The branding of the terms “safe sex” and “protected sex” may stand out as one of the most successful marketing efforts in history. For the past quarter century, Americans, young and old, have been assured and reassured that all we have to do to “protect” ourselves from sexually transmitted diseases like AIDS is to practice “safe sex.”

      In more recent years, the term was revised to “safer sex,” with the generous admission that condoms do not provide 100% protection, as if anything does. Exactly how far short of 100% risk reduction, and for which diseases, is seldom mentioned. As will be shown in chapter 10, this lack of clarity and honesty can have life-and-death consequences. But if condoms are not always effective in preventing STDs, why are they being promoted as doing so? Who benefits? Who invented these terms and what was their motivation?

©2009 All Rights Reserved - Center for Relationship Intelligence LLC

Chapter 8

As we have all been told hundreds, and possibly even thousands, of times, the term “safe sex” was a response to the threat of AIDS, which first appeared in the U.S. as a devastating scourge afflicting gay men in cities like San Francisco and New York City in the late 1970s. It is less well-known that other sexually transmitted diseases were also proliferating in this decade. In 1976 the CDC announced that a frightening new strain of gonorrhea, PPNG, had suddenly appeared, which not only resisted penicillin but actually consumed and destroyed the drug. PPNG first appeared in the Philippines among a sexually active core group of prostitutes and servicemen in and around U.S. military bases where many women habitually took black market penicillin as a prophylactic treatment, a practice that almost surely led to the mutation. At first, health experts hoped PPNG could be contained in the Philippines, but when it reached the American gay population it spread like wildfire…By the early eighties, just as AIDS was first being noticed, the prevalence of both syphilis and gonorrhea among gay men was several hundred times that among comparable straights.