Aswad
Posts: 9374
Joined: 4/4/2007 Status: offline
|
quote:
ORIGINAL: Leatherist Call me paranoid-but it's the "reasonably" part that gets to me. Reasonably basically means "in a range that normal people might well find acceptable if they educated themselves as to the actual risk and the means of managing it." And that's about as accurate as anything but percentages and the like will get you. Obviously, this means someone will still have to do the research if they want to be aware. If a 1-in-6 chance of dying is acceptable to you, there's nothing wrong with one round (pardon the pun) of Russian Roulette. If a 2-in-3 chance of dying is acceptable to you, there's nothing wrong with six in a row. But for most of us, those odds wouldn't even come close to being acceptable. Again, reasonable is subjective. It's true that statistics are cumulative. You're using an inapplicable example, though, as pulling the trigger six times in a row has a fixed probability of killing you (if we simplify by not considering the infinitesimal chance the bullet is a dud or jams), and that will be the exact figure one point nil. STDs and the like, however, are a regular cumulation, in which successive experiences raise the base odds to higher powers. Take unprotected blowjobs, for example. If a girl picks a random guy, sucks him off, then swallows, she just played the lottery. Her odds of "winning" the HIV pot would hover at around 3-in-a-million. By comparison, taking the car to work might as well have been outlawed as a health concern. Of course, when she's been wearing that poor, sore jaw out every waking hour for a while, with a neverending row of guys she's never seen before, and where nobody gets to go twice, even those odds will add up. Kind of like not wearing your seatbelt for a quick run around the corner will also add up. All in all, unprotected oral sex is comparable to driving to work. I'll leave the math on infidelity rates, condom use rates at infidelity, condom failure rates, demographics, bubonic plague resistance, testing frequency and accuracy vs incubation time, partner selection, likelyhood of being told of infidelities and accidents, and so on, to those who would actually be doing it in the first place. Scat is similar. Figure out what risk you can live with, and what you want to do. Bear in mind that our instinctive risk evaluaton will mark planes less reliable than cars... Health, al-Aswad.
_____________________________
"If God saw what any of us did that night, he didn't seem to mind. From then on I knew: God doesn't make the world this way. We do." -- Rorschack, Watchmen.
|