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Talk:Safe sex

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Article merged: See old talk-page here. --Una Smith (talk) 03:13, 28 December 2007 (UTC)

Does the article say touching hiv +ve blood or vaginal fluids with no apparant cuts or open bleeding wounds cause aids?

Contents

1 STD's versus Pregnancy 2 Abstinence Section Should Be Removed 3 First safe sex guidelines written in 1983 4 Abstinence as a remedy


[edit] STD's versus Pregnancy

When the flame wars over abstinence are over, this section needs more editing to differentiate between safe sex to prevent the spread of STD's and safe sex to prevent pregnancy. The article needs to be more clear on this. Square126 (talk) 01:13, 13 July 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Abstinence Section Should Be Removed

If there were an article on safe driving practices that focused on ways to lessen the risk of hurting yourself or others while driving, would it make sense to include a section entitled "Not Driving as an alternative to safe driving"? Would it include notes that you could still be hit by a car on the sidewalk or at a cross walk or that you could cause someone else to get in an accident by being really good looking or wearing a watch the reflects the sun into someone's eyes while they're driving? Would it mention that the Amish support not driving a car as an alternative to safe driving?

"Abstinence..." is a nonsense section for this article, and it should be removed.

Otherwise, there are plenty of alternatives to "safe sex" that limit and/or eliminate one's risk of contracting an "STD" or becoming pregnant. 68.79.23.66 (talk) 23:55, 3 September 2008 (UTC)—Preceding unsigned comment added by 68.79.23.66 (talk) 23:50, 3 September 2008 (UTC)

