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coffeespoons comments on Quantified Risks of Gay Male Sex - Less Wrong Discussion

33 Post author: pianoforte611 18 August 2014 11:55PM

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Comment author: ShardPhoenix 20 August 2014 04:37:17AM *  9 points [-]

I was young in the 80's, but my impression is that HIV/AIDS was considered a pretty gay-specific thing at first. Later there was more media pushing the idea that it can affect anyone - for example, one of my schools had a straight woman with HIV visit to tell us about it. While this was presumably well-meaning and may have even had good effects in terms of encouraging safety, it did lead me to a quite skewed perspective of the relative risks (I was still aware that it was more prevalent in gays, but not by how much).

Comment author: coffeespoons 20 August 2014 04:10:16PM *  1 point [-]

I'm female, but I had no idea until after I'd had sex with bisexual men that the HIV risk was much higher than from sleeping with straight men. I used condoms anyway, but I was pretty shocked to learn about it. I still date bi men*, but I'm much stricter about making sure they've had STI tests than I used to be.

*My main social group are the UK bi/poly community, so two out of three of the men I've dated in the last few years have been bi.