While I’m quite sure that Governor Perry’s motives for mandating the HPV vaccine for middle-school girls have little to do with genuine concern for women’s health and a lot to do with Perry’s cozy relationship with Gardasil manufacturer Merck, he’s on the right side in this fight, and that’s probably one of the only public policy positions he’s ever taken that I actually support.

I think Bachmann’s ridiculous freakout has as much to do with her realizing that Perry just stole her teaklanner supporters and effectively killed her presidential aspirations as it does with her supposed concern for parental rights. Not that Bachmann ever had a realistic shot at winning the GOP in the first place (the fact that she has a vagina eliminated any chance of that happening), but I think seeing Perry come into the race and watching his poll numbers skyrocket while hers took a nosedive made it pretty obvious to her that her campaign is going nowhere.

I think that a lot of social conservatives would LIKE for there to be an STD that precisely tracks their distinctions between “good” and “bad” sex.

I lived through the early days of the AIDS epidemic. And it was COMMON in those days for conservative politicians and religious leaders, from Bob Dornan to Bill Dannemeier to Pat Robertson, to speculate that this was God’s punishment against gays. It simmered down a bit when Arthur Ashe got it and more when Magic Johnson tested positive. But this was a really common view. That’s what they really want. They want God to come down to earth and prove all their BS about sexual morality right by striking down all the sinners and infidels, just like Revelation predicts.

And this HPV thing, in a microcosm, is the same wish. The thing is, since God, if She exists, is not actively intervening in the world, and the actual pathogens that cause STD’s are generated by biological evolution, they can’t actually get their wish. Actual STD’s infect the people having the “right” kind of sex as well as the “wrong” kind.

Leave it to conservatives to be so very worried about who’s fucking that they eclipse the fact that there’s a vaccine against cancer. (ok, against one cancer) We should all be celebrating the fact that we are now clearly living in the future, and that’s awesome.

So, we’re at the point where conservatives just hate everyone and want them to die, right?

So…

“There’s a vaccine out now that prevents this certain type of cancer, but don’t take it, cause if you do, you won’t get cancer.”

WTF?

Thanks for posting this kind of post, Amanda. The bullshit piles on day in and day out and sometimes I feel like I’ve lost my center, where I can look at things and go WHAT THE FUCK ARE THEY TALKING ABOUT.

And DGTslu2K - lol on ‘tea-klanner’ I think I’m gonna start using that one.

Look, saying “I’ve had HPV” is basically saying, “I’ve had sex.”

Not even.  I had a brush with HPV *before* I became sexually active.  My doctor’s best guess was that I picked it up by using non-applicator tampons (no, I didn’t always wash my hands with soap & hot water before touching myself Down There).  I make no claims about my “purity” before or since in thought word or deed.  But the dirty dirty PIV sex is not a prerequisite for exposure to the virus.

I think the HPV vax is awesome. My 14 yo daughter has been immunized, and I’m working on the insurance people to approve it for my son as well.

So, we’re at the point where conservatives just hate everyone and want them to die, right?
Comment #4: Punditus Maximus  on  09/14  at  07:14 PM

Well, yeah.

Pat Robertson just advised a man whose wife has Alzheimer’s to divorce her and start over.  She can just die.

Because gays are destroying marriage.

Really, a vaccine for cancer is bad.  A cure is one thing…maybe it could even be rationed out to the “right” people.  But wholesale prevention of cancer?

No way.

Not only does HPV cause cancer, successfully treated women can have difficulties carrying a baby to full term. I found that out the hard way when my water broke when I was 35 weeks pregnant with my son. Why? Two years earlier, I had a LEEP which removed part of my cervix and thinned it out just enough that I could carry a baby to viability, but would still be premature. Other women who have had LEEPs aren’t so lucky. They have multiple miscarriages. But hey, I guess they’re pro-life for virgins and not whores.

The ignorance and the hate of these idiots just leaves me speechless.

And as soon as my insurance policy pays for boys to get the vaccine, my 12 year old son is going to get it.

And you didn’t even get to the part about how Bachmann knows the vaccine is evil because some woman told her it caused mental retardation (her word, not mine) in her daughter.

Sheesh. How dumb and crazy do you have to be in this country before you’re unelectable?

Yikes. What an asshole that Peters guy is.

I know. I really shouldn’t be surprised. It’s just that he’s so open about his vileness. Actually, that’s not new either.

So, I guess if you’re a virgin, and you’re looking for a partner and you meet a wonderful kind loving person who seems very promising, but then you find out they’re not a virgin, you should shame them for being a whore and dump them and move on?  I just can’t comprehend this.  It’s beyond vile.

Religious opposition to vaccines has a pretty long history.  There were several groups that opposed the smallpox vaccine because it was “against the will of God”.  Many Islamic countries have groups (such as the Taliban) who have issued fatwas opposing the polio vaccine.  Some Catholics and other Christians oppose the rubella vaccine because it was developed using embryonic cells (i.e. aborted fetuses). 

In all of these cases, they’re joined by various crackpots who oppose them for different but equally specious reasons.  Then we have the libertarians, who don’t understand biology and herd immunity (or choose to ignore it) and oppose compulsory vaccinations for purely ideological reasons.

