GrandpaLash
Posts: 133
Joined: 1/8/2005
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No, your question was: why does it seem you are trying to MINIMIZE the need for cleaning things properly between users?
And I wonder where you got that concept from, because there certainly isn't anything in my post to suggest it.
As for your other point, I am fortunate enough to live in a country where the religious Right doesn't have a great deal of power (yet), and HIV education here is excellent. We had one new reported case of HIV in 2003 in a population of 20 million, and the epedemiology is still as I stated above.
The HIV issue, in fact the entire VD issue is similar to the heroin issue. They are what sociologists call 'moral panics', where a genuine but rare (in real terms) issue is blown out of all proportion to its actual incidence. And it is no coincidence that the three are sexual morality/human 'weakness' issues, and fall within the purvey of the religious and fundamentalist Right.
Now before anyone jumps on me again for 'minimising' their seriousness, I will mention two things from my own life.
First, my eldest son died as a direct result of his heroin addiction, and I am intimately aware of the heartbreak and pain this curse can bring. But I am also irretriveably convinced that the problem is not so much the drug itself as the social conditions brought about by moral panics that allow right-wing 'solutions' that refuse to face the realities, and create a sub-culture of degradation, crime, and excessive vulnerability, much as you point out re HIV.
Second, in the early to mid 90s I was intimately involved in the HIV issue, since my then partner's best friend had gotten an unwelcome Xmas present at a bathhouse. He was incredibly tenacious, and finally died with as much dignity as is possible in those circumstances, and we are all incredibly proud of him. But as an adjunct to my involvement in his care, I became heavily involved in public education about HIV, and became also very familiar with the epidemiology. I am the last person to advocate carelessness in one's sexual life, but the facts are, unless things have changed dramatically in the last year or so, that heterosexuals not involved in the drug scene are at infinitesimal risk of getting HIV, unless they are ferociously promiscuous.
But even then, I have been involved in small population alternative scenes for 30 years, the sort of scenes the inhabitants often refer to as incestuous, and in all that time, I know of only one person who contracted a serious disease, syphillis, and he was the most promiscuous of us all. He was also successfully treated.
I am not at all attempting to minimise the seriousness of any of these things, and I personally take care to clean my toys and vet my lovers carefully, but I get so annoyed at seeing so much exaggerated fear about things that are really, for most of us, incredibly unlikely events.
Grandpa Lash
_____________________________
Sex without D/s is about as pointless as D/s without sex
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With the rampant spread of disease .... - 
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