Disagree: Some fairly large groups advocate abstinence as a way of avoiding sexually transmitted diseases and pregnancy. So it is appropriate to cover abstinence among the alternatives to intercourse in safe sex. It is also appropriate to give balance to that by noting that abstinence, while theoretically fairly effective is difficult to practice correctly, so has a much lower actual use effectiveness.
In your analogy - comparing the risks of taking alternative transportation to those of driving an automobile would be perfectly reasonable for an article on safe driving. Zodon (talk) 04:58, 4 September 2008 (UTC)
Some fairly large groups sounds like weasel words. Which fairly large groups? Enumerating those groups and their motivations may be helpful and maybe be useful material to add to the religion and sexuality article. To me, it's fairly obvious that anybody can not do something, including sex and I don't know why this article should cover that. It is a little weird to me that abstinence is included. However from a consistency POV, given that it is, it seems a little weird to me that See also section doesn't wiki-link the sexual abstinence article. InsufficientData (talk) 14:57, 4 September 2008 (UTC)
Since the article spells out some of the groups, e.g. "some American evangelical Christians and the Roman Catholic Church," I thought that the reference was obvious.
The wikilink seemed like a good idea, but See also sections are deprecated in WP:MEDMOS, so I added it as a link in the abstinence section. Zodon (talk) 05:02, 5 September 2008 (UTC)
Disagree? That wasn't a disagreement with anything I posted. That post didn't address my concerns with this page on any level. That was an advocation for a new page, entitled "Ways of avoiding sexually transmitted disease and pregnancy", that link to the "Safe Sex" page and the the "Abstinence" page.68.20.13.112 (talk) 05:30, 14 September 2008 (UTC)
The proposal, as indicated by the heading of this section, appeared to be to remove abstinence from this page. The removal of abstinence is what I was disagreeing with.
I have reverted the removal of abstinence, since the mater was under discussion and there was certainly no consensus for removal.
Also, note that celibacy is not the same as abstinence, at least according to the articles. For instance celibacy involves not getting married (not a requirement for abstinence).
Perhaps a way forward would be to provide some citations from reliable sources supporting the idea that abstinence has no place in safe sex, so that view could be worked in.
As to the proposal to split off some of the content here - this article isn't big enough that it requires splitting. The proposed topic for a page doesn't seem particularly natural/obvious/easy to find, looks more like a POV fork [duplicate article]. Seems best to improve/expand the coverage here until get to the point where there is a need to split it. Zodon (talk) 01:44, 15 September 2008 (UTC)
Perhaps a way forward would be to consider the logic of including "not having sex" as a section within "safe sex". Considering the driving analogy, above, might be a start. The premise within the concept already assumes the act. Abstinence would be a logical section within an article of "Methods for mitigating the risks of contracting a sexually transmitted disease or becoming pregnant".(Gwopy (talk) 04:47, 15 September 2008 (UTC))
One source of confusion might be that Wikipedia:Wikipedia is not a dictionary. i.e. this article is about the concept of "Ways of avoiding sexually transmitted disease and pregnancy" or "Methods for mitigating the risks of contracting a sexually transmitted disease or becoming pregnant" or "safe sex" (those are just different names for essentially the same concept). So the article includes things related to that concept, including, as it happens, an opposite ("unsafe sex" also directs here, and the article on it was merged into this one.) Zodon (talk) 08:28, 15 September 2008 (UTC)
Please read the article. This article is about the concept of way to "practice of sexual activity in a manner that reduces the risk of infection with sexually transmitted diseases (STDs)". Abstinence is not the practice of sexual activity. It is the practice of NOT being sexually active. Once again I extend the analogy that "not driving a car" is not a relevant means of "not having an accident while driving". That said, I would fully support and contribute to a page entitled "Ways of mitigating the likelihood of contracting sexually transmitted disease and/or becoming pregnancy". Safe sex would be one of the way. Chastity belts would be another. Castration would be yet another. Abstinence would be another way. Hysterectomies would likely provide some mitigation to the risk. I think it would be an interesting article. Should I start the article and move the currently irrelevant abstinence section from this article to that one? Just tell me what you'd like me to do.(Gwopy (talk) 23:00, 22 September 2008 (UTC))
Abstinence means various things, it may mean absence of sexual activity, refraining from vaginal intercourse, or other things. Some of the things it means entail risk of STDs. e.g., from the lead of the article on abstinence, "Sexual abstinence is the practice of voluntarily refraining from some or all aspects of sexual activity."
Later it notes "Further, some have noted that many do not consider oral sex or similar acts to violate abstinence. One study states that 55 percent of college students claiming abstinence had, indeed, performed oral sex. Many of these acts can transmit STDs.[4]"
Also, as noted above, the opposite of, or absence of an activity or concept is not unreasonable to receive mention on the concept's page. Not driving a car is obviously a way of avoiding automotive accidents, and would need inclusion in such an article. (To do otherwise, if there is a significant car-free movement, would likely violate NPOV.)
As to the page you propose. I don't see a particular benefit in starting another page covering "Ways of mitigating the likelihood of contracting sexually transmitted disease and/or becoming pregnancy."
It isn't clear that this is a notable/coherent concept. It would need more focusing - how do you set a limit to what to include? To use an extreme example, Genocide prevents STD/pregnancy. Does it go in the page? As to the specific items you mention: As I understand it chastity belts are more intended to prevent sexual activity (among other things), rather than STDs/pregnancy per se; castration prevents sexual development and activity (i.e., broader scope). Pregnancy prevention is a side-effect of hysterectomy, rather than its purpose. There may already be a similar page or list. You might want to look around the sexuality articles. (Or maybe you already have - I haven't seen such an article or list, but I know mostly the birth control articles, and haven't looked at the sexuality articles in general.)
I don't necessarily oppose it, but think it needs more research/refining.
However the existence of such a page would not remove the need to cover abstinence here. As noted, some propose abstinence as an alternative to safe sex (for instance abstinence only education).
The level of safety/risk varies with various sexual activities, some of the range of activities are labeled abstinence, the level of pregnancy/STD risk involved in those activities is just as much game for coverage as any other activities. Zodon (talk) 04:31, 23 September 2008 (UTC)

[edit] First safe sex guidelines written in 1983

The following sentence (which was recently added to the Focus on HIV section) is dubious and at the least misleading.