All I see are a lot of people putting others at danger to score some stupid ideological points.

This is nothing new. When AIDS broke out, Phyllis Schlafly weighed in that the way to protect yourself from it was “stay a virgin until you marry, marry a virgin and stay true to each other.” It must be great to go through life so simplemindedly certain about everything.

I have to back up the statement that it doesn’t even take actual fucking to infect. There’s been a rise in throat cancers in men and women, some of which may or may not be related to various strains of HPV. And it doesn’t take a genius to figure out how that could happen. The old oral/genital distinction of various strains of herpes is being found to be less and less a reality (if it ever really was,) and that’s another reason boys and girls should both get the vaccine: everyone has a mouth and throat.

DTGslu2K @1: Making a treatment mandatory because the for-profit company selling it bribes you is never on the ‘right side’. Yes, my own kids are getting Gardasil (including my son, whose vaccination won’t be covered by insurance). No, I don’t think that Perry gets any kudos for his decision.

Amanda, it’s not bizarre. These are people who either don’t fuck, or fuck and are terribly guilty about it, or think that they are the only ones entitled to fuck. Therefore, other people fucking are immoral, QED.

@Americanpapist apparently believes that survivors of childhood sexual abuse, widows, widowers and those whose marriages were annulled by the Church are not allowed to remarry. I’m pretty sure that isn’t even Catholic doctrine. Asshole doctrine, maybe.

We should rename the diseases that people can be vaccinated against but choose for stupid reasons not to vaccinate. If you’re under 10 months old, you can still get Whooping Cough. If you’re over 10 months old (I think that’s when you can safely be vaccinated) and are otherwise healthy, you don’t get Whooping Cough, you get Whoopsies Cough because WHOOPSIES we should have vaccinated our kid but we didn’t because we’re lazy fucking parents. Measels? That’s Weasels because your parents tried to weasel out of it and wanted everyone else to do the heavy lifting for them. Ruebella can be HERPDERPies.

These people live their lives in constant fear that someone will JUDGE THEM so I say we start judging.

“These are people who either don’t fuck, or fuck and are terribly guilty about it, or think that they are the only ones entitled to fuck.”

My guess is that the first two comprise less than 3% of the total.

Ayelet Waldman had sex with her husband and admitted it in public?!?!? How dare she!!!

This takes me back to the days of my dear sweet grandmother, who once opined that pregnant women really shouldn’t go out in public because everyone would know what they’d done. At least her excuse was being born in 1895.

The only reason to freak out about HPV—and about the vaccine—is that we can’t handle the fact that people fuck.

That’s not all.

This Thomas Peters fellow blogs @ CatholicVote.org. Blog name? The rhyming American Papist.

It’s partly a fear of sex and all it entails. But social conservatives also know God better than anyone else, and that Old Testament states God is not okay with most sex, not to mention he is so repulsed by emission of bodily fluids he requires atonement in the form of one dead animal or another. (Blood is clean as long as it doesn’t come from lady parts.)

If you believe in God and you know what he dis/likes, it’s safe to guess that STDs are a divine consequence of bad people having spiritually unsafe sex (projection bias). Not only is God as scared shitless about sex as you are but he is also just, so it further stands to reason that God only punishes bad people. By bad people, I mean sluts. (The accuser, regardless of gender, is always a good person thanks to the following biases: just-world phenomenon and fundamental attribution error/actor-observer bias.) Sluts are (mostly) women. Women function as the repositories for our sins. By “our” I don’t mean me, specifically. I’m a good girl!

See? It all makes sense. Unless you’re Christian but not an asshole.

I remember hating some of Waldman’s columns in Salon, but she’s kicking ass today.

TMI, fuckheads? I could do without the I that you believe the all powerful ruler of the universe cares deeply about your sex life, but I’m not going to get that, now am I?

My projection bias link should come after “If you believe in God and you know what he dis/likes,”

Sheesh. How dumb and crazy do you have to be in this country before you’re unelectable?

There is no bottom. At this point being even mildly educated and rational is considered a strike against you.

Time for a small PSA: HPV is not exactly an STD. It can be passed by skin to skin genital contact, in the parts that condoms don’t cover and that people might be touching who still consider themselves technically virgins. One can be all abstinent-y and still get cervical cancer, if one is not abstinent-y enough.

And absolutely yes to whoever mentioned that the treatment for cervical dysplasia is not benign: preterm labor and stint in the NICU is its most enduring legacy, and that is not a pleasant one by any means. Treatment is not prevention.

“HPV is like the common cold in terms of severity.  Most people are fine, but a percentage of people get sicker and die.  That’s why we vaccinate against the flu, and why we should vaccinate against HPV.”

