The whole point of Ryan White was that he was a literal poster boy for the “Normal people can get AIDS” campaign. Why do you think we heard about him?
Also, he was a reminder to the public that people could get HIV through no irresponsible action of their own; and, of I remember the timeline correctly, it was to shame the Red Cross for their negligent handling of the blood supply.
To me, promiscuous sex implies that it’s sex had without discernment. I would say that a man who has 30 opportunities for sex in a year and avails himself of all of them would be promiscuous while a woman who has 30 opportunities in the same time period but only avails herself of a few is not. By that logic, should the two engage in sex, it would be possible for the man to be promiscuous but not the woman. And my understanding is that when people say gay men are promiscuous because men are promiscuous, what they mean is that gay men, on average, have sex at the rate that straight men wish they were having sex. I dunno.
My point is simply that every time a man has sex with a woman, a woman has sex with a man. If a man goes out and picks up a woman for a meaningless one night stand, then there was a woman who picked up a man for a meaningless one night stand. Men cannot have more sex with women than women have with men. This is simple mathematics. A man cannot have 30 instances of random promiscuous sex in a year unless there were women who 30 times had random promiscuous sex with that man.
It’s perfectly reasonable to imagine that men would prefer to have more random promiscuous sex than straight men actually have. And when we look at what happens when men have sex with other men, we see all sorts of things that don’t really happen when men have sex with women.
Of course, with prostitution, (still much more prevalent among women than among men), one woman can supply the contact point for multiple men.
It might be true that the number (or percentage) of men and women who are interested in casual sex are about equal. However, as long as there is an industry that provides members of one sex for multiple encounters with the other sex, the numbers and percentages are going to be a bit skewed in one direction.
I hope you’re not implying that gay men got AIDS in the 80s because of their “irresponsible action.” For the first several years, nobody knew that it was caused by a virus, and that it was spread through certain bodily fluids.
And as far as the public’s involvement, gay men were fighting for our lives, and damn few other people gave a fuck for a long time. Then lesbians started getting involved, then Reform Jews. We’re still waiting for the Black community, who are still in denial after 30 years.
Nonsense. That man can have random promiscuous sex with 30 women, each of whom had been a virgin until he seduced them. And when they discovered his true nature, swore a permanent pledge of celibacy. Men who have a high number of sex partners tend to think with their dicks, not their heads. Women tend to be different.
Liberace, for instance. I mean, who ever would have guessed!? :eek:
As if that were a bad thing. :mad:
Sometimes men love women
And sometimes men love men
Then there are bisexuals
Though some just say they’re kidding themselves
La-la-la-la-la-la…
– Phoebe Buffay
Wasn’t that actually part of Ross Perot’s platform, at one point?
They always wanted to be inside the mainstream. [rimshot]
Cite?
:dubious: And why should that have “improved their image”?! What’s wrong with promiscuity anyway?!
I once heard a talk by Gary Null, an “alternative-health” guru (generally he came across like a crank – but just plausible enough to make you feel entirely unclean about the way you’ve been living your life) on the radio arguing an HIV-denialist position – he believed that AIDS was caused by the highly unusual circumstances of the newly-out gay-male lifestyle of major American urban areas in the 1970s (where and when the first cases were reported), which (by his account) involved a lot of drugs, daily sex with anonymous partners, vigorous dancing, and maybe 4 hours of sleep a night, all such behaviors tending generally to weaken the human immune system.
Errmmm . . . does the bathhouse really deserve to be equated with the brothel? It’s really more like a singles’ bar with less pretense and more steam – isn’t it?
I am inclined to believe that. The male libido might not be any more powerful than the female, but it is definitely more urgent, and less selective. However:
Yes, but those women are fewer in number than promiscuous men, more’s the pity. 
Sometimes, but no answer readily suggests itself. It might well be, not one little bit further.
Ok, one man has sex with 30 women, and those women each have sex with only one man, once in their lives. And the other 29 men in the sample would have to die virgins since the women have given up on sex. The other men in the world can’t have sex with women because every time they do a woman would have to have sex with one of them.
The mean number of sexual partners for straight men and straight women must always be exactly the same, unless the men are having sex with each other. And last I checked female prostitutes who service male clients are also women, so men who have sex with female prostitues do so exactly the same number of times female prostitutes have sex with men.
It is a simple fact of logic that the mean number of heterosexual partners that men have must exactly equal the mean number of heterosexual partners that women have, unless you do something nonsensical like exclude female prostitutes but don’t exclude male johns. Of course the median or modal numbers could be different, but I’m talking about the mean. Think about it for a second, it is logically impossible for it to be otherwise.
Wait, are you saying that if someone has sex more than once in their entire lives, that makes them promiscuous?
It certainly wasnt ‘a few years’ before we knew generally how HIV was transmitted; and it was the gay activists who refused to consider closing bathhouses long after health experts knew they were a breeding ground for the disease who bear a disproportional share of blame for so many deaths. And it wasnt just HIV. It was a host of venereal disease exploding throughout the gay community. And it was greatly assisted y rampant drug usage which weakened immune systems. HIV (or GRID) was known in the gay community long before it broke mainstream.