NCJ Number
130855
Date Published
1989
Length
15 pages
Annotation
This paper examines the effects of AIDS in relation to safer sex, responsible advice versus the responsibility to advise, promiscuity, and AIDS testing.
Abstract
Safer sex organizing activities have been conducted at the grass roots level long before professional health and sex educators made important contributions to AIDS education. The overprofessionalization of safer sex organizing, however, and the lack of historical insight by professionals has had a direct impact on the style of education for both gay men and heterosexuals. It is essential that those concerned with the broader implications of AIDS understand the history of the gay community's safer sex organizing. With regard to responsible advice versus the responsibility to advise, the inability to decide specifically what is safe and unsafe has prevented many groups from recommending what is safe in broad terms. Counselors and safer sex educators, especially doctors, are often unwilling to say that anything is safe because they are afraid someone will acquire HIV infection while taking their advice. Perhaps the single most misunderstood aspect of HIV transmission is that promiscuity is the chief culprit. Despite wide media and scientific reporting, epidemiological studies show that it is not primarily the number of sexual partners but rather the exchange of infected semen or blood that creates risk for contracting the virus. Women are more likely to acquire than to give HIV infection when having sex with a man. Some individuals feel their anxieties about AIDS will be relieved through testing. This may be true for some people, but the test itself often raises as many anxieties as it quells. The solution may involve expanding concepts of sex, increasing the discussion of pleasurable possibilities, and eroticizing measures that reduce the transmission of sexually transmitted diseases. 3 references and 4 notes