Neat, I hadn't realized they got the window down. That's great.
I agree with you pretty much completely. I just worry that we'll forget the real lesson of the AIDS epidemic. Which I feel is that whenever you have a lot of unprotected sexual contact among large numbers of people, you create a good environment for a new STD to evolve. Testing can never protect us from that (at least, not without some really high tech testing methods that can test for evolving dangers, certainly nothing like what we have now). So,I don't want people to ever encourage that sort of breeding pool.
Basically, it's all about reasonable risk assessment. Risks don't care about your moral system. They don't care if you're in love or not in love, whether you had sex with a good person or a jerk, whether it was committed or a one night stand. They care about what you do. And yeah, it's not nearly as simple as only having sex with one partner will protect you, and certainly not one partner at a time in the current popular serial monogamy model. But testing does make things much safer. Barriers do make things much safer. You can look at all of your options and see which ones make sense to use in your circumstances.
In general, people need to learn to do risk assessment. Humans are very bad at it for more abstract or long-term dangers. But good risk assessment makes for choices that decrease your risk or allow you to take reasonable risks for what you decide you want.
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Date: 7/10/10 08:29 pm (UTC)From:I agree with you pretty much completely. I just worry that we'll forget the real lesson of the AIDS epidemic. Which I feel is that whenever you have a lot of unprotected sexual contact among large numbers of people, you create a good environment for a new STD to evolve. Testing can never protect us from that (at least, not without some really high tech testing methods that can test for evolving dangers, certainly nothing like what we have now). So,I don't want people to ever encourage that sort of breeding pool.
Basically, it's all about reasonable risk assessment. Risks don't care about your moral system. They don't care if you're in love or not in love, whether you had sex with a good person or a jerk, whether it was committed or a one night stand. They care about what you do. And yeah, it's not nearly as simple as only having sex with one partner will protect you, and certainly not one partner at a time in the current popular serial monogamy model. But testing does make things much safer. Barriers do make things much safer. You can look at all of your options and see which ones make sense to use in your circumstances.
In general, people need to learn to do risk assessment. Humans are very bad at it for more abstract or long-term dangers. But good risk assessment makes for choices that decrease your risk or allow you to take reasonable risks for what you decide you want.