Just an fyi, the common cold and the flu (influenza) are two different things. Influenza is usually severe and can cause complications up to death, especially in vulnerable populations. The common cold is usually not these things.

http://www.diffen.com/difference/Common_Cold_vs_Flu

These people are going to have goddamned brain aneurysms when they discover Toxoplasma gondii…

(Around 25% of the US population…)

OMG thank you for this post. it’s so fucking true. who are these victorian england nutters anyways? what the hell is the matter with them?

and that Old Testament states God is not okay with most sex

Untrue. But social conservatives don’t let what the Bible actually says get in the way of their bullshit. (For extra fun bonus points, note that the oft-quoted Levitican prohibition only applies to men, and either it doesn’t apply to lesbians, or it forbids women from having sex with men. Man, do they hate that.)

I imagine the American Papist’s objection is that people are getting divorced and remarried; keep in mind he is Catholic.

mythago, how do your noted exceptions counter “God is not okay with most sex”?

Even if you were straight and married, you couldn’t even pull out without being struck dead.

The Bible “actually says” men shouldn’t sleep with other men. Social conservatives didn’t make that up.

Thanks to the Rethuglican “debates”, we now know:

1. Executing people is good.  Doesn’t matter if they’re guilty or not, doesn’t matter whether they are mentally competent or not, doesn’t matter if they’re not even adults.  Fry ‘em, the more the merrier…

2. Letting people who have no health insurance die of otherwise treatable diseases/conditions is a good thing and is sanctioned by god.  The more the merrier.

3. The HPV vaccine — and one assumes penicillin and any other antibiotic or successful treatment of any STD — is wrong, wrong, wrong!  Don’t have sex ever!  But keep that quiver full!  But don’t have sex!  Ever!  But if you do, then you deserve to die in the most hideous and painful way.  And goes for those monogamous, waited-until-they-were-married-virgins too, the dirty sluts.  Girls, touch the Mighty Manly Peen and it’s all over…

Bonus #4.:  Thanks to that moral titan, Pat Robertson, we know if the old hag gets sick, god wants you to trade her in on a new model (let the Great And Powerful Newt show us all how to live our lives!)

So, will somebody take the next step and straight-up ask them at the next debate:
If somebody gets sick, is it truly god’s judgement of them?  If a child is born with congenital defects, is that god’s judgement of the child’s parents (or at least judgment of their slutty mother, since women are the carriers of all things evil)?  Is there any form of sexual congress that they have no interest in regulating?  Do they think we all need to be fitted with orgasm alarms and be required to get a license before using our genitals for anything other than urinating/bleeding?

And the biggest question of all: 
Other than personal and corporate financial matters (unless that person/corp. is in any way left leaning or friendly to any Democrats/Democratic causes) or anything involving corporate malfeasance or destruction of the environment or (christian) churches, do Americans have a right to any form of privacy, of any kind, in any sphere of human existence, i.e. is there some aspect of our lives that can not, shall not, will not be regulated under Republican-controlled government?
...

Ayelet Waldman is a married woman with four children.  How does Thomas Peters think the children came about?  Storks?

Yes, the Bible does actually say men should not have sex with men.  Doing so makes them just as disgusting to God as people are who eat shrimp or bacon.

I went to high school in the early to mid 00s, and thus am an abstinence education alum. HPV was like the lynch-pin for their “omg sex will kill you no matter what!” argument because condoms aren’t that effective at preventing it. Part of the hysteria is that the shot takes away an important method of scaring your daughter from even safer sex. Married women that die from boring sex are just a necessary casualty for them in their war on hot, hot teenage sex.

OK, I’ll come out here again as a guy who knows he has at least one strain of HPV. I had some visible “issues”. No insurance at the time, so who did I turn to? Planned Parenthood. I think it was $80 for the initial visit unless I could claim certain exemptions, which I didn’t, and $35 for subsequent exams. Again, most of that fee could be waived with proper documentation. Planned Parenthood helps men too. This was a little bit cheaper than going to a Spanish-speaking cash clinic.

By all means. vaccinate at least some of the boys. Not all girls will be vaccinated, and vaccinating at least some of the boys prevents them from becoming vectors between unvaccinated women, and will also prevent the boys from having a pretty painful treatment. Not much pain for me as the lesions were at the condom line, but further out I can imagine things would be a lot more painful

But this is all about the slut-shaming. “How dare you call 12 year olds sluts” and “Our 12 year olds will become sluts” is all they’ve got.

But WTF? This is a potential victory against a serious form of cancer! Let’s make it happen!

BTW, I am fully aware that a positive pap smear followed by a colcoscopy is usually quite a bit more serious than having to make little X’s on a picture of a penis and then have said X’s burned off with acid. I got off easy. some guys may have it worse.

@alysia #36 - For me, it was Catholic high school in the early 00s. I don’t think HPV was ever mentioned, but we did actually have a demonstration with a hula hoop, beach ball, and kickball, where the hula hoop represented “normal-sized pores in a condom”, the beach ball was a sperm, and the kickball was an HIV virus. Someone held the hula hoop between two people standing about 10’ apart, and they had to play catch with the two balls through the hoop - not really all that difficult.

The take home message was “see condoms don’t work and if you have sex you’ll get AIDS anyway, even if you use condoms, so don’t do it, you dirty sluts.” And my dad wondered why he found a box of Plan B in my brother’s bedroom one morning after his girlfriend went home. I told him that he needed to have the condom talk Right Now because our school was lying to us… and of course as a high schooler with no other source of information (because your parents assume you’re getting the truth at school), you’re not going to call them out on their BS or complain to your parents, because you assume that what you’re being told is true, too.

