Our Afternoon Advice host Tiffany Granath (MySpace, website) cracked me up this morning with the story of why her car — a beautiful white Jaguar coupe – is in the shop. You see, its built-in Bluetooth isn’t working. Which is a job hazard, because she has to shout, and she makes a living from her voice so that’s just not acceptable.
I told her my own fairly recent strategy, when I hear myself complaining about things that aren’t that important: I cut myself off with a mock-wail of “… and the remote control to my Mercedes is broken!” Because honestly, I know just how privileged I am, and also how precarious the world is. I’m damned lucky to drive a Toyota and have a nice place to live and fast internet and aqueducts and sanitation.
Not to mention, Sex in the News!
A young man sent NPR’s Youth Radio listeners into a controversy by noting on the air that condom-free sex has replaced (or at least, precedes) the engagement ring in his generation:
“My generation has known the threat of HIV/AIDS for our entire lives, and sex without a condom isn’t something we enter into lightly. For a lot of my friends, the transition from having sex with, to sex without a condom, is seen as a symbolic engagement. It shows trust, commitment and the prospect of a shared future. An engagement more practical than spending on money on a piece of jewelry for a marriage that might not pass the test of time.”
Tiffany and I talked about that for a while. We both see the truth in it, and the danger — HIV infections are up 40 percent in the United States in the past couple of years, folks! — as well as the generational difference. Last week we talked about older people having more sex and how STDs are on the rise in retirement communities, attributed to folks not realizing that they too need to practice safer sex. For those folks, condoms represent birth control, which is not usually needed if you’re over 65. But for everyone under 40, condoms represent STD prevention — so when you stop using them as part of your ongoing relationship, it’s assumed you’ve got some other birth control method in place.
The NY Times has a nonstory about HIV research that nevertheless left me feeling a tiny bit of hope. I say it’s a nonstory because it’s basically “Can a daily pill prevent HIV? No one knows!” even though the headline suggested something more … complete. However. The story notes that several studies are looking at the potential of a daily pill we could take to prevent HIV, a “pre-exposure prophylaxis” or PrEP method of prevention (vs a one-time vaccine, for example).
I’m cynical about developing monthly pills for anything, of course, knowing that it’s a lot more profitable to sell people 30-day supplies of medication for 50 years than to sell them one shot every 10. On the other hand, I know people who take acyclovir on a daily basis and suppress herpes outbreaks quite successfully, even through times of stress or other triggers. And I am certainly not opposed to treatments, cures and preventions that work!
Experts say we’d still need to follow all the precautions and that a pill would be just one more tool in the toolbox for sexually active people to keep safe and healthy.
Speaking of sexually active people who play safe: we took a detour down the “there’s a social network for every niche” path and talked about FetLife, an adult social media community. I mentioned it mainly because when you’re always reading about sex, your sense of vanilla, kinky and fetish gets all messed up, and I was wondering what exactly qualifies a person to sign up on FetLife, for example, rather than, oh, I dunno, OKCupid or Facebook or wherever people hang out these days.
Funny and life-saving at the same time, the new kugelsicherebustenhalter has been handed out to 3,000 female police officers in Germany. These bullet-proof bras are intended to solve the issue of a bullet-proof vest smashing a regular bra into your ribcage, gouging your flesh with underwires and metal fastenings and making it even more difficult to breathe. Not to mention the burns, punctures and other dangers of a bullet hitting metal that close to you. The Register story I linked to above is funny; the BBC has more actual details and the photo I posted at the top.
