desertvixen | World Aids Day Posting

From

cinchntouch :

Usually on World AIDS Day I like to do a lecture on Safe Sex I won't this year because you all know about safe sex already. What I want to do is challenge folks. I invite folks who have never made a pitch for safe sex to make one on their journals today. For me to talk about safe sex doesn't have the same resonance as younger gay men talking about it, straight men of all ages talking about it lesbians talking about it and heterosexual women talking about it.

Make it a meme - you write about safe sex and tell your friends too. I think you might be surprised how little some folks know about it. For example, you might be surprised to know that I am still not certain if HIV can be transmited through blow jobs! I could look it up, but I never have and it seems like the last time I looked everyone was saying different things.

So, normally when I write about issues related to sex, I'm talking about being pro-choice. Safe sex is a choice, but it's not always a choice that people know a lot about. The state of sex education in our schools has seen better days, depending on what part of the country you live in.

As a straight female teenager, most of the emphasis on safe sex was put on not getting pregnant. Pregnancy was the Big Deal that we were worried about, because we weren't ready to be mothers. The guys we knew weren't ready to be fathers. I was lucky, because I had parents who talked openly with me about sex, about birth control, about how important it was to not get pregnant when you weren't ready. Looking back, though, my mother didn't have much to say about sexually transmitted diseases - most likely, even as open-minded as she was on the subject, she didn't think I would be having sex with anyone who HAD a sexually transmitted disease.

For awhile, she was right. I gave up my virginity when I was seventeen to my high school sweetheart (who, in retrospect, wasn't really worthy of it - as he turned out to be a total loser with no ambition whatsoever) and enjoyed being sexually active.

When I was twenty, no longer dating the high school sweetheart and in the Army, I had plenty of chances to be sexually active. I thought I was pretty safe-sex savvy - I even made one partner go to the drugstore and get condoms because he forgot them.

When I was twenty, I didn't really worry about STDs because I thought none of the guys I knew and would consider having sex with would have STDs. They were Good People. I was a Good Person. Good People didn't get STDs.

When I was twenty, I found out that sometimes Good People have STDs, and they don't always know they have them. Some people don't have symptoms.

When I was twenty, I contracted genital herpes from someone who didn't know he had it. I thought I was being safe about sex, and I found how the hard and painful way that I was wrong.

I don't have frequent outbreaks, thankfully, but it's a fact of my life that I, a Good Person, have an STD. It won't kill me, or make me really sick, but it sucks. Anytime I go to form a relationship with someone that's going to involve sex, I have to be upfront about the fact that I have an STD. I've faced some rejection and less-than-pleasant treatment because of it, because there's that stereotype that only Dirty, Nasty, Slutty People can get herpes, or any STD - including AIDS. That's just not the truth. And there is no cure. They can treat the symptoms, suppress it, but they can't CURE it.

1 out of 5 adolescent or adult Americans has genital herpes. 1 out of 4 women in this group has herpes. 1 out of 8 men in this group has herpes - mostly because it's easier for women to contract it from men. (numbers are from the CDC)

So the point of all this? Safe sex is important - preventing STDs (to include HIV/AIDS) and preventing pregnancy. It's just as important to not treat those members of our society who have STDs as if we're somehow unclean, or pretend that STDs are something that can't happen to you or to people you know. It's not a joke, it's not something you should wish on someone, and it's not something you can catch by talking to us, being friends with us, or respecting us - whether the STD in question is herpes, HPV, or HIV/AIDS.

DV