KewlDewd66 wrote:
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However, I must never disregard the fact that this presumption does not work the other way around, ie., that I can afford to be careless or even less careful, if I am not entering the 'red zone'. (I do not think you ever said that but am trying to emphasize this point.)
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Correct, I didn't say that and I have never said that. The other responders who somehow managed to infer that did so based on their own predilections or on the attitudes of the gay milieu. I'm a belt and suspenders kind of guy. Actually, I'm a belt and suspenders and duct tape kind of guy.
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This is so much more about your behaviour than about the environment.
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Mathematically, this is not so. The probability of an infected partner holds an equal weight with the probability of transmission; they are multiplied together. After all, you can't catch something from someone who hasn't got it!
Practically, as I mentioned in my probability essay, it is difficult to accurately know the disease status of any potential partner. You have much more control over the transmission probability. Still, safer sex is not safe sex (condoms do have some probability of breaking; it is possible to transmit AIDS by kissing) so it makes sense to use several methods to increase safety. The bottom line is that if I pick a partner out of a population that has half as many disease carriers then I have halved my chance of being infected, regardless of how small or large the transmission probability is. Reducing either probability increases your chance of health but reducing them both increases your margin of safety even more.
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Getting to know someone is really a hardly viable alternative these days.
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No, but you can get information about someone even before having anonymous sex. A guy you see in a bathhouse getting fucked bareback by a long line of guys is certainly riski
er than someone who you meet in a bar who is just interested in oral. The guy in the bar
might have spent last night being fucked bareback but the other guy did with 100% certainty. Why not choose the less risky alternative?
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But do not apply the laws of statistics literally.
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I have to disagree. After each event you are either infected or not but that does not mean probability is not involved. The disease transmission process is so complicated and depends on so many contingencies that you have to make probability estimates based on all factors and to skew the odds in your favor by taking advantage of every factor. There are no certainties; you have to use a probilistic approach. I think a reasonable goal is to reduce your chances of contracting HIV to 1 in 10,000 per year, about the same as being killed in a car wreck in the US.
In another thread someone asked the question "what would be different if there were no HIV"? In my view not much because the male drive to promiscuity is so strong that if there were no HIV then there would be something else that would put a break on having unprotected sex. After all, HIV went from being an unknown, extremely rare, hard to transmit disease to a global pandemic in less than 20 years largely through the agency of gay male sexual behavior.
Basically, male promiscuity will expand until something stops it. What? I can think of several candidates right now: drug resistant syphilis or one of the rare viral hepatitises. There might have been a longer duration when no inhibitions were present but eventually they would be created or come to light.