Good Girls, Choose Your Own Universe

My my, Korski certainly didn’t take long to get his bowels in an uproar. My vote for his angst would have been for Dana spanking him yet again in his Saturday submission (I almost spit Pepsi through my nose over the Korski bag gag..:), but it appears
it wasn’t my totally neutral stance between the two in my submission, but rather my “reality” he has issues with. Ok then, ladies and gentlemen choose your Universe! And no, I’m not going to blow smoke up your ass about
how big my classrooms are, what colleges I’ve taught at, and the other useless props one needs to “instantly credential” their opinion, it’s almost as transparent as attacking (and questioning) another’s character
in an attempt to make a point when you’ve never met the person. As an aside, the President of Iran has been on a crusade to rid Iran’s institutes of higher learning of liberal and secular professors and while I think his methods
are over the top I can certainly understand where he’s coming from.

Korski’s entire rant (let’s see, I stopped counting after 10 BKKSWs and was only half done..:) works off the premise that all men are animals who not only can’t tell the truth, don’t feel confident with what their
“truth” is so they must invent one, can’t go a short period without sex, find a simple home HIV test too time consuming and I’m going to guess the instructions are also too difficult to understand, and has the moral
turpitude of a swamp rat. WAIT, hold the phone! Do you suppose I hit a nerve? If Dear Reader that description fits you then read no further, hit the back button and read Korski’s latest submission and get your warm and fuzzy high (we all
know there are some of you out there). For those of you with a modicum of self restraint and common sense read on.

Yes, I recommended monthly testing for mongers. No, I didn’t say you could test positive in a month after contacting HIV. However, how many people is it permissible to expose to HIV? For those of you who like me think ZERO is the correct
answer then once a month might not be enough. How many women (and men) do mongers sleep with in any given month? Not being a monger I don’t know for sure, but lets say the number is greater than zero for our purposes. If you get tested
monthly the longest you will go ‘unknowingly’ exposing others to HIV is not a month, but the time it takes from contacting the disease to the time it gets picked up on the test (a normal person develops anti-bodies that will test
positive on a HIV test within 2 weeks to 6 months). The month figure was just an arbitrary timeframe of “acceptable exposures” vs. your time and money in going through the hassle of being tested. Would that be 15 possible exposures?
25? One a day so 30? Dana 150? A “Rapid HIV Test” provides results in under 20 minutes. I’m going to do something the good professor didn’t do, link you to some sources so you’ll know I’m not making stuff
up and so you can read it for yourself. Here’s a link to some information on HIV testing: here. “Testing is often done at 6 weeks, 3 months, and 6 months after exposure
to determine that a person is not infected.” From: here. It seems a “month” wasn’t that far off if ONLY to time WHEN you could have HIV. Obviously if you’re
a monger it could turn up any day, a month is just a reasonable figure I threw out there seeing how cheap and easy it is to be tested.

There are six major risk factors for contacting HIV:

* Have you injected drugs or steroids or shared equipment (such as needles, syringes, cotton, water) with others?
* Have you had unprotected vaginal, anal, or oral sex with men who have sex with men, multiple partners, or anonymous partners?
* Have you exchanged sex for drugs or money?
* Have you been diagnosed with or treated for hepatitis, tuberculosis (TB), or a sexually transmitted disease (STD), like syphilis?
* Have you received a blood transfusion or clotting factor
between 1978 and 1985?
* Have you had unprotected sex with someone who could answer yes to any of the above questions

As you can see ANY monger is batting .500 at the very least. Yes, two of the risk factors mention “unprotected” sex, so if you’re one who uses condoms for oral sex, kissing, dry humping, or just rubbing up against
the wet stuff on a leg, then you’re doing great and you can cross off two of them. A “low” risk from kissing or oral sex you say? True, but I’ll bet you buy the occasional lottery ticket anyway just in case you beat
the odds… And what if you do cover your entire body in a condom? Here’s a reference from 1993 which is probably still valid though I suspect they’ve improved condoms since then: here.
(Ya, I know, one of those dirty sites with an agenda, but consider that pores are the least likely way you’ll get HIV when using a condom and catastrophic failure (bursts, tears, slipping off (Korski?), etc) are.. then…) Yes, there are
a lot more recent studies but they mostly say the same stuff, slightly different numbers, just type in “HIV condom failure rate” into your search engine and wade through the 211,000 hits you’ll get. That’s a lot written
about something “that never happens.”