Indeed, the first safer sex guidelines appeared in the 1983 booklet How to Have Sex in an Epidemic: One Approach, written by Michael Callen, Richard Berkowitz and Dr. Joseph Sonnabend in response to the emergence of AIDS among gay men in America.[1]

While the reference does appear to say what the sentence claims, it does not appear to be a highly reliable source for such a claim about history (extraordinary claims require high quality sources). Since practices for prevention of STDs go back for centuries, the claim that this is the first safer sex guidelines needs better documentation, and possibly clarification (i.e. was this the coining of the term "safer sex?"). Zodon (talk) 05:53, 21 October 2008 (UTC)

I suggest the book "Safety in Numbers" by Edward King (available through Google book search), which says, "It was How to Have Sex in an Epidemic: One Approach which pioneered the approach to safer sex which we recognise today. It was virtually the only safer sex publication which proposed a specific theory of what caused AIDS, on which its advice about specific sex acts were based." A recent article in the Lancet cited this book to support a similar statement. Trezatium (talk) 08:43, 22 October 2008 (UTC)
So it apparently marked the application/adaptation of safer sex techniques to HIV/AIDS. Much more plausible than the claim that there were no such techniques before then. (Might be worth noting what sorts of changes were made in safe sex.) Thanks. Zodon (talk) 07:55, 24 October 2008 (UTC)
As I understand it, the booklet was the first attempt to promote risk reduction (as opposed to risk avoidance) as a method of preventing STI infection, which would make it the first set of "safe sex" guidelines ever written. But I could be wrong. It might be best to wait and see if anyone more knowledgeable speaks up here. Trezatium (talk) 17:08, 25 October 2008 (UTC)
What is the difference between "risk reduction" and "risk avoidance"? (e.g. are those terms for something like condom use vs. something like abstinence?)
The use of condom type devices in attempts to prevent STI have been documented back to at least 1564. While condom use for STI prevention has gone out of popularity in some places and times, for instance in the U.S. the Comstock laws of 1873 were partly responsible for a decrease in knowledge of contraception and a rise in STIs; but condoms have also had advocates and increases in popularity as disease prevention (e.g. German military pre-WW1, US military starting in 1930s through WW2, etc.). More recently various factors, such as more effective treatments for various STIs, lead some to view STIs less seriously, for instance going back to historically less effective methods of prevention, such as promoting abstinence (e.g. US military 1947 through Vietnam war). Then HIV/AIDS prompted many to again advocate safer sex practices.
If you look at it in terms of STD prevention, the History of condoms seems to give an example of "those who forget history are condemned to repeat it." The use of safer sex practices may seem new if compared to what was done immediately before, but not so new if looked at in historical perspective.
Certainly there have been advances in understanding and new devices and techniques, but are a lot of similarities also. Zodon (talk) 07:52, 26 October 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Abstinence as a remedy

The author writes:

Some groups, notably some American evangelical Christians and the Roman Catholic Church oppose sex outside marriage,

Afaik, most of Christianity and good many other religions do. 'Some Swedish athletes and teachers and the Seven-Imams-Shia Islam oppose excessive drinking', don't they? But that's beside the point: Whatever the merits or demerits of sexual abstinence, abstaining from sex without marriage is NOT sexual abstinence. To a literate reader, this passage looks very funny. 78.55.129.12 (talk) 21:11, 26 November 2008 (UTC) Wojciech Żełaniec

How is abstaining from sex when not married not abstinence? Is somebody who abstains from sex when they are married more abstinent in some way? What is "funny" about it? You seem to agree with what it says. (Unclear what you find unclear/funny/objectionable about it, so can't suggest way to help resolve.) Thanks. Zodon (talk) 01:04, 27 November 2008 (UTC)
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