naturefun

The first step of an HIV infection is the virus being picked up by a dendritic cell. DC's are like the lookouts of your immune system. They pick up possible invaders and bring them to lymph nodes where your B and T cells live. They basically show around the thing they picked up saying Hey, look at this thing I found! What the heck is it? From there, your body can react one of two ways. (1) Oh, that's a liver/kidney/blood/etc cell; leave it alone. (2) Crap, we've never seen one of those before! Mobilize the troops! Of course, this actually works against you; the type of cell your body uses to mount a defense is the kind of cell that HIV infects. Anyway though, to start an infection, HIV needs to contact a DC. These are found all through your mucosal surfaces- basically, anything wet and pink. They're also found in abundance in the lining of your blood vessels, which is why getting a virion in your bloodstream makes the infection more likely to get a foothold. But you can contract the disease through the tissue inside your mouth and pharynx, lungs, eyelids, anus, vagina, urethra, and so on. You just don't hear about those things because you don't usually get another person's blood or cum in your lungs. If it gets into your bloodstream, all the better for the virus. Receptive partners are nearly always at higher risk. This is because in normal coitus, more male fluid reaches female mucosae than female fluid reaching male mucosae. You're also at higher risk is the sex introduces tearing. The anus isn't adapted to accommodate a penis. Because of this, anal sex often involves tearing and has a very high transmission rate. Depending on the source you trust, you could have a 30% chance of contracting HIV by receiving anal sex from a seropositive male. For what it's worth, one of my classes had an HIV lecture a month ago. Here are the transmission rates out of one of the lecturer's slides for a single contact event: Anal intercourse (receptive): 1-30% Anal intercourse (insertive): 0.1-10% Vaginal intercourse (receptive): 0.1-10% Vaginal intercourse (insertive): 0.1-1.0% Needle sharing: 0.67% Needle stick (accidental): 0.3% Oral sex: "small" So yes, the risk of contracting HIV from oral sex is small both in absolute and relative terms. However, keep in mind that all these statistics represent single events. Eat out enough seropositive women with high viremia and sooner or later you're likely to get infected. Low transmission rates only protect you when your exposures remain very rare. There's one exception to the rule that HIV has low transmission rates: contaminated blood transfusions. Your odds of contracting HIV after receiving a tainted blood transfusion are around 90%.

Me and my fiancee decided we were both interested in swinging before being married- obviously, given that she's my fiancee, not my wife. That said, this was a recent thing for us and we've been dating for nearly nine years. If we had our way, we'd have been married about four years or so ago. However, since there's no one with a pot of money offering to pay for our wedding, and we're both students, we really don't have that means. So while we weren't actually married when we decided to give the lifestyle a try we might as well have been for all intents and purposes.

It adds some nice variety. Physically, cumming in a girl feels a lot better than coming on her. But coming on her has visual appeal that coming in her doesn't and she likes some variety in where my cum goes. We find it isn't better or worse; just different. In any case, I don't know that I've ever licked my cum off of her per se, but I like it when she kisses me after I cum in her mouth. She also sat on my face once after I came in her and made me lick it out, which was really, really awesome.

What happens is that HIV, like any other infectious agent, will have an incubation period until it turns into a full-blown infection. Your body will fight this off reasonably well, and you'll feel better. It's just like a common cold. The difference is that HIV's life cycle allows it to hide. Your body can never eliminate 100% of the virus because a small amount of it is always hiding somewhere. In fact, this is why HIV is so dangerous. The effects of the virus itself aren't that bad- heck, the simian version of HIV, SIV, is a chronic but certainly not life-threatening illness. The difference is that chimpanzees allow the virus to stay, while our immune system nukes itself into oblivion trying to wipe out the immune cells that HIV resides in. This doctor should have his license revoked immediately. From the CDC: Now HIV transmission rates are relatively low for oral sex, and they're virtually non-existent for the person receiving oral sex because while HIV is present in saliva, it's not present in high enough concentrations to threaten contagion. The person giving oral sex, on the other hand, is definitely at risk.

I think my point is that there's wiggle room. Whenever the question has to do with kids and sex, I generally talk about good sex-positive guidelines, but the fact that every family works differently and as such some things will work in some families but not others is king. Personally, my parents made me aware of things that they did sexually. It bothered me a bit in my angsty years, but in retrospect it really had a positive effect on me. It did a lot to teach me to respect all people as sexual and to make me not afraid to come to my parents (well, my dad) with questions and whatnot. It's one of those things I didn't like, but I'm now glad was done whether or not I liked it.

