MsKitka.com

An interesting article was posted yesterday on Slate. In the article, the author informs us of the conservative media’s neglect to mention anal sex statistics from the survey publicized last week about teenagers and their sexual practices.

There’s no delicate way to put this, so I’ll just quote the survey report: “For males, the proportion who have had anal sex with a female increases from 4.6 percent at age 15 to 34 percent at ages 22–24; for females, the proportion who have had anal sex with a male increases from 2.4 percent at age 15 to 32 percent at age 22–24.” One in three women admits to having had anal sex by age 24. By ages 25 to 44, the percentages rise to 40 for men and 35 for women. And that’s not counting the 3.7 percent of men aged 15 to 44 who’ve had anal sex with other men.

The last time major national surveys asked about this practice, in the early 1990s, only 20 percent of men aged 20 to 39 said they’d had anal sex with a woman in the preceding 10 years. Only 26 percent of men aged 18 to 59 said they’d ever done so. In the first survey, the 10-year limit excluded half the sexual career of half the sample, but that isn’t enough to explain a doubling in the percentage saying yes. In the second survey, according to the current report, the inclusion of men aged 46 to 59 might have diluted the sample with “cohorts that were less likely to have had anal sex.” But that’s the point: Newer cohorts are more likely to have tried it.

Why does this matter? Because anal sex is far more dangerous than oral sex. According to data released earlier this year by the Centers for Disease Control, the probability of HIV acquisition by the receptive partner in unprotected oral sex with an HIV carrier is one per 10,000 acts. In vaginal sex, it’s 10 per 10,000 acts. In anal sex, it’s 50 per 10,000 acts. Do the math. Oral sex is 10 times safer than vaginal sex. Anal sex is five times more dangerous than vaginal sex and 50 times more dangerous than oral sex. Presumably, oral sex is far more frequent than anal sex. But are you confident it’s 50 times more frequent?

So, while practically all news agencies reporting on the survey are posting articles about the seriousness of teenagers engaged in oral sex, the statistics of anal sex are far more troubling due to the dangerous rate for contracting STDs.

The author goes on to explain the extent of the hush on the anal sex section of the survey:

If you live in Bergen County, N.J., congratulations. You get the only newspaper in the world that mentioned heterosexual anal sex, albeit briefly, in its write-up of the survey. Two other papers buried it in lines of statistics below their articles; the rest completely ignored it. Evidently anal sex is too icky to mention in print. But not too icky to have been tried by 35 percent of young women and 40 to 44 percent of young men—or to have killed some of them.

So, is anyone feeling relieved yet that their children may only be engaging in oral sex?

This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 21st, 2005 at 3:47 pm and is filed under News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.