Holy shit, Hobbes.  I have never been more grateful that I went to public high school in the early ‘90s in a major city before the anti-retrovirals were developed, and people were still so scared shitless of their kids getting HIV that I got the single best sex ed. I have yet to hear about, and I believe, though I’m not positive, that the nurse kept a big bowl of condoms in her office (sadly, I had no reason to remember this clearly).  The only things that I didn’t learn about back then were things that weren’t yet known.

Hobbes:

Ow. I got Catholic sex ed too and they didn’t lie to us to quite that degree.

I think people can tell because they’ve had sex less often or with fewer people.  If ‘you get over it’ how do you know how long it lingers?

Personally, I can count the number of people who I’d touched their genitals on one hand.  But I can also count the number of times I’ve had sex with my spouse in the last year on one hand… I just don’t desire it as much as some people must.

Come to think of it, it wasn’t just my urban magnet school, either.  My roommate freshman year in college went to a public school in a wealthy suburb, and her sex ed. teacher dressed up as a sperm (a white hoodie, apparently) and ran into the wall several times during one class in order to demonstrate the efficacy of condoms.  Which, when my roommate told us about it, cracked us all up and made us feel contact embarrassment, but was at least very accurate.

I think people can tell because they’ve had sex less often or with fewer people.  If ‘you get over it’ how do you know how long it lingers?

I believe that the problem with being absolutely certain from whom you’ve contracted HPV is that several months or even years can elapse between being infected and the infection resulting in anything detectable by modern medicine.  There is no blood test, or anything, so there’s no way for men, in the absence of symptoms, to find out their HPV status, and women have no way of knowing unless/until something shows up on the PAP.  It doesn’t take that many partners over a period of years to muddy the waters, so to speak.

Were there any provisions in Texas for people who didn’t have insurance and couldn’t afford the vaccine?  I think it’s rather expensive - in the $300-500 range.

There’s some rumors going around ‘that pulling out is 2% less effective than condoms’ which seems a bit hard to calculate… And probably wrong.

Thank EG01, that’s what I thought, but i hadn’t looked it up.  I don’t know how uncommon I am in number of partners… It just seems that some people probably have had so few - sex is messy and who has time for it? - so they probably do know.

@Crissa: My usual response to disinformation of that sort is to go straight to the “your mom” lines.  Not classy, but it gets the right amount of disdain across.

@alysia #36 - For me, it was Catholic high school in the early 00s. I don’t think HPV was ever mentioned, but we did actually have a demonstration with a hula hoop, beach ball, and kickball, where the hula hoop represented “normal-sized pores in a condom”, the beach ball was a sperm, and the kickball was an HIV virus. Someone held the hula hoop between two people standing about 10’ apart, and they had to play catch with the two balls through the hoop - not really all that difficult.

“Ah, Sister Eucheria?”

“Yes, PiaToR, you have a question?”

“Well, you said that sperm cells were held in a liquid ejaculate.  And water molecules are a lot smaller than even HIV viruses, right?”

“Yes…”

“And people use condoms as water ball-”

‘GO TO MY OFFICE IMMEDIATELY!!!”

I think my Roman Catholic education missed out on something by not letting us have nuns teach us about sex.

Just like Ayelet Waldman, I had pre-cancerous cells lasered off my cervix when I was in my early 20s. I believe I had had sex at that point exactly TWICE. It was from HPV. As far as I know, though, isn’t HPV something you kind of always have once you have it? I do know that it’s really common. And if I had been able to avoid the terror of hearing the word “cancer” (even if “pre” was attached) over the phone and the pain of the surgery, you bet your ass I would have done it.

Oh, uh, in case I wasn’t being clear, I meant above that I would have gotten that vaccine in a heartbeat. It is late and I’m worried being tired might be muddling me up.

To PiaToR @48

Okay, if I ever have kids, I’m teaching that to them, because that is funny and awesome and even more funny and awesome out of the mouth of a young teenager.

You might wanna get your kids to test how much water a condom will hold before it bursts.  And then remind them that the average male ejaculate is perhaps a bit over a teaspoon’s worth.  Or point out that most of it is liquid, protein and a little fructose. Like, say, an egg white (although that probably uses other sugars). Remind them that egg whites are not noted for burning holes through plastic, rubber, or latex.

“Here I have an egg.  I will now crack open this egg and pour the contents into a condom.”

Stand holding the condom up, with the egg stuff conspiciously bulging at the bottom.

Now start playing a tape with a male and female voice, starting from the male voice saying that was fantastic, proceeding to the female voice asking him to get off, and then some sort of humorous dialogue between the two of them (“You know, you’re not as good at this as your sister”) until, FINALLY, he throws the goddamned thing in the wastebin.  At this point, throw your condom in the wastbin.  Say five minutes or so.  While you’re standing there holding up the eggy condom.

“Any questions?”

