Orgies are safer than driving April 9, 2007

The odds of dying in a motor vehicle accident in your lifetime is 1%. Since you aren’t worried about driving, you certainly shouldn’t be worried about an activity with a lower risk of dying. The odds(pdf) of a woman catching AIDS from a single act of vaginal sex with a condom, when the guy doesn’t know his HIV status, is 1 in 5 million! Fellatio without a condom is approximately the same odds. For men it is 1 in 10 million, so let’s just worry about women. If a woman boinks 1000 men w/ a condom, the odds of getting AIDS is 0.02% [1 – (1 – 1/5000000)^1000)]. These are actually upper bounds, because AIDS is overwhelmingly trapped in small subgroups: poor blacks, drug users and gay men. If you wish to throw a swinger sex party (my page hits will soar now!), you can require that participants show a valid negative AIDS test within the previous year. This will reduce the single sex act odds to almost 1 in 100 million. Actually, it’s slightly higher because there is an infinitesimally small chance that someone caught AIDS between the test and the orgy. If a woman engages in 10 sex acts at an orgy (fellatio and vaginal sex), the odds of getting AIDS is 1 in 10 million. And if she attends 100 orgies in her lifetime, the odds of getting AIDS is 0.001%, which is 1000X safer than driving a car. The odds of being struck by lightning in your lifetime is 0.02%. Again, the odds of getting AIDS is even lower if the orgy participants are not in a high risk subgroup. Even if you forget to use a condom occasionally, the risks don’t go up very much. And remember, we are comparing the risk of dying in a car versus living with a manageable disease. FYI: The risk of transmitting Herpes type II with a condom is practically 0. It goes to 0 if you just check for any visible lesions. All other STDs are also low risk and are treatable.

So why are we bombarded with scary messages that equate casual sex with death? There are two main reasons, IMO. First, most people don’t use condoms consistently. If this same woman had 100 orgies without ever using a condom (1/100K), the odds of getting AIDS is 0.1%. That’s still quite low for each person, but it’s a little high from a public policy standpoint. People die in car accidents, but they become a source of disease w/ AIDS. The infection rates would go up over time if everyone engaged in reckless sex. See Africa. Second, AIDS activists must lie to get support and funding for AIDS campaigns. If AIDS activists admitted that this is only a serious problem for high-risk groups (poor blacks, drug users and gay men), there would be no public support for funding. The public doesn’t like druggies and gay men, and has little sympathy for poor blacks. So they had to scare you into believing that even your precious suburban white children might get AIDS. But it’s not true unless your daughter is shagging bi-sexual, black, drug fiend. Of course, with my luck I’ll probably get ebola from a friendly kiss on the cheek. If there’s a God, he certainly hates me.