Holes in Condoms . . .

STDs are very tiny organisms, minuscule in size compared to sperm. These super-small viruses can get through a hole in a condom much more easily than sperm can. For example, HIV (the AIDS-causing virus) is so small that two million of the
disease-causing agents could crowd on the period at the end of a sentence.

In 1993 the University of Texas analyzed the results of 11 different studies that had tracked the effectiveness of condoms to prevent transmission of the AIDS virus. The average condom failure rate in the 11 studies for preventing transmission
of the AIDS virus was 31%.

One reason condoms fail in preventing the transfer of AIDS is that latex condoms have tiny intrinsic holes called "voids." Sperm is larger than the holes, but the AIDS virus is 50 times smaller than these tiny holes which makes
it easy for the virus to pass through [Source: Dr. C. M. Roland, editor of Rubber Chemistry and Technology]. To give you an idea of how easy it would be for the virus to pass through these holes, just imagine a ping pong ball going through a basketball
hoop.

“But as far as I am aware it has surprisingly little to do (some to be sure) with heterosexual male farang—mongers or otherwise. It is a problem that has a lot more to do with intravenous drug use and the very large number of
Thai men who frequent whorehouses for Thai men, those who seldom if ever use condoms; and who then pass on STDs, including the HIV, to their girlfriends and wives who never dare suggest that they wear a condom.”

WOW, and I suppose the women working the farang scene in Thailand don’t have contact with Thai men? There must be some secret club you have to be part of to ‘only’ work in a Thai whore house. Yet another ‘feel
good’ roll of the dice. Sorry, but the quote above is nonsense. This leads the reader to believe the most common way to get HIV is through sharing needles or Thai whore houses, perhaps it’s the most “sure” way but not
the most common, the numbers don’t support that premise. Take for instance Thai teenagers and Thai military men/women (to name a few): here.

“The HIV cases among the youth — HIV/AIDS was the second leading cause of death among Thais aged 15 to 24 last year – have in fact driven health officials to produce a similar change of behaviour among the youth.” (I’m
going to guess motorsais is the first) (do we assume that all Thai 15-24 year olds are using IV drugs, gay sex, and visit Thai whore houses?)

“Studies have shown that the infection rate among sexually active Thai teens rose to 17 percent in 2002 compared to 11 percent in the previous year, according to the English-language daily 'Bangkok Post' on Thursday. “
(Wow, 17 percent.. no matter which method of choice you think you use to contact his disease 17% is a huge number)

An interesting article with two quotes I’ll list, one showing how HIV was first though to be ‘only’ a IV drug use problem but then hit almost 50% of Chiang Mai’s sex workers (didn’t say if they were the
“thai brothel only” type of woman), and a second quote further on shows how an aggressive condom program cut the rate by up to 90% (I think this figure is optimist but still shows just how effective (but not foolproof) condoms are):
here.

“In 1988, infection rates among injecting drug users rose alarmingly from zero to 30% over six months. A year later, the national HIV surveillance system revealed that in the northern city of Chiang Mai, 44% of sex workers were infected
with HIV. There were fears that the HIV epidemic would seed itself in the general population — fuelled by the high proportion of men who visited sex workers.”

“The scheme has been highly successful. Reported condom use in brothels increased from only 14% of sex acts in 1989 to over 90% by 1994. Over the same period, the number of new STI cases among men treated at government clinics plummeted
by over 90%.”

There are millions of articles (no exaggeration) on HIV/AIDS available at your fingertips so I’m going to stop the quotes and referencing here. By now we should know that Yes condoms help (a lot), no they are not foolproof. Yes testing
regularly is your best chance of finding out you have HIV so you can seek early treatment and live a long life and not pass it on to anyone else, I threw a monthly testing scheme out there which I don’t think is unreasonable at all if you’re
a frequent monger and are actually concerned about your health and the health of those you have sex with. We’ve learned it’s utterly false to think that if you wear a condom you are not at a risk for HIV, even more false that “unless
there are symptoms” as you can go for a decade or more infected with HIV before symptoms appear. Perhaps in a sