Am I the Last Woman Using Condoms? - Safe Sex - Marie Claire
There’s a cultural assumption that all men hate condoms. But in both serious and casual relationships, my partners were equally concerned about protection. We’d all grown up in the HIV/AIDS era of the ’80s and ’90s: I know straight women who contracted the virus or battled other, less deadly STIs or had abortions. It wasn’t until I hit my 30s that men started to complain. Suddenly, they were going soft—and if we didn’t use a condom, it would all be OK! Their erectile dysfunction was somehow the prophylactic’s fault, a convenient cover for their insecurity. Before Harry, I assumed that all my friends had casual or semi-casual sex safely. But when I asked, my female friends hedged—some did, some didn’t—and guys told me that their dates were increasingly saying, “We don’t need condoms. We don’t have any STDs—right?—and sex is better without them.”
As it turns out, I’m scarily in the safe-sex minority. Only 19 percent of single women 20 to 44 regularly use condoms, according to a 2008 study by the Guttmacher Institute, which studies sexual health—and that shockingly low number is comprised of women who aren’t living with a partner. The study’s co-author, Laura Lindberg, Ph.D., and other experts list the same reasons for the decline in use: Women switch to other methods as they age; both genders feel that condoms are “for teens”; by their late 20s, both partners have likely been in long-term relationships in which condoms were long ago tossed out. So what are the other 81 percent of women using as STD protection? Lindberg surmises that those women figure their partners “don’t look risky.”
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