HIV has been something of a godsend to socially conservative groups who see sex as sin.
They use the threat of the disease to scare people into equating sex with death.
Consequently, alot of misinformation gets out by groups with ulterior motives other than educating the public.
For example most recently, U.S. Senator Bill Frist mentioned on a television talk show that he “didn’t know” if HIV could be transmitted through tears or sweat, and that it “would be very hard… I mean, you can get virus in tears and sweat but in terms of the degree of infecting somebody, it would be very hard.”
But just because there are a lot of politicans and interest groups with religious motives to exaggerate the risks – there still ARE risks and you should be aware of them.
HIV is a virus that replicates and multiples in the white blood cells, cells responsible for fighting off diseases. Technically, you don’t get sick or die from the HIV virus itself.
What happens is that once the HIV virus replicates in enough numbers, your immune system is weakened and you can catch exotic, life threatening infections that no healthy person would ever normally catch.
You have “AIDS” once your immune system has been sufficiently compromised to catch life threatening illnesses such as cancer, pneumonia, and tuberculosis.
The good news is that the chance of catching HIV from unprotected vaginal sex with an HIV+ positive woman is relatively low.
Your Chances Of Catching HIV
It’s estimated that your chance of catching HIV through vaginal sex from an HIV+ positive woman is about 1 in 300 to about 1 in 1,000, depending on the research group you ask.
Some studies indicate that the chances may be even less; as little as 1 in 10,000 from infected women to men through vaginal sex.
Keep in mind, those are the odds when having sex with an HIV+ positive woman unprotected!
The chance of catching HIV from receiving oral sex is considered nearly non-existent. In fact, there are no known documented cases of a man catching HIV from receiving oral sex.
HIV is actually a delicate virus, and doesn’t survive in the harsh environment of the woman’s mouth and saliva. As long as you don’t have open cuts on your penis, and she’s not bleeding profusely from the gums, you’re safe.
What about giving a woman oral sex, cunnilingus? Again, it’s extremely difficult to catch HIV from an HIV+ positive woman by giving her cunnilingus unless your gums are bleeding or she’s menstruating into your mouth.
Still, vaginal fluid can contain small amounts of the virus. You can always reduce your chances from extremely low to absolute zero if you use a dental dam.
So what are your chances of nailing a girl who has HIV?
In the United States, about 1 in 300 Americans are infected with the HIV virus. But you have to look at the demographic group you’re dealing with. A random, middle-aged Caucasian gay man is statistically more likely to have HIV than an 18-year old straight, Caucasian girl.
And a lot of people who are infected know they are, and will tell you.
So let’s play with the russian roulette odds for a moment.
(P.S. If you’re scared about HIV, check out my Soul Mates Formula program (click here), so that you can quickly get the RIGHT girl for you and have as much hot, raw, and yet SAFE sex as you want)
Let’s say you randomly pick up a girl off the street and she sleeps with you. The two of you have one encounter of unprotected, vaginal sex.
Let’s say that no one has ever been tested. No one knows if they’re infected or not. And let’s go with the national statistics and say there’s a 1 in 300 chance she has HIV.
And let’s use the more conservative estimate for vaginal female to male transmission – again, about a 1 in 300 chance.
Your chance of catching HIV from the single encounter is about 1 in 300 times 1 in 300.
That comes to about a 1 in 90,000 chance of being infected. (However, your chances of catching HIV from an HIV+ positive woman increases if you give her anal sex).
All the research studies say that condoms are highly effective in reducing the risk of transmission. With a condom, your chance of catching HIV from vaginal sex falls effectively to zero.
The risk of transmission is much higher from a man to a woman than it is from a woman to a man. Sperm carries the HIV virus and is more likely to infect a woman through micro tears in her vaginal tract.
And sperm unloaded into a woman’s anal track during anal sex is the most dangerous of all; the anal tract is most likely to have small tears that allow the virus to enter the bloodstream. In fact, some studies estimate that the chance of an anal-receptive woman catching HIV from an HIV+ positive man may be as high as 10% per encounter.
Getting HIV is not automatically a death sentence. If you have access to modern (and expensive) anti-viral treatments, you can reasonably expect to easily live 20 to 30 or more years with the virus. And by that time, hopefully and most likely there will be more advanced and effective treatments extending life spans even further.
However, the anti-viral treatments are expensive and can make you feel tired, weak, and sick. And you’ll have to monitor your condition with repeat visits to the doctor. Even worse, you’ll lose the ability to ever have unprotected sex without seriously putting your sexual partners at risk of catching it too.
The real danger with HIV today is catching it and not knowing that you have it.
You can easily go on for five years feeling no symptoms. Then, all of a sudden, you get sick and weak for seemingly mysterious reasons. You get hit by a life threatening infectious disease. The doctors diagnose you with HIV, but over the years your immune system has been seriously compromised – it’s progressed to AIDS and you have a 30% chance of dying from the opportunistic infection that afflicts you. In the meantime, you’ve spread it to your girlfriend.
Even worse, HIV is no longer one strand. Viruses mutate and “super strands” have appeared. Today there are at least five known strands of HIV – A, B, C, D, and E.
In North America, the “benevolent” strand A is by far the most common. However, strand E has been spreading throughout Asia like wild fire recently.
Strand E is a much more hardy form of the virus than strand A and spreads from person to person much more easily. Whereas with “old fashioned” strand A, the chance of spreading from an HIV+ positive woman to a man during a single vaginal intercourse is no more than 1 in 300, with strand E your chance of catching the virus are more like 1 in 30 to 1 in 50!
