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Condoms ….. Plastic Bullet of Doom.

As you may have gathered, I am a firm believer in the condom. As far as I’m concerned it is the bestest invention ever. Beats TV, the internet and even fermentation (where would we be without cheese and liban ……and yes even the Jesus juice too). However, recent studies seemed to have found a rather interesting/worrying side effect to safe sex.

It seems that in a fair percentage of cases penile vaginal intercourse without a condom can be a good thing as a recent article published in the Archives of Sexual Behaviour suggests. Apparently consistent condom use is linked to such dangers as psycholigical immaturity (we don’t develop the right tools to deal with emotions) and lack of ability to deal with stress. Further more some other articles advocate penile-vaginal sex as a method to control blood pressure, heart rate and over all health, (all of these benefits apparently do not apply when there’s a piece of plastic in the way.

These rather bold statements on the medical marvel and much negated cure all that is unprotected vaginal sex have lead me to try and find out why that piece of plastic keeps fucking things up. One reason could be that the fumbling pisses both partners off and leads to elevated blood pressure, another could be the fact the pain related to the guy thinking he has to stick his ding dong in fast and furious till the girl has rug burns …… but by far the most interesting reasons I’ve found both have to do with seminal fluid-spunk.

The first is the apparent antidepressant properties of sperm (why I spent my money on weed in college is beyond me …….strike that ….. I don’t swing both ways ….. oh well ) and the other is that unprotected vaginal sex apparently helps you fight off HIV by boosting certain allo-immune factors (I failed immunology so you’ll have to forgive me if I’ve gotten this wrong).

Now I’m one of those people who thinks that everything and anything in medical literature should be published. We have loads of quack doctors running around as it stands so matters can’t get that much worse and the state the FDA is in at the moment drug companies can be feeding you cyanide tablets for shits and giggles and it’d be legal. However even with a publishing track record like mine (drivel of the highest order …..especially during the college years …. I cringe at how vain I was to think that I could change the world with just one typo-laden, ethically biased article) you’d have to be insane not to see that there is some bias in some of these papers. (all links are click-able and I encourage you to read the individual papers if you have the time).

For one thing none papers on semen analysis were conducted using monogamous couple only and did not offer a baseline or compared polygamous/polyamorous relationships, gay relationships or relationships involving sporadic condom use. Secondly the semen is the new prozac article doesn’t even tell you which compounds in semen act as antidepressents, so it’s the scientific equivalent of if you breath air between the ages of 12 and 18 you will grow tall very quickly.Plus there’s another point to be made, the semen explains why women benefit from unprotected sex but does not explain why men do …….

And as for the articles with the running commentry on how using a condom with make you go crazy, get depressed and lord knows what else ….. you have to bear in mind that most of these articles were written or co-written by the same person – Stuart Brody. PhD. Now he may have a point (I’ll confess I haven’t read everything he’s written and lord knows the guy can churn them out faster than a catholic family pops out babies) somewhere but I sincerely doubt that his rather erm …. rather controversially article “Lack of evidence for transmission of human immunodeficiency virus through vaginal intercourse.” would aid his credibility.

We all love being mavericks and expecially when it come to sex …… after all …. some would argue that everything we do revolves around our evolutionary impertive to “boom boom pow” as it were. However conducting a survey and saying that the reason why people should not think that vaginal intercourse is strongly linked to HIV is because of the” intellectual limitations of some respondents resulted in seropositive subjects failing to report anal intercourse or iv activity. Such failure often resulted in attributing HIV spread to vaginal intercourse.” Meaning that he wasn’t sure if the people he surveyed were fucked up the arse, shot up herione or bought condoms before they were involved in the study and there for can’t prove that vaginal sex actually lead to them getting HIV. Kind of like saying because people tend to smoke, drive cars and use mobile phones you can’t prove that people die in a car crash, they could have died because of smoking.

So I suppose the point behind this post is not to believe everything you read, most of the stuff we’ll read over the next couple of years of our lives will be manipulated, processed and doctored to suite people needs; sure I could have talked about any number of other studies and cure alls but this seemed the most interesting for numerous reasons.

Another interesting thing to look out for is when/how Brody’s work will be interpreted and used by the religious right …….. food for thought I say ……

Yes, here’s his email stuartbrody@hotmail.com. Have fun …….

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