We call it Ardipithecus nowadays.
I agree with Heebie: the pill may prevent HIV infection, but presumably it doesn't prevent pregnancy, let alone all the other STDs we can list. Condoms will not be going anywhere.
I have not read the article because it's likely to make me cranky in one way or another. Suffice it to say PrEP is a great thing, but some of the olds get a little tired of the youngs who did not live through Certain Years being like "what's the big deal, gramps? Why are you not gleefully nonchalant about us declaring the condom passe?" I will try and read the article.
There's a guy saying that the problem with condoms isn't (only) sensation but some emotional nonsense about "closeness." It didn't make me cranky, but it did make me roll my eyes.
That actually struck me as interesting. The author didn't say it this way, but surely condoms as being about emotional closeness as opposed to sensation has to have something to do with trust in relation to disease risk: if you're willing to have sex without a condom with someone, either you trust them enough that you believe they won't put you at risk of catching HIV or another STI (that is, they're reliably monogamous and tested); or you feel strongly enough about them that even if they might put you at risk, you're willing to accept it.
So, for him, Truvada is a way to get that feeling of closeness and emotional connection without the accompanying risk. No reason it shouldn't work for him, condomless sex will probably feel risky to him forever even if it's ameliorated by Truvada. But I'm figuring a generation that becomes sexually active with Truvada as an option isn't going to put the same symbolic weight on condomless sex.
Maybe, but in a heterosexual context, it seems more similar to something like "If you loved me, you'd trust me to pull out in time."
At bit different when the partner bearing most of the risk talks about it, of course.
Well, yeah. I mean, I agree that finding your sex life emotionally satisfying only if there's an element of unnecessary risk in it is maybe less than the most sensible way to feel about things. But it struck me as interesting that, if you take the risk-seeking (in the slightly more complicated sense that seems to be going on for this guy) as an emotional given, that he's happy to have found a way to retain the symbolic risk and get rid of the actual risk.
Off to watch men in skin-tight pants grapple with each other.
I'll be fine. I just need to buy a black and yellow scarf as protection.
There's a guy saying that the problem with condoms isn't (only) sensation but some emotional nonsense about "closeness."
You know, and both of these are things that people said as an excuse for barebacking before there was PrEP, when it was a casually narcissistic violation of an important, self-preservation-based social contract, and it's another reason I'm like "can we maybe not be cavalier about this?"
I want to be clear that I wouldn't withhold it either. I was a little bugged by his tone when he said that he loved American healthcare for shelling out $1000 for a month of pills. That's pricey, and it seemed to gloss over all of the vulnerable people, i.e. low-income sex workers, who probably won't have access to it and need it more.
I also do worry some that people a large number of people won't take it regularly enough. I don't know how the anti-retrovirals work, but is it at all like when antibiotics become less effective if people don't finish the course and breeding superbugs? People are not super reliable about taking drugs. In the case of the pill, failure means pregnancy. Superbugs are a public health issue.
Having said that, I also remember that there used to be arguments that the multi-drug cocktails were so complicated that it would be unmanageable for people in Africa. That was pretty offensive, so. Still, I think I might feel better if it were a monthly shot.
From the story in the OP:
"I likely would be dead if I had come of age during the height of the AIDS epidemic. I make no bones about that. Nor do I think my attitude about condoms is salubrious to reducing the rates of other, non-life threatening STIs. But I enjoy having condomless sex, and I don't believe I should be shamed for it."
Yeah, this guy pisses me off. "My behavior is risky. But I like it. So there!"
That said, I certainly think that any risk reduction is better than none, and PrEP should certainly be available and encouraged. None of that keeps this dude from sounding like every other jackass who's tried to talk his partner out of wearing a condom.
15.2: Sort of. If someone who's already infected with a virus has subtherapeutic circulating concentrations of a drug, then drug resistant strains of the virus can appear pretty rapidly.
I thought the theory of evolution was a fraud.
20: It is. The drug resistant virus doesn't arise through evolution. The Intelligent Designer zaps all the drug susceptible virus out of your system and replaces it with the drug resistant version.