465,000 (out of 360,000,000). That's a little over a tenth of one percent (0.12%).
Okay, now, imagine the worst situation - actually having unprotected sex with someone who is HIV positive. What are the chances that you'll get it? Pretty good, we'd all say. But a bit of research shows that it's not sure at all. In fact, for normal (ie., non-anal) sex, the transmission rate is about 1 in a thousand. Yup, that's right. For every thousand times a HIV-positive person has sex, on average, they'll infect somebody once. And that's for an infected male, infecting a female. The chances of an infected female infecting a male are about a tenth of that.
So, taking all the above into account, let's imagine this scenario. A sexually promiscuous female, who always uses a condom, who lives in either the US, the UK, or Australia. She has sex with two different guys, every week. That's a hundred different guys a year. That's a LOT of different partners. But she's pretty promiscuous, as we said. And she moves on quickly. On average, she has sex with each of these partners twice before moving on. So...two hundred sexual encounters a year, with a hundred different men. Now let's look back at that 20% figure that was quoted above. How long would this woman have to continue this way, having sex with a hundred different guys a year, to reach a level of having a 20% chance of contracting AIDS? Do the math...5% failure rate (of condoms) times 0.1% transmission rate times 0.12% infection rate times 200 encounters a year. That's a 0.0012% chance of her contracting it every year. In other words, to get to the 20% chance level, she'd have to keep up her promiscuous lifestyle...for slightly over sixteen thousand years. Yup. 16,000 years. Doesn't sound quite as bad as it was above, does it?
This sort of scare tactics, often used by the religious in an attempt to convince us all of the folly of pre-marital sex, do nothing quite so well as hide the truth. The fact is that if you are careful and responsible, the chances of you contracting any disease via an active, varied sex life are very low. Certainly much lower than, say, the chances of being hit by a car next time you cross the street. Why aren't the same religious people trying to get us all to stop crossing the street, since it's more dangerous than having an active, responsible sex life? Good question. To which I have a good answer - the 'danger' they talk about is only a means to an end. The end is to get you do to what THEY think is morally right - regardless of the facts. This is not to say that all these christians (such as the poster of the passage above) are intentionally telling lies - far from it. I have no doubt that they are giving the dangers as they see them. But, like many people, they see the sensational, rather than the actual, particularly when the sensational seems to support their position. A simple investigation of the facts (all of the information above took me about ten minutes to pull off the net) shows that the huge danger they talk about simply isn't there.
Is this to say that there can't be any negative consequences to sex? Of course not. You CAN get pregnant. You CAN contract an STD, even AIDS. So...you act responsibly. You use condoms. Always. What you DON'T do is stop doing a natural, enjoyable activity which can bring two people closer together, just because of some fanciful statistics and a bit of invention by those who think you should act the way they think is moral.
Do what YOU think is moral. And act responsibly when you do it. And enjoy.
Pretty scary, huh? Risks of between 1 and 5 (20%) and 1 in 20 (5%). Makes you think...is it worth it? A 20% chance of getting, possibly, AIDS? I think we'd all agree that 20% is a pretty good argument NOT to have sex. Obviously, AIDS is the biggest threat. You get that...you're dead. It'll just take some time. So a figure ANYTHING like a 20% chance of getting AIDS is, indeed, a VERY good argument against having sex outside marriage.
But let's look at that figure a bit more. To begin with, failure rates for condoms are around 5% according to medical (rather than 'right-to-life') authorities. Still pretty bad...5% chance of getting AIDS. But let's keep looking...
How many people actually are HIV positive, to potentially infect you with AIDS? In Australia, it's around 15,000 (out of 20,000,000). In the UK, about 50,000 (out of 60,000,000). In the USA, about 400,000 (out of 280,000,000). That's a total, for those three countries, of 465,000 (out of 360,000,000). That's a little over a tenth of one percent (0.12%).
Okay, now, imagine the worst situation - actually having unprotected sex with someone who is HIV positive. What are the chances that you'll get it? Pretty good, we'd all say. But a bit of research shows that it's not sure at all. In fact, for normal (ie., non-anal) sex, the transmission rate is about 1 in a thousand. Yup, that's right. For every thousand times a HIV-positive person has sex, on average, they'll infect somebody once. And that's for an infected male, infecting a female. The chances of an infected female infecting a male are about a tenth of that.
So, taking all the above into account, let's imagine this scenario. A sexually promiscuous female, who always uses a condom, who lives in either the US, the UK, or Australia. She has sex with two different guys, every week. That's a hundred different guys a year. That's a LOT of different partners. But she's pretty promiscuous, as we said. And she moves on quickly. On average, she has sex with each of these partners twice before moving on. So...two hundred sexual encounters a year, with a hundred different men. Now let's look back at that 20% figure that was quoted above. How long would this woman have to continue this way, having sex with a hundred different guys a year, to reach a level of having a 20% chance of contracting AIDS? Do the math...5% failure rate (of condoms) times 0.1% transmission rate times 0.12% infection rate times 200 encounters a year. That's a 0.0012% chance of her contracting it every year. In other words, to get to the 20% chance level, she'd have to keep up her promiscuous lifestyle...for slightly over sixteen thousand years. Yup. 16,000 years. Doesn't sound quite as bad as it was above, does it?
This sort of scare tactics, often used by the religious in an attempt to convince us all of the folly of pre-marital sex, do nothing quite so well as hide the truth. The fact is that if you are careful and responsible, the chances of you contracting any disease via an active, varied sex life are very low. Certainly much lower than, say, the chances of being hit by a car next time you cross the street. Why aren't the same religious people trying to get us all to stop crossing the street, since it's more dangerous than having an active, responsible sex life? Good question. To which I have a good answer - the 'danger' they talk about is only a means to an end. The end is to get you do to what THEY think is morally right - regardless of the facts. This is not to say that all these christians (such as the poster of the passage above) are intentionally telling lies - far from it. I have no doubt that they are giving the dangers as they see them. But, like many people, they see the sensational, rather than the actual, particularly when the sensational seems to support their position. A simple investigation of the facts (all of the information above took me about ten minutes to pull off the net) shows that the huge danger they talk about simply isn't there.
Is this to say that there can't be any negative consequences to sex? Of course not. You CAN get pregnant. You CAN contract an STD, even AIDS. So...you act responsibly. You use condoms. Always. What you DON'T do is stop doing a natural, enjoyable activity which can bring two people closer together, just because of some fanciful statistics and a bit of invention by those who think you should act the way they think is moral.
Do what YOU think is moral. And act responsibly when you do it. And enjoy.
