Rollo Tomassi said:
The Myth of the Dodged Bullet
In my lifetime I've had sex with over 40 women and I never once caught a venerial disease, nor did I get anyone pregnant. I can also point to men I know who contracted Herpes from the only women they'd ever had sex with. The fact of the matter is that you can equally be a rock star and tap hundreds of women without any consequence and you can be a virginic saint and contract a disease on your wedding night. The myth of the dodged bullet is an AFC social convention that's rooted in the rationalization that monogamy serves the purpose for controlling sexually transmitted diseases and thus fewer partners are more desirable than many. From a statistical standpoint this may seem logical on the surface. Fewer opportunities for sexual intercourse would indeed decrease the risk from a single individual, but unfortunately this isn't a practical estimate. You'll also have to base the numbers not only on how many sex partners you and your monogamous partner have had, but also how many prior partners they've had and how many those partners had as well and so on exponentially. Yet inspite of all this, the odds that you'll die from a form of cancer, heart disease, smoking or obesety related diseases or even an alcohol related traffic fatality far outweigh any risk of dying from a venerial disease in western society. The mortality rate for for contracting gonnerhea, syphilis, clymidia, herpes and even HIV pale in comparison to many - in some cases more easily preventable - diseases.
Of course, since this is a social convention, I would be grossly negligent and severely lambasted by the public at large for even implying that I'm condoning, much less advocating, that a man explore his options and open his experience up to having sex with multiple partners. This AFC social convention/rationalization is unassailable; it sounds like it makes good sense, "boy, am I sure glad I got married/shacked up and didn't catch a disease, pffew!" It sounds like conviction, when in fact it's a rationalization for a lack of other realistic options with women or an innability to deal with a fear of rejection from multiple sources. Beware of turning your lack of game into a virtue, you're only fooling yourself.
What a load of bull****. It has nothing to do with some AFC rationalization. It is simply a mathematical inevitability, and these people are right to try to stay safe out there. You might as well say using dirty needles isn't dangerous. Just because the probability of getting HIV is low doesn't mean you shouldn't take precautions to avoid contracting it. And the more dirty needles you use, the greater your chances of getting it. The same is true with women. By some estimates, something like 25% to 50% of people catch at least one STD during their lifetimes (and I've also read that 1 in 4 have herpes). Now, these numbers didn't just come out of nowhere... I'm sure the epidemiologists were smart enough to control for biases in their studies, and even if you sampled only women from middle income to higher income families, the rate might go down but the risk is still there. OK, just to be conservative, let's say that 1/4 of your potential female mates do have the dreaded herpes (you may substitute the lovely HPV if it makes the example more vivid for you). Obviously the number of sexual partners the women each have would affect their own chances of getting herpes, but by the law of large numbers, if you pick 4 women randomly from the population, 1 will have it. Anyway, let's also assume, for simplicity, that you go in unprotected and will contract herpes if you have sex with a girl who has it. But this doesn't mean your odds of contracting herpes are independent of the number of women you sleep with. The more women you bang, the higher your chances of catching herpes. Now, to illustrate, randomly select 4 women and have sex with one of them. The odds are that 3 of these women are clean. So, after banging the first girl, your odds of staying clean are 3/4. Find 4 more women and again pick one to have sex with. For this event, your chances of staying clean are again 3/4. The probability of getting this far without getting herpes is now 3/4*3/4 = 9/16, or just over 50%. Repeat process. By 10 sexual encounters, your odds of staying clean drop to 5%. By 40, .001%. NOT contracting a disease by this point would definitely be "statistically significant." You're virtually guaranteed to get something if you keep going.
Now, you yourself apparently realize this, so how is this reasoning not appropriate for forming a "practical estimate?"
Personally, I don't think a person should avoid sex entirely due to these risks, but being smart never hurt anyone. Not wearing a condom is just stupid, both because of STD's and the risk of pregnancy. As discussed above, limiting one's number of sexual partners also doesn't hurt anything. But most importantly, find some quality women, not drunkards and party animals. I'm sure there is a negative relationship between education level and STD rate. Find intelligent, professional, value-oriented women. Save the sorority girls and party sluts for the frat boys who don't have the brains to attract smarter women. Many of them have things that you don't want! It also makes sense when you look at it from the perspective of natural selection. Some STD's have the potential to damage reproductive organs and limit the ability to reproduce (HPV and cervical cancer comes to mind), so in the end, all the smart and less promiscuous women on average have more offspring and it is their genes (along with the successful males that copulate with them) that dominate the next generation of human beings.