And I still can’t believe no-one here has bothered looking up Toxoplasma gondii yet…

Well, I’m not in the habit of looking up diseases.

Well, I’m not in the habit of looking up diseases.

Oh, I thoroughly recommend it.  Almost as much fun as slapping babies.

I repeat, if the wingnuts ever twig to what’s being suggested about its effect on humans , they’ll start running around like Chicken Little…

Someone important in Democratic politics should hire Ayelet Waldman.  No one alive is better, it seems, at getting social conservatives and their apologists to embarrass themselves, and all she does is state the simple truth.

All I can think is that this is like a No-True-Scotsman argument, only it’s more like No-True-Virgin.

My sil was tested for Toxoplasma gondii and my mom insisted that my brother was going to clean the box for her cat (very clearly Her cat, from before their marriage, who did not like my brother) through both her pregnancies.  Not something I had to look up, except to verify I had remembered the name correctly.

Also, I think it is important that Waldman said where she got it.  How else could you short out the nutters’ “oh-dirty-slut” more effectively?  Whether he got it from his previous wife or elsewhere hardly matters for that though - except to take it even another level of not a result of “oh-dirty-slut”.

In the *old* testament, the Bible is very clear that men should not sleep with other men.

In the *new* testament, (in the Gospels, even!) Jesus is heard to remark:

[Mark 7:15] Nothing outside a man can make him ‘unclean’ by going into him.

Now, Jesus was mostly talking about eating shellfish and pork and the like, but you know that Jesus! Always with the parables and the allegories! So, he might have been talking about a cheeseburger, but he also might have been talking about a big ol’ cock.

Shit, my diagnosis for HPV came when I was 17, with my firs monogamous partner. I guess I was quite the whore. I’ll be vaxxing my daughter when the time comes just in case being a whore is hereditary.

Ayelet Waldman is a married woman with four children.  How does Thomas Peters think the children came about?  Storks?

Ah, but see. Waldman should not have those children because she should not have married her husband because he should never have divorced his first wife.  See, in Peters’ world, the first marriage is the only marriage, and the ones that came afterward are illegitimate and immoral. Waldman’s marriage was immoral and illegitimate because her husband was divorced. She deserves her HPV and her cancer because of that immorality. Had everyone acted according to Peters’, and Rome’s, laws, none of them would have HPV. (That’s his perspective; I happen to think Rome’s laws are utterly worthless, at best.)

WHEN will American Papist LEARN?!?

http://oralcancerfoundation.org/hpv/index.htm Nothing to see here, move along. And die, sluts.

I’ve had HPV.  It was sort of a big deal for me because I got one of the dangerous strains, but luckily my mom had great health insurance (I was 17 when I got it and on her plan throughout college).  So I stayed on top of it, had a colposcopy (which hurt like hell but is better than getting cancer), and made sure to get a pap smear every year to monitor it.  If it’s caught early enough, there’s like a 95+% that it can be cured, so it really is shame or lack of health care that kills more than the disease itself.  It cleared up on its own, which is pretty common, and I have gotten the Gardisil shot.

I’m not ashamed of my story, even though I am what many would label a slut.  The stigma needs to go away.  The sex shaming is responsible for more deaths than just the virus, because it really does have such a high cure rate if caught early, and a high prevention rate with the vaccine.  If someone tries to tell me that I could have avoided HPV by not having sex, I would tell them that they could have avoided getting the flu by not going out in public.

But even those slut-shamers who are hard-set in their ways are still advocating punishment by death for “innocent” people.  A woman can be a virgin and marry a virgin, and then get HPV when her husband cheats on her.  Or she can be the victim of rape, which is ridiculously common in our society.  Its seems unfair that she should die for something bad that someone else did.

Smug religious scolds tell a married woman that she’s still a dirty whore for getting HPV from her own husband.  Meanwhile, another smug religious scold tells a man that it’s okay to divorce your wife if she has Alzheimers if you want to take up with another woman, because Alzheimers is kind of like death anyway.

My silly “sex ed” was more of the shaming variety, rather than the “technical” variety.  We had a troupe of 20-something come into art class for some reason and put on a skit.  The girl thought she loved the guy, so she game him a piece of chewing gum.  They broke up and she fell in love with another guy.  She asked the first guy to give her back the gum, and then the second guy didn’t want it because it was all chewed up.  Yes, they directly said that your virginity is like gum and that you’re used up after one time.  It’s really a terrible analogy though because sex doesn’t get used up after one time.

Then we had a “guided discussion” and plenty of the teenagers gave fantastic, mature answers despite most of us being 14-15 and the teacher was actually shocked that we weren’t a bunch of brainless idiots who were slaves to our hormones.  One question for boys was “What would you do if your girlfriend was pregnant?” and one boy answered that he would start looking for a job.  The teacher was surprised that he had any answer at all, let alone something so reasonable.  Now of course, he wouldn’t necessarily follow through with it until the kid was 18, but any answer at all was more than the teacher expected.  She was hoping that everyone would silently avoid eye contact so she could is it as a shaming moment.

