July 6, 2003

I have deleted yesterday’s post about spitting vs. swallowing, name-calling, and my assignation yesterday morning because the comments led me to believe that the post shared so much information as to embarrass both its readers and its author.

However, I do want to point something out, for the benefit of those who left comments about the relative safety of letting somebody come in your mouth. While it’s true that there is some disagreement about how safe unprotected receptive oral sex is, the consensus from all parties seems to be that it’s significantly safer than protected receptive anal sex, because of condom breakage, slippage, etc. Letting somebody fuck your ass while wearing a condom is, in other words, two to three times more dangerous than letting somebody come in your mouth. So to participate in the former but refrain from the latter seems to me to be letting sensationalism rather than science dictate your behavior.

Of course, in my case, both sensationalism and science take a back seat to neurosis and paranoia, but I have to assume there are some people out there for whom this is not the case.

(The CDC Collaborative HIV Seroincidence Study is pretty clear about the numbers involved, and here is a more recent document that discusses in detail the risk of HIV transmission through oral sex, with a comparison at the end to other sexual practices, including protected receptive anal sex. One passage in particular details the relative safety of a range of behaviors: “You know, the principles on individual risk reduction have always been to move people along toward a safer part of the spectrum. So to move them from unprotected receptive anal, to receptive anal with a condom, to insertive, to insertive anal with a condom, to receptive oral with ejaculation, and if I was dealing on an individual level with a patient whose primary risk behavior was oral sex with exposure to ejaculate, I would counsel that individual to try to reduce their exposure to ejaculate.”)