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Date:         Thu, 16 Apr 1992 21:46:00 CST
From:         "Darryl (The Other Brother) Johnson" <DJOHNSON@TCUCVMS.BITNET>
Subject:      Re: "Safe Sex"

From: JHART@UMASSD.BITNET
Just a comment:  In 1986 a similar study was done in Florida on
20 couples.  These couples were chosen because one partner of each
couple was HIV positive, while the other was negitive.  These
couples continued practicing 'safe sex'.  Within one year, both
partners of ALL 20 couples tested positive.
---------------------------------------------------------------
Below is a section of Chapter 12 in "The Myth of Sexual AIDS" by
Michael Fumento, entitled "Preventing Decadence Versus Preventing
AIDS".
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
On another occasion, Koop said, "Of course you speak of
abstinence, of course you speak of monogamous marriage, but you also
speak of condoms....This conservative antagonism to the truth is
ridiculous."
Perhaps, but it is important to understand that to many people the
condom is something far beyond a rubber sheath to prevent contact
between genitalia.  Whater its disease-preventing faculties, the
condom clearly means one thing: somebody is having sex purely for the
sake of pleasure.  This many conservatives continue to view as the
ultimate symbol of debauchery and national and cultural moral decay.
   Condoms are always used in sex for pleasure: hence, condoms are
always bad.  If this sounds like puritanism, so it is.  As a staffer
for Gary Bauer in the White House Office of Policy Development, James
Warner, a staunch conservative, worked with many leaders who fought
against condom use.  "These people are truly characteristic of what
Mencken said about those who are afraid that somebody, somewhere might
be having fun," Warner told me. "They are strange.  Thoughts about
sex play a very strong role in their lives."
   Sometimes the puritans inadvertently showed their hands even to
persons outside their workplace.  In the material the Education
Department regularly send out during Secretary William J. Bennet's
tenure, a Los Angeles Times piece, which was just another in a long
litany of "AIDS Has Ended the Sexual Revolution" articles, was marked
by Education officials for categorization purposes under "VICE
(Perversion/AIDS)."
   Having already come up with their conclusion, the moralists were left
only to decide on their arguments.  While some used a forthright
approach, saying that mortal preservation wasn't worth moral
compromise, others sought to combine the two.  But the most cynical
of the moralists realized the inherent dangers of preaching morality
to what they considered to be at best amoral rabble.  And so, disguising
their moral indignation behind the shield of practicality, moralists
sought to impeach the value of the condom in the prevention of AIDS.
   Thus did those who saw any sex outside marriage as evil -- the
moralists -- combine under the anticondomite umbrella with the
nonmoralist hysterics who saw virtually any sex as incredibly risky.
One of these supposedly scientific arguments ran as follows:
   Condom use pregnancy prevention failure rates of between 10 and
   30 percent are reported and that involves an peak ovulation
   "window" of only about 12 to 24 hour or so between each menstrual
   cycle.  AIDS, on the other hand, never sleeps -- so its carriers
   are always ready to transfer a potentially infectious dosage of
   AIDS virus no matter what time of month it is.
This is a mixture of nonscience and nonsense.  First, a peak is just
that: A woman is susceptible to pregnancy half the time.  Second,
regardless of ovulation cycles and peaks, it is far easier for a
fertile man to impregnate a fertile woman than it is for him to
infect her if he's carrying HIV.  Recall that over a period of
several years, only 10 percent to 20 percent of seropositive male
hemophiliacs and transfusion recipients managed to infect their wives.
If the fertility rate weren't considerably higher than that, the human
race would quickly die out.  Finally, the vast majority of heterosexual
men are fertile, but they are not infectious.
   There was also a good deal of confusion over the meaning of the
"failure rate" of condoms.  Thus it was popular to use the 10-percent-
condom-failure rate in preventing pregnancy from a well-publicized
Planned Parenthood study as if this rate somehow meant that one out
of ten condoms failed.  Secretary Bennett's booklet on AIDS warned,
"When condoms are used for contraceptive measures, THEY fail about ten
percent of the time" (emphasis added).  The booklet went on to cite a
study by Margaret Fischl.  Claimed Bennett's cheif of staff, John
Walters, "Condoms have a particularly high failure rate when used by
young people," as if condoms somehow popped more leaks when young
people were using them.
   In fact, as Surgeon General Koop points out well, it's not that simple:
   Let's say that a surveyor approaches a couple and says, "What method
   of birth control do you use?". [And they say,]"Well, we use condoms."
   "Have you ever had a failure?" "Yes, we had a child we didn't expect."
   So that gets checked off as a failure of condoms.  However, you go back
   and talk to that couple and say, "Tell me exactly how you used your
   condom?" "Well, you see we really practice [the] rhythm [method]
   unless my wife thinks she's fertile." Well, that is not the condoms,
   that is again human unreliability.  So one has to be very careful about
   using statistics that are taken from surveys.
A distinction the condom opponents were loath to make was between
equipment failure and user failure.  The first, referring to an actual
problem with the condom itself, poses by far the least difficulty.
The second refers to the failure to use condoms properly.  The
Fischl study that Bennett's booklet cited, for example, stated,
"Only three spouses used barrier contraceptives regularly during
a two-to-five year period prior to enrollment [in the study]; all
three were seronegative for [HIV]."  The problem of condoms versus
some prophylactics, such as the Pill or the IUD, is that since the
condom can be used only once, a special effort must be made each
time one wishes to have intercourse.  The problem with condoms
versus even other one-time contraceptives is that the former can
be put on only immediately prior to intercourse.  Female barrier
contraceptives -- sponges, foams, jellies, diaphragms -- can all
be applied several minutes to several hours prior to intercourse.
Thus, condoms are the form of birth control least conductive to
spontaneity.
   One month after New York City unveiled its slick condom campaign,
Mayor Edward Koch suddenly came out against promoting prophylactics
as the first line of defense in favor of promoting abstinence. "Flip-
Flop Ed" read the Post headline, although the mayor said he still
completely favored the condom ads.  Koch's reasoning was simple.
Condoms are "Russian roulette".  Said the mayor, "There are six
bullets in a revolver."  Since "leakage" is found in about 17
percent of condoms, "it's roughly the same kind of odds."  The
reference was, of course, to the Fischl study, and the "leakage"
statement was fatuous.  The study had nothing to do with measuring
the permeability of condoms.  All it measured was seroprevalence
rates of those who claimed to use condoms as opposed to those who
did not make such a claim.  Studies that have measured leakage
have essentially found nothing to measure.  As Consumer Reports
stated, based on its own study and those of others, "Intact latex
condoms won't let even the smallest microbe through."  It stated
also, "In principle, latex condoms can be close to 100 percent
effective."
   [ A study done by Dr. Marcus Conant of the University of California
   , San Francisco, demonstrated that twelve varieties of latex
   condoms proved impenetrable to HIV, herpes virus one and two,
   and cytomegalovirus, another STD which especially plagues
   homosexual men.  There was, however, occasional leakage in the
   natural membrane condoms. ]
   Thus -- at the risk of sounding like a National Rifle Association
slogan -- condoms don't usually fail, people do.  Telling a couple
that using condoms leaves a 10-percent or 17-percent chance of HIV
transmission if one is seropositive, is as fallacious as telling
a thirty-year-old college-educated woman -- who may be ravishing,
charming, and intelligent -- that, based on Census Bureau statistics,
her probability of marriage is only 20 percent.  People decide their
own risks.  A couple using condoms correctly and consistently incurs
little chance of transmitting HIV or anything else.
Comments: Gated by NETNEWS@AUVM.AMERICAN.EDU