…but you know that Jesus! Always with the parables and the allegories! So, he might have been talking about a cheeseburger, but he also might have been talking about a big ol’ cock.

Thank you for making my day, Mighty.

And I still can’t believe no-one here has bothered looking up Toxoplasma gondii yet…

Should we have to? I know it’s the don’t-clean-the-cat-box-while-pregnant virus ... and that it’s perhaps been linked to schizophrenia.

I also don’t see why Toxoplasma should send conservatives in fits. Aside from anti-feminist “cat lady” jokes, they don’t seem particularly anti- or pro-cat compared to the general population.

Let’s remember what things were like, back in the “Good Old Days” where the prevailing assumption was that the only licit sex was done in wedlock:

General paresis, former known as dementia paralytica is an organic psychosis resulting from syphilitic infection of the brain. the infection usually occurs in early adult life, but eh onset of general paresis is generally delayed until middle life.  The average age of patients at time of hospitalization is forty-five.  In recent years, about 6 per cent of first admissions to mental hospitals have been affected with this disease.  Male patients exceed females in the ratio of 3 to 1.  The incidence rate in urban communities is about 3 times as high as for rural areas.  Foreign-born and native whites are about equally affected, but the incidence among Negroes is four times as great as among whites.  With respect to economic and educational status, general-paresis patients are slightly inferior to to other patients.

Chapter 15, Organic and Toxic Psychosis, from

Abnormal Psychology,  James D Page, McGraw Hill, 1947

Look, saying “I’ve had children” is basically saying, “I’ve had sex.”  It’s that common.  There’s nothing shameful about children, unless you think sex is shameful, full stop.

hp, Toxiplasma is a protozoan parasite, not a virus, and is one of the worse kind of infections a human can suffer from short of the infamous brain-eating ameoba.

BTW, paratenic is a cool word

I got the “OMG, a virus is smaller than the pores on a condom bit.”

Unlike others, I got it in the 90s, at Michigan State, from an actual scientist. I took a class that was bascially created to satisfy humanities majors’ science credit from this dude, who is still head of the pesticide research lab. He took one class day to try and scare every one into not having sex.

Otherwise, a very good teacher and pretty nice guy from a few interactions, but that bullshit was some bullshit. And it did give my sexually inexperienced self a bit more fear of STDs than I should have had. Which partly led to me not having sex with someone I really should have had sex with, because she told me she had HPV. I was pretty dumb.

Well, I think we need to shame all the conservative virgins.  That’s much more embarrassing.

For example, watch this video:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ngiJhmoFKkw

“I’m just gonna tell you from my own personal life, abstinence works…”  Did Rick Perry just tell us that he never got laid?  It took the legal establishment of a marital relationship for him to taste the forbidden fruit?

These sex-scolds are an amazing contradiction: one the one hand, manly men, as we know, get all the ass they want, like the guy from Mad Men and Rick Perry, on the other hand, abstinence is awesome, they KNOW from PERSONAL EXPERIENCE that it’s a good idea.

The battle of bizarre, barbaric shibboleths.  Of course, I think the resolution of this paradox is simply that women can’t have sex with anyone except them, especially not black men.  That resolves our impasse.

Toss in the fact that they kept calling our most hound-dog president of recent memory, Clinton, gay, and we’ve found ourselves in a deeply confusing universe.

some people need to be forced clockwork-style to screen Poe’s “I’m Not a Virgin Anymore” until it sinks in

hp, Toxiplasma is a protozoan parasite, not a virus, and is one of the worse kind of infections a human can suffer from short of the infamous brain-eating ameoba.

I’m still not really getting why conservatives would react with fits to knowledge about it. If you’ve been pregnant, you’ve been warned about it. It tends to be passed via cat poop and undercooked meat, not sex.

In fact, I’d say that up to a few years ago, it was probably better known in the wider US population than HPV. Heck, my mom used it as an reason to get me to clean the cat litter box when she was pregnant with my youngest sib.

Yeah two people doing the exact same “TMI” thing over some lady sharing a completely straightforward unremarkable story in which she actually shares, like, an exactly appropriate amount of information relative to the subject she’s speaking on is really, really weird.

I also don’t see why Toxoplasma should send conservatives in fits.

i, Toxoplasmosis can flare up to be dangerous - however, it usually shows up once as a mild flu, but then settles down apparantly asymptomatically.  Compromise your immune system, or have that infection when you’re pregnant and there’s problems.

ii, Far from “one of the worst deadly infections”, it is incredibly prevalent in humans.  About 25% of the US population, around 60% in Germany and France - somewhere between 20 and 80% of the human race has the thing.

iii, We know for a fact it changes behaviour in mice.

iv, Research on humans is more difficult to figure out.  HOWEVER, there are studies suggesting the following
    - It makes women more intelligent, and more sociable. Whether that means “motherly” or “slutty”, I dunno.
    - Pregnant women are more likely to give birth to boys than girls
    - It makes men more aggressive and more jealous
    - It makes both sexes more neurotic, give them slower reflexes and make them less novelty-seeking
    - Infection may double your chances of having a car accident.
    - People with schitzophrenia are three times more likely to have it than the general population
    - Different prevalence rates might affect cultural differences in countries.
    - The little bugger may be inserting genes into our genome.

