Despite all the facts establishing that unsafe sexual practices contribute to infection with HIV, people continue to engage in unsafe sex. Why?
Lack of self-respect? Willful ignorance? It just feels better?
Does anyone here have any firsthand knowledge of studies done to ascertain what most people are thinking when they engage in that activity?
Is it really that complicated?
How about “Wow, I’m going to get laid!”
Positron emission tomography scans have shown that often people react first, then think. Mainly they think to justify or rationalize what they did when they reacted.
I think most of the people who still engage in unsafe sex, deep down, believe that bad things will not happen to them. That stuff happens to other people. But you can bet that if I was still single and sexually active, the firefighter would not enter without an asbestos suit:)
It’s tough to overcome millions of years of evolved instinctual behavior?
Well, I’ve heard of men who refuse to wear a condom–you know the usual stuff about “showering with a raincoat.”
Lack of education?
The schools I attended in the late 80s and early 90s literally shoved safe-sex education down our throats. It wasn’t enough. There could be a condom machine in everyone’s bedrooms and unsafe sex would still occur. In the heat of passion it’s tough to think about the potential consequences.
HIV infection is no longer the death sentence that it was 20 years ago. Plus, AIDS never hit the heterosexual community in widespread epidemic form. It’s just not something people believe will happen to them. And as for VD and unwanted pregnancy, I think it’s mostly a case of “I’m going to enjoy this now and worry about the consequences later.”
Yup. Same reason people smoke, take heroin, go “subway surfing” and drive their cars at 90 mph.
Because we men can only think with one head at a time.
"“showering with a raincoat.”
Hmm, “with showers drawing near, wise men put on their coats?”
As for why they have risky sex, the usual batch of reasons: drugs, alcohol, too much trust ("I don’t have any STD’s I swear!), hormones, education or lack of it, ignorance (HIV is the only thing out there to get tested for–nope there are a lot of other things too) & of course, they simple don’t care.
They taught you oral sex techniques?
Yeah. Like we needed advanced diagnostic techniques to tell us THAT. 
Reading between the lines… “unsafe sexual practices”, “when they engage in that activity” it would seem to me you are talking about buggery. Is that what you mean? I’m resisting the temptation to say ‘Don’t beat around the bush’, but it would help if you clarified your point.
If you meant not wearing a condom, in my case the answer is a combination of alcohol and opportunity…
People, in general, have poor risk-management skills that starts with poor risk-assessment skills. Why is there still teen pregnancy, when birth control has been widely available for the last couple decades?
People confuse long odds with no odds.
First-hand knowledge? Okay, I’ll bite.
In no particular order:
• Being under the influence. When you have a willing partner under you, your skin is hypersensitive to touch, there’s music on your brain, a fog in your head, and you have a raging hard-on that aint gonna quit, somehow it’s a lot easier to “forget” about the dangers of unsafe sex. One’s decision-making ability can be substantially impaired, to put it midly.
• Believing that one is relatively safe from STDs, being the penetrative participant. (I’ll say it again: relative. Yes, I know there is still substantial risk involved in being on top; it’s undeniably stupid behaviour.)
• Laziness. It’s terribly easy for a session of full body contact rubbing and kissing to progress into penetration–without a change in position. I won’t describe it as “accidental” penetration, but with both participants purposely moving together, it’s easy enough for a penis to slip in.* You both continue to mindlessly rocking back and forward and before you know it you’re having full-blown, unsafe sex. It’s easy–easy to lose yourself in the sensations and pleasurable contact, easy to “forget” about the risks involved. Putting on a condom requires a break in physical contact and a sobering shift in mindset (“Okay stop, pull it out. This is not safe.”).
Let’s face it: fiddling with a condom wrapper, putting it on and lubing up isn’t the sexiest action in the world. It’s certainly not the same seamless transition as going without.
• It feels better. Condom-less sex is undeniably more pleasurable than safe sex. Some men have difficult reaching orgasm while they are wearing a condom.
… on re-read, I realise I should be totally clear: unsafe sex is stupid, stupid, stupid behaviour. The above points should not be taken as endorsement, only as an illustration of why people may engage in said behaviour.
Incidentally, I don’t believe a lack of education – in the developed world at least – is as much to blame for the transmission of STDs as the above factors.
Jervoise
What is an “unsafe sexual practice”? Can you list “all the facts” that establish such practices “contribute to infection with HIV”? And which people “continue to engage” in them?
Rhetorically speaking I think “unsafe sex” is a defensible position and I’m willing to play the devil’s advocate, but I’m suspicious that someone would choose a patently loaded question (i.e., “Have you stopped beating your wife yet?”) as the topic of their second post.
I read an aritcle recently that suggested that one of the reasons young women don’t buy condoms is that they don’t want to feel like they’re * planning* to have sex. They want to feel like the sexual act is just something that “happened” . . . that they were swept away by passion, rather than making a thought-out, calculated choice.
What evidence is there that one instance of unsafe sex is more dangerous in terms of a cost/benefit analysis than, say, one session of hangliding? Skydiving? Driving in accident prone areas?
I’ve known people with a sort of similar way of thinking, that having condoms handy brands them slutty and therefore don’t keep them around. They can think “I’m a good upstanding moral person, I don’t need condoms.”
Then, when one thing leads to another they don’t have one around. And they do it over and over never keeping condoms mostly out of just being too stubborn to admit they have sex.
Maybe not the sexiest action in the world, but I think that process is really good foreplay and certainly doesn’t ruin the mood at all, provided the condom is close-by enough to minimize the “no contact” time.