Disclaimer- I don't have kids, so discard my thoughts at your leisure. This strikes me as the ideal. I hear a lot of people say that they don't want their kids to know because their sex life is private. That logic has never really followed for me. It's not mutually exclusive to keep your children and arm's distance from your sex life, and to be open to your kids that yes, mom and dad have a healthy, active sex life. Allowing your kids to be aware that you have an active sex life, and that it involves things that go beyond "turning the lights off" doesn't sound like abuse or exhibitionism. It sounds like good, positive role modeling. We talk a lot about the importance or role modeling a big range of virtues for our children- being a hard worker, making your word your bond, being charitable, being educated and intellectual, why shouldn't we also role model having a healthy sex life? Keeping the fact that you're sexually active and enjoy a breadth of sexual activities well-hidden from your children doesn't strike me as accomplishing anything other than reinforcing negative views about sex.

I think this really hits it on the head, and I'd like to piggyback on it a bit. I once had a prof tell me that it's good to have an open mind, but a person whose mind is always open will never take a stand on anything. You need a mind made up to take a stand. That's really made me think a lot over the years. As we legalize more things, the biggest argument is the slippery slope. It's endured the test of time. If we let gay people marry, what's next? Marrying your dog? Pedophilia? Etc. I think that argument is bullshit, but not for the same reason as everyone else. Logical fallacies come in two flavors: formal and informal. A formal fallacy is a set of reasoning which is always wrong: you won't get HIV from having sex because transmission rates are really low. An informal fallacy is a fallacy that results from anything else (e.g. a red herring). Wikipedia has a fantastic list of fallacies if anyone's so inclined. I could spend hours there myself. The Slippery Slope teeters between being an informal fallacy and not a fallacy. The reason is because there's actually a valid argument that legalizing gay marriage could lead to, say, human-dog marriage. Now I'm not saying that it's a reasonable conclusion. But I am saying that it's not a conclusion that should be automatically discounted. In politics, there's a concept called The Overton Window- conceptually, the window represents the breadth of issues a politician can support and keep his job. As you expand the window to include something new, something that was once far away from the window is now a bit closer. Move public perception of the legalization of interracial marriage from acceptable to popular, and there could be a coattails effect that moves same-sex marriage from unthinkable to "merely" radical. Now, if someone says that legalizing same-sex marriage will consequently lead to the legalization of human-dog marriage, they're wrong. However, if someone says that legalizing same-sex marriage will consequently contribute to a general liberalization of sexual norms, and that such a change could lead to decreased public outrage about bestiality, and that such a change could lead to zoophiles starting an advocacy movement because they're now less afraid of public condemnation... etc etc etc... he or she has a valid point. Also, I would assume that when interracial marriage was the hot button issue of the day, there were probably people screaming that next we'd be letting the homosexuals marry. Are the two issues linked? Not directly, but I also think that the presence of a slippery slope for legalizing and legitimizing more kinds of love is supported by the fact that this image is quite popular among supporters of same-sex marriage: See? There were once upstanding citizens supporting a ban on interracial marriage. But history shows us that just because you're a white, clean-cut capitalist doesn't mean that you're on the right side of the argument. We're literally using conservatives' arguments in the civil rights movement about race decades later in the civil rights movement about love. Personally, I think disagree with the slippery slope argument for a different reason. I don't argue with the presence or absence of a slippery slope. I argue for trust in society. I believe child molestation to be wrong. Period. And I believe that a free society with rigorous debate and discourse will, far more often than not, make correct determinations as to what's right and what's wrong. Say that we fully legalize same-sex marriage today on state and federal levels, and tomorrow I get cryogenically frozen for 100 years. When I wake up, it's legal for adults and children of all ages to have sexual relations, and that opinion has 80% popular support. My first reaction will be "holy shit, what the fuck happened while I was asleep?". However, my second action won't be to condemn what society has become. It'll be to find out what the fuck happened while I was asleep, because for there to be that much of a shift in such a short period of time, either NAMBLA figured out how to make the technology from They Live feasible, or there actually existed credible arguments in support of adult-child sex that my deeply-rooted antagonism toward the topic presented me from giving fair consideration to. Now, I realize that I chose an extreme example for this scenario. I did so simply because (1) extreme examples are better at illustrating points and (2), this is the argument I most often hear in public discourse. I trust that society, in the end, will do the right thing. If same-sex marriage is right, we'll come to that conclusion given enough time. If pedophilia is wrong, then society will never judge it otherwise, whether or not same-sex marriage makes it slightly less unthinkable. Like you said- there are too many things that we don't consider as possibilities simply because they're so far outside the realm of what we consider acceptable in modern society. Maybe I don't want to marry someone of a different race, or of my own sex. But as someone who would potentially want to (and in the case of the former, is going to), I like that I'm able to if I damn well want to. Non-monogamy or not having kids or having kids but not getting married- these are all things that shouldn't be a big deal. Life is short and the one thing I've learned in my 20s is that no one knows what the fuck they're doing, and we're all just making it up as we go along. I'd like the most options possible to do that. If you want a real-life example, I'm Wiccan. I always knew about Pagans and Wiccans, but I never took it seriously. I mostly relegated the title to angsty teenage girls who want attention and to be different. Imagine my surprise when in college, an exceedingly normal, intelligent, and well-adjusted friend of mine tells me that she's Pagan. I was shocked at first, then started to do some reading. Within a few weeks I found that Paganism was the spiritual calling that I'm meant for. I've further honed my focus to Wicca, but the fundamental principle I've been harping at remains. Exposure leads to acceptance, leads to egalitarianism, leads to more people finding fulfillment because they've found the right life choices for themselves.

