A friend of mother’s, a lovely older woman, casually remarked recently that the only way she would consider dating again would be if she found a man willing to provide both a doctor’s note and a bank statement. I can’t blame her for not wanting a new dependent at her age (not unless old lovers are a tax write-off), but what intrigued me about this comment was her need for proof of his medical fitness.
Tag: STDs
Fifty years after the female birth control pill hit the market, male birth control is finally becoming a reality. While I will admit that it must be harder to control a billion sperm than it is to control a single egg, the real reason this technology has taken so long to arrive can be described by two words – supply and demand.
USA Today posted an article on Saturday with the headline “Young Couples Often Disagree about Monogamy” in which they assert:
Many young American couples can’t agree on whether they’ve decided to have sex only with each other, a new study shows.
Oregon State University researchers analyzed data collected from 434 heterosexual married and non-married couples, aged 18 to 25. In 40% of those couples, one partner said the couple had agreed to be monogamous while the other partner said there was no such deal.
My response to this claim is simply “Sigh”.
British firms have sunk millions into new technology which will enable people to test themselves for Sexually Transmitted Infections (STIs) using their mobile phones and a chip they purchase for less than $2. The motivation behind the initiative is to encourage STI testing with a goal to reducing the nation’s high STI transmission rates among the younger population. A worthwhile goal, but what happens if the test leads to riskier sex? If it does, then the investors will have overestimated the new technologies benefit to society.
Remember The Who, talkin’ ’bout their generation? Maybe to a 20-year-old guy in the 1960s, the idea of wanting to die before getting old sounded pretty cool. But, you would think that, by the time he reached his fifties and sixties, life preservation would be the name of the game. But judging by the rate of condom use and casual sex in this (g-g-g-g-g) generation, they never stopped living on the edge.
An advocate for sex-trade workers in Halifax, where I live, tells me that there is no market at all for unprotected sex in the city: one hundred percent of transactions in the sex trade here is sex with a condom. As any good economics student will tell you, a market clears at the point at which supply is equal to demand. If there are no transactions, it must be true that there is no price a potential buyer of condom-less sex is willing to pay that a seller is willing accept. Of course, it could also be the case that there is just no demand for that particular product, but I think we all know that isn’t the case.
Prostitution, very narrowly defined, is not a criminal act in my country, Canada. If we are in a private home and I want to charge you for sex and no one is else is profiting, the state has nothing to say on that.
