A lot of my friends are unofficial members of the “Everything But…” club. This means that on hook ups and dates they’re willing to do everything but have intercourse. It’s safe sex, Northwestern style.
Normally the biggest worry with this behavior is what to do on the next date — once you’ve revved the engine, it’s hard to shut off the car. This alone is distressing, but what is more depressing is the news I recently heard. Apparently, a girl who may or may not still be a virgin, could possibly have developed an STD from going down on a boy who may or may not go to this school. Now this girl may or may not be lying about any of the above facts, but either way, this is all very distressing.
Last summer, I was talking about the subject of STDs with a bunch of people. The conversation, if I remember it correctly went something like this: “Would you tell your partner if you had an STD before a) sleeping with him/her or b) going down on him/ her?”
“It would depend what kind it was,” one male said. “If it wasn’t, you know, a bad one, I probably wouldn’t bother.” (Is there such a thing as a good STD?)
A female who has an STD told me, “Well, it’s much harder for girls to pass it on to guys, so if he were just going down on me, then no, I probably wouldn’t.”
All this distressing news, by the way, has wreaked immense havoc on my immune system, causing me to develop an extremely annoying canker sore. And in my distressed state, I grew quite certain that my canker sore was actually an extremely fatal strain of herpes which would cause me to die tomorrow. It wasn’t and it didn’t, but still it worried me.
Enough that I decided to seek counsel on the subject. A call to the Center for Disease Control did nothing to allay my fears. According to the CDC, when you go down on another person, you are putting yourself at risk for gonorrhea, syphilis, herpes, hepatitis B, HIV, chlamydia, and HPV (the last two are less likely). Receiving oral sex is not much safer–you eliminate the HIV risk, but you are still susceptible to all the other diseases.
No one is sure of the exact danger involved in the act since as the CDC operator told me, “We’re not actually in the bedroom with you.” What is known, however, is that on the continuum of transmission, you are less likely to contact these diseases from oral-genital contact than from vaginal or anal sex. But the risk is still there.
Most experts say that the best protection for oral-vaginal contact is a square-shaped sheath of latex referred to as dental dam (for penile contact, experts recommend condoms). The dental dam is so called because the device was first used in dental surgeries before some dentist decided that it would make a good contraceptive device as well. How this dentist made the connection, I do not ever want to know.
Armed with this new information, I asked the stock boy at my local supermarket to show me where the dental dams were located. He directed me to the toothpaste aisle. Not quite. When I went to the local Jewel on Howard, I got the same sort of reaction from the pharmacist. “Dental dams?” he asked, “Is that some kind of new trend or something?”
Alarmed, I decided to ask around and see what other people thought on the subject. One girl scrunched her face at the thought of giving head to a shrouded penis. “You think penises taste bad,” she said, “Try sucking on latex.” A guy asked if dental dams were related to the Hoover Dam, although I’m pretty sure he was joking.
Just how worried should we be about this oral sex thing? The CDC is almost as evasive as President Clinton on this topic. “Our rule is to just give you information, not to advise,” said a 24-hour STD hotline operator. “All I can tell you is that these are the risks, this is how to protect yourself, the rest is up to you.”