I agree that visibility is important. I'm bisexual too as is my fiancée, and we both have the challenge of being out despite being in a heterosexual relationship, and neither of us ever having a homosexual relationship in our past. While's it's unfortunate, cultural ingrouping is a real thing and prejudice correlates positively to a lack of exposure. What does that mean? People tend to seek the company (romantic and platonic) of people similar to themselves, and we develop prejudices against people we don't have contact with. It follows simply that developing prejudice against people unlike ourselves is a natural occurrence. The facts that racial prejudice is much better than it was in the 1950s and that we hammer home the point to children in their formative years that skin color doesn't matter are not coincidental. Asking about whether we should be out as swingers to increase our visibility as a community begs the question of what the goal is of being out. I'm bisexual. I'm denied quite a few state and federal rights depending on who I fall in love with. Swingers aren't in the same position. We aren't disenfranchised of rights. What do we have to gain by being more visible? I post to a fetish-themed site this debate comes up quite frequently in. Personally, I recognize that we don't have much to gain through visibility in the practical sense. We don't face disenfranchisement. If me an my fiancée want to have sex outside our relationship there aren't any legal barriers preventing us from doing so. The only ones that I can think of don't count as disenfranchisement because they affect people in vanilla relationships equally- laws regarding prostitution, public exposure, consent, etc. However, I belong to a religion that has as its first pillar the need to affirm and promote the inherent worth and dignity of every person. I don't have the data on hand to back up the assertion, but a quick look at the media demonstrates that societal acceptance of co-marital relationships is low. Yet swinging isn't an uncommon activity. In 2005, the Kinsey Institute estimate that there are 4 million swingers in the US. Another more recent source (2011) on CNN Health estimated the number to be as high as 15 million Americans. That's a significant number of Americans- in the same ballpark as how many Americans are BLGT-identified. There are currently 319M Americans- 15M swingers would make us about 5% of the population. But that number is probably low when you think about what's going into it. The 319M Americans includes children, who I'm going to assume aren't included in the swinging population number (their sexual proclivities be damned) as well as the elderly (you're not swinging if you're no longer sexually active). Remove those two age groups and the percent share of Americans is higher- similar to being BLGT or African-descended. Yet while those two groups have mainstream moral acceptance- even if true egalitarianism remains a work in progress- I don't think we do. It's odd, too. We don't look down on single people who have active sex lives, even though slut shaming exists. We don't look on married couples who go to strip clubs. And a lot of men would get a high five from a buddy after saying they went to a massage parlor and got a happy ending rather than moral indignation. And that last one isn't even legal! So why should we as a community- a community that's a real cross-section of the country and world as a whole, not be treated the same? Why shouldn't I get a high five from a buddy when we share how our weekends went and I say I watched some hung dude bang my SO while I had sex with his wife? Of course, I'm not necessarily advocating a world where people openly discuss their sexual achievements and exploits (though it'd be nice). I'm saying that we should have a world where we're respected for who we are- moral, law-abiding, job-holding, tax-paying, family-oriented people... who happen to enjoy things as diverse as reading, water-skiing, long walks on the beach, movies, bars, and yes, co-marital sex. I realize that I can be part of the problem or part of the solution. I'm a young professional. I work with a lot of people my age in a very liberal community. I'm an upstanding, clean-cut, and generally respected person in my community. I don't run any particular career risk for having my close friends know that I'm a swinger. I'm out as bisexual to my immediate but not extended family. I'm relatively good at controlling where information goes by being selective and deliberate in who I give it to. I recognize that some people can't be open about swinging, and that's fine. But I can. I don't have to be, but I can. This is how a culture changes. My deal with my fiancée is that we have discretion to be out to our peers about swinging. If they're peers that are strictly in her or my social circles (when you live 1,400 miles apart, you don't know most of each others' friends), we can use our own discretion. For shared friends, we need to consult each other first. But the point is that we've agreed this isn't something that by necessity must stay hidden. I've told one person so far. Her response? "Ok." It wasn't a big deal.

