sex ed

Do Not Sleep With Someone Who Says This to You

Photo: SeongJoon Cho/Bloomberg via Getty Images

In this month’s Marie ClaireWhitney Joiner identifies a familiar type: the twenty- or thirtysomething who eschews condoms because he just doesn’t feel like the type of guy who gets AIDS.

“People like us don’t get STDs,” Joiner’s lover said to her offhandedly. “You know: White. Heterosexual. Middle-class. It’s all blown out of proportion.”

Nope! Not true. Not a thing. Everyone gets STDs. Do they need to make a picture book about this bodily function, too?

Then there’s his buddy, who doesn’t have to use a condom because he got tested, trust him: “He says he doesn’t have anything, and he’d be honest with me because we’re friends.”

Even if the people who say these things are, statistically speaking, less likely to have HIV, they are not magically ineligible for STDs, including all the other ones that, as Joiner points out, are asymptomatic in women and can lead to infertility and cancer. They might, however, be ineligible for sex because they are assholes. Assholes who are likely to have contracted HPV from the last person they used these lines on. But, whatever, it’s not like it’s going to kill them.

Do Not Sleep With Someone Who Says This to You