The problem with the above statements is, of course, that they’re difficult to tease out and there’s the correlation/causation problem.  Intelligent women might be more likely to have cats, for example.

But I keep waiting for people like the anti-vaccers and all the other conspiracy theorirsts to wake up to the idea that there is a brain-altering amoeba working its way through the population, turning countries to make them look like Europe, and encouraging women to have sex…

Yeah two people doing the exact same “TMI” thing over some lady sharing a completely straightforward unremarkable story in which she actually shares, like, an exactly appropriate amount of information relative to the subject she’s speaking on is really, really weird.

I think the TMI referred to the fact that she was providing information that ruined their ridiculous rightwing beliefs.

The TMIers have clearly never been tested for STIs in San Francisco…Here’s how the process went for me last time:

Me: “Test me for HPV, HSV 2 (but not HSV 1, I’ve had it since I was a little kid), Chlamydia, Gonorrhea, Syphilis, HIV, Hep A/B/C…What else?”

Dept Public Health Employee: “Whoa, whoa, whoa…First of all, do you sleep with other men?”

Me: “No.”

Dept Public Health Employee: “Ok, let’s reduce that list a little.  How about just HIV?”

Me: “WTF?”

Dept Public Health Employee: “And really, it’s a bit of a waste of our time to do any of this.  Do you really think you have any STIs?”

Me: “But…But…Safe sex, etc…”

Dept Public Health Employee: “Look, if it doesn’t hurt when you pee, and you don’t sleep with other men and you don’t shoot heroin, then you don’t have anything that’s going to hurt you.”

Me: “But…Herpes!”

Dept Public Health Employee: “Benign…”

Me: “But…HPV!”

Dept Public Health Employee: “Are you going to stop having sex if you have it? Even if you give it to a woman, odds are she’s going to clear it.”

Me: “But…”

Dept Public Health Employee: “We are dealing with life and death here.  I tell you what - tell me you’re gay and I’ll test you for HIV and Syphilis.  Deal?”

I swear to god this is how it went down.

mdg94131, the reason they didn’t test you for Herpes Simplex is because the tests are usually only run when there are some sort of symptoms from a possible active case:

Laboratory tests include: culture of the virus, direct fluorescent antibody (DFA) studies to detect virus, skin biopsy, and polymerase chain reaction (PCR) to test for presence of viral DNA. Although these procedures produce highly sensitive and specific diagnoses, their high costs and time constraints discourage their regular use in clinical practice.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herpes_simplex#Diagnosis

I would think the same is true of HPV as well.

It’s possible to have occult, or hidden infections of chlamydia or gonorrhea in men, but not very likely.

It’s possible to have occult, or hidden infections of chlamydia or gonorrhea in men, but not very likely

The problem here is that a lot of people are very good at being in denial.  I once had a broken condom and then a week later had some serious itching down there.  I got tested for all STDs because I have OCD and I’m a little bit of a hypochondriac and I’m also very responsible and wouldn’t want to risk infecting someone else. I found out I had Chlamydia.  I told the guy that I got it from, and he was so weird about it.  He had probably had it for over a year and never bothered to get it checked out.  After the antibiotics he was amazed that he could pee in a solid stream again.  But then a few weeks later he claimed that he got it from me, even though he had been having symptoms for months.  He denied those symptoms so hard that he conveniently forgot about them just a few short weeks after he was cured.  I don’t know what he actually believed, but he was determined to pretend that nothing unusual had happened before he met me.

So my point is that sometimes it’s worth testing people even when they deny having symptoms.  The shaming in our society increases the chances that people will lie about symptoms, even to themselves.  For the infections that can be cleared up with antibiotics, depending on how expensive the test is, we should probably just do wide-scale frequent testing on a large part of the population.

So my point is that sometimes it’s worth testing people even when they deny having symptoms.

As H. L. Mencken noted:

The really astounding thing about marriage is not that it so often goes smash, but that it so often endures. All the chances run against it, and yet people manage to survive it, and even to like it. The capacity of the human mind for illusion is one of the causes here. Under duress it can very easily convert black into white. It can even convert children into blessings.

For the infections that can be cleared up with antibiotics, depending on how expensive the test is, we should probably just do wide-scale frequent testing on a large part of the population.

One physician who wrote about sex in the late 60s(the decade, not that time of life) suggested that on a single day, everyone in the country should receive an antibiotic shot that would target the bacterial STDs, and while there would be a few complications(not using a derivative of penicillin on those who had an allergy to that class of antibiotics, for example),  that idea and yours are both worth implementing on a small scale to see how much they would affect the infection rate of bacterial STDs

I know that there is a movement to include HIV tests whenever someone gets their blood drawn for testing in the emergency room, the cost to be born by the Federal Government, it probably died because of all the panic over the Federal deficit, although it would end up saving money in the long run by making intervention possible earlier in the infection process for many people.

Tests for bacterial diseases are usually worth doing even in the absence of symptoms, as the bacterial antigens and/or antibodies to those antigens are inexpensive to test for, and the tests should have have a low false negative rate, so that you get the carriers in a population.

