Savage Love

Will a few straight people contract HIV from cunnilingus, infections that could have been prevented by an obsessive avoidance of bodily fluids, "inflammation," and the devoted use of, for your conditions leave no other option, dental dams? Yep, but straight people seem to have reached a collective, subconscious, wholly rational conclusion: The prevention of those very few infections is not worth the end of oral sex as they know and love it. Oddly enough, that's the same conclusion dykes came to about oral sex when they rejected dental dams en masse a few years back. As someone once wrote me, "It's a quality of life thing."

There are degrees of risk, and the amount of risk each of us accepts into our sex life requires constant reassessment. Risks assumed out of ignorance, or a desire to self-destruct, are one thing (two things?) -- people should be educated and people with low self-esteem should be patted on the head. But risks willingly and knowingly taken on -- flying, driving, voting, the slight risks of HIV infection from hetero oral sex -- are quite another.

One or two people unaware of the risks involved with unprotected cunnilingus probably read the "Insatiable" column, and could have learned something new had I brought up the very long odds of contracting HIV via cunnilingus. But I doubt the person in question would have changed his or her behavior after reading of these minimal risks.