Same, though slightly more bisexual than lesbian.

I used to be in a lab that studied HIV so I can explain these things a bit more when I have some more time on my hands. However, two quick points. The "cure" for HIV isn't working. UPenn still has some people functionally cured of HIV with the treatment you're referring to, but the infection comes back when you take them off of antiretroviral drugs. Plus, at least one of the guys died. The problem is that we can't eliminate all the reservoirs in the body where HIV remains latent. Remember the big article a few months ago about a baby being cured of HIV? It was bullshit. The scientist quoted clearly said that the child was functionally cured (which is quite different from being actually cured), but the columnist heard the words "cured" and "HIV" in the same sentence and ran with it. Other STD infections make HIV easier to contract. HIV is actually pretty hard to catch- you need a huge viral load because the virion is so damn fragile and it needs to come into contact with a bleeding wound or a mucus membrane. Chances are much better for the infection to catch when it contacts a bleeding sore on a mucus membrane. Such lesions are commonly caused by other STDs. Eliminate other STDs, you reduce the window for HIV transmission.

Multiple issues with this logic. First, developing a drug costs lots and lots and lots of money. Lots as in 9-10 digits. Why would someone spend a billion dollars developing a cure for a disease, but then not sell it? Second, drug development trials are public domain. The US government even has a searchable website where you can go to read the reports on trials. If these cures existed, anyone would be able to look them up. They wouldn't be secrets. Third, drug patents don't last very long. After looking up that cure that Merck or Pfizer inexplicably developed but never deployed, all another investor has to do is wait for the drug to come off patent and start producing it. Meaning that anyone or their mother can start a factory pumping out pills for said cure. Manufacturing drugs is dirt cheap. This is essentially the business model for Forest Laboratories. Fourth, perhaps this is true, but it fails to take into account market strategy. Say three companies are making drugs that treat herpes. Then one company makes a cure for herpes. Perhaps that company would want to sit on the cure because the treatment is more profitable in the long run. But it's not nearly as profitable as the fact that this wonder drug would quickly gain a 100% market share and put its competitors out of business. Also, just because a disease has been cured doesn't mean it's going away. Strep throat can be cured. People still get strep throat and still buy antibiotics to treat it. Source: scientist.

Depends on what you mean by school age. I think this is different for 7 vs 17. If you mean younger school age, I think it just matters how disruptive this would be to your family's routine. If the kids wouldn't know the difference (i.e., they're in bed anyway and can get you easily if needed), then go for it. If you need to shuffle the kids somewhere in front of a movie with copious pizza and ice cream, then it's a judgement call I think every individual couple needs to make. Older kids? I think that it's ok IF they know you swing. We all talk about how important it is for our kids to be open with us about any questions or concerns or thoughts they have about sex. How can they trust us if we're going to bring people into the house to have sex hoping they won't notice? Teenagers aren't dumb. Personally, I think this is a good teachable point. Raise your kids to be empowered to enjoy their own sexuality as they wish in a responsible manner. Have appropriate discretion, but don't hide the fact that you practice what you preach.

Can I get some more details on this club? I move to New Orleans in a few months.

Haven't begun swinging yet but this is a talk we've had. Telling family is completely off limits. We've talked about whether we'll hide it from our children when they come along, but that's something we really won't be able to determine more solidly until we come to that juncture. We want to raise our kids in a sex-positive environment and we since we expect they'd likely figure it out sooner or later, we'd like to choose the manner in which they find out and use it as a teaching moment to pass on our own ethics. As for friends, we've decided that some friends we can tell and some are off limits. In general, we're alright telling friends who are our generation, but not friends in older generations (given that most our friends are through church, we have a lot of cross-generational friendships). Mutual friends we both need to agree before telling. Individual friends- given that we live 1,200 miles apart, we have quite a few friends that the other doesn't know- are up to each of us. I have no qualms about telling friends if I think they're friends who could handle it.