The problem with viral tests is not only the cost, but the fact that if one doesn’t have an active outbreak spilling a viral load into the bloodstream, it takes other tests to verify a viral infection, that, as in the case of those for Herpes simplex listed above, are expensive and take more time than the initial test.

I can’t say about other viral STDs, but I believe it’s kind of hard to ignore a symptomatic outbreak of Herpes Simplex, my wife had one a few years ago, and to ignore the level of pain it produces and the other symptoms would be a really, really bad case of denial.

No, Dark Avenger, the reason they didn’t test me for HSV and HPV is because I went to a San Francisco Public Health Center that receives federal funding that they primarily intend to use to test gay men for HIV and Syphilis.  When I went to my doctor, he tested me for all that…I just wanted to keep it anonymous, which is not possible.

retweet with ‘TMI’ response = “This was too much information, so I’m going to disseminate it further.”

>_<

mdg94131, they’re not going to tell you the part about the HSV tests costing a lot of money and not being recommended for asymptomatic presentations, while of course your doctor will be glad to take your money without informing you of these facts and test you anyway.

He also tested you for HPV without telling you about the FDA’s stance on HPV testing in men:

Is there an HPV test for men?

There is currently no FDA-approved test to detect HPV in men. That is because an effective, reliable way to collect a sample of male genital skin cells, which would allow detection of HPV, has yet to be developed. In October 2009, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) did approve the use of the first HPV vaccine (marketed as Gardasil®) for boys or men age 9 through 26 for the prevention of genital warts caused by human papillomavirus (HPV) types 6 and 11.

http://www.thehpvtest.com/about-hpv/faqs-for-men/?LanguageCheck=1

This is from the CDC:

Is there a test for HPV in men?

Currently, there is no test to find HPV in men. The only approved HPV tests on the market are not useful for screening for HPV-related cancers or genital warts in men.

  Screening for anal cancer is not routinely recommended because more information is still needed to find out if screening and follow-up interventions prevent these cancers.  However, some experts recommend yearly anal Pap tests to screen for anal cancer in gay and bisexual men and in HIV-positive persons. This is because anal cancer is more common in those populations.
  There is no approved test to find genital warts for men or women. However, most of the time, you can see genital warts. If you think you may have genital warts, you should see a health care provider.
  There is no test for men to check one’s overall “HPV status.” But HPV usually goes away on its own, without causing health problems. So an HPV infection that is found today will most likely not be there a year or two from now.
  Screening tests are not available for penile cancer.

You can check for any abnormalities on your penis, scrotum, or around the anus. See your doctor if you find warts, blisters, sores, ulcers, white patches, or other abnormal areas on your penis—even if they do not hurt.

http://www.cdc.gov/std/hpv/stdfact-hpv-and-men.htm

I would be asking that doctor about your HPV test, if I were you.

3.  Are men screened for HPV infection?
Men are not routinely screened for HPV infection unless they fall into a high-risk category. The current commercially available tests – the Pap smear and DNA HPV tests – are not approved for testing samples from males. However, some specialty labs have validated DNA tests for analyzing anal swabs from males. HPV-related cancers in men are very rare.

http://labtestsonline.org/understanding/analytes/hpv/tab/faq#3

I think AmericanPapist has a very good point. If two people claim to be virgins and monogamous, they can’t possibly lie because people moral enough to be virgins and monogamous never lie. But I’m sure if one of them is lying, it’s the woman’s fault. If she lied, well, she *lied*, and if her husband lied, when does a woman get a pass just because it’s something over which she has no control?

So, yeah, AmericanPapist has a very good point. No need for HPV vaccine because no one lies about sex, and if anyone does, you can still blame her for it.

retweet with ‘TMI’ response = “This was too much information, so I’m going to disseminate it further.”

Well yeah, how else is everyone going to know what a slutty slut slut she is?

It also bothers me because HPV is passed through entirely non-sexual means.  So, kissing, touching, sharing drinks, and, as suggested upthread YOUR MOM can all give you HPV.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2788520/

I did a ton of research a while back on HPV (as part of a larger set of research on the very few STD’s that lesbian are actually at risk for - basically that and herpes) and was pretty surprised to discover that health professionals basically consider HPV a non-issue. It’s not worth testing for, stressing out about, or reporting to your partners. It was kind of shocking, coming from the queer OMG SUPER SAFE SEX ALWAYS culture that I’m used to. But the more I learned, the more sense it made. There are hundreds of strains of HPV making it impractical to test for, the vast, VAST majority of cases clear up on their own, and 90% of people get it. It really is a non-issue. What about the cases that ARE an issue? That’s why regular pap smears are so important, so we can catch it on those rare occasions when it IS a problem.

And, of course, everyone should get the HPV vaccine. I’ve been trying to start mine but Planned Parenthood keeps running out of it before I get around to calling again. Must be popular! Good!

Yes, I’ve had HPV (no bad pap smears though, thankfully). It’s time we stop acting like it’s anything more than a common cold. Which, by the way, can be an STD too!