Consider strand E a nasty “super mutant” version of the virus.
Currently, less than 1% of North Americans who are HIV+ positive have the E strand. That might change in the future however.
Managing Your Risk
The mistake a lot of guys make is that they think they’re safe because they’re with a “clean girl”.
Even if your “clean girl” has had only one male sex partner before you, that male sex partner could have slept with ten other girls… or who knows… ten other guys!
Also, women have every incentive to LIE about the number of sex partners they’ve been with before. Women in general don’t want you to think of them as a slut so will underreport the number of previous sex partners they’ve had. I met one 19-year old girl who claimed she had had only three sex partners previously; later she revised her number up to 17!
Remember, statistically, you are safer having had one-time protected sex with 100 street prostitutes of unknown status than repeated, unprotected sex with your “clean girl” of unknown status.
That being said, having had unprotected sex with girl doesn’t mean you have HIV.
In fact, given the odds, it’s highly unlikely that you are infected.
But we are talking about odds.
You might want to get tested just for the heck of it. It doesn’t hurt. Most likely your test will come out negative. If it doesn’t, and you want to live a long life, it’s best to know right away before the virus has a chance to damage your immune system. At least then you’ll have a very good chance of living a long life.
Remember, the worst case scenario is having it and not knowing it while it attacks your immune system.
If you do get tested, it takes 4 to 6 weeks after your possible exposure for the test to be generally accurate. After 12 weeks of the possible exposure, the test will be 97% to 99% accurate. You usually have to wait a few days after the test to get the results.
I got tested and it came out negative. Yes, it was nerve racking waiting for the results… but nothing makes you think about and appreciate your life more than that HIV test!!!
What I Recommend
Don’t put yourself into the nerve racking position of having to guess whether you might have been exposed to HIV… and having to wait an agonizing six weeks to get an accurate test… and sitting in the doctor’s room while he hands the results down on you.
Believe me, it SUCKS.
Even though the odds are low, the psychological stress is NOT worth it.
Use a condom. But most of all use a condom because, besides HIV, there’s a lot of other nuisance STDs that you can catch MUCH more easily than HIV – like genital warts and genital herpes.
What a wonderful period of human history we live in when you have to put a balloon on your penis!
But it beats waking up the next morning praying to god and scrubbing yourself.
If you have trouble putting on a condom in the heat of the moment, find a steady girlfriend and, ideally, have her tested. Put her on the pill and that way you can have all the unprotected sex you want. And if you do have sex outside of your primary relationship, at least you’ll more likely wear a condom because now you’re not only protecting yourself, but you’re responsible for protecting her, your amore.
Also, if your girlfriend knows that you’ll go ballistic if she cheats on you, that is certainly one strategy of keeping her from cheating in the first place. But the strategy can backfire on you. If she DOES cheat on you behind your back, she may fear the disastrous consequences of your hell fire if she tells you.
So she cheats behind your back and one day you wake up with a mysterious STD you caught from her lover.
You may want to consider having an emotionally OPEN relationship with your primary partner, where she feels she can TELL you if she ever feels attraction for another man to the point where she feels like she’s about to cheat. That way she can come to you and talk about it without fear of jeopardizing the relationship – BEFORE she does the deed and puts you at risk.
Remember, in life you can never completely eliminate your risk in anything.
Every time you step into a car you put yourself at risk for injury and death.
In fact, in the United States far more people die from car accidents every year (about 50,000) than die from HIV (about 16,000).
The point isn’t to go crazy worrying about the risks, but to manage and minimize them.
You have the ability, with the right tools, to have beautiful women in your life. Just play it safe!
Now here’s the typical kind of comment and letter I get:
Hi Jesse- Make a long story short. Was out with friends and ended up bringing random girl home from the bar this past weekend. The bar definitely was in an area known to be roamed by street workers. Any how, she was 28 yrs old, cute & i thought for sure she couldn’t be a hooker. Had unprotected sex and after the deed she told me she usually charges a fee but im cute so she made an exception. I freaked out on her and she said she was clean and gets tested every 6 months. Said she doesn’t do it much(yeah). I felt like crying and told her to leave immediately. I’ve never had an STD before and definitely concerned with HIV. I’ve never felt so vulnerable and helpless like this before. I don’t show any symptoms yet (only because its day 2). What should i do? I’m 29, healthy, no drugs. Any advice would be appreciated!
And here’s what my response would be,
Don’t panic! It’s *very, very difficult* to catch HIV from vaginal sex, unless the girl was menstruating and bleeding on your penis. Not impossible, but it’s estimated at 1 in 1,000 to 1 in 10,000 for vaginal sex per encounter. And that’s usually because the man had open sores on his penis AND the girl was infected and menstruating.
HIV does NOT transmit easily. It’s much more commonly transmitted from anal sex (receiving anal sex) and from needles put into veins.
Also, of the hundreds of guys who have written me about this (vaginal sex), NONE of them turned out to be infected after they got tested.
So you’re very safe.
Still, it’s like revving up your car to 100 mph on the highway. It’s a pretty stupid risk to take. Not particularly dangerous if it happens once, but dumb nonetheless.
Much more likely you can catch HPV or Gonorreah or Herpes from unprotected sex. These viruses spread VERY EASILY and herpes has no cure. So you want to wear condoms because of these ones.
Use this as a lesson to use condoms! Every guy has to go through this and screw up once to experience that fear. That fear will help you now to be safe in the future. Just like every little kid needs to burn their finger on the stove once to learn the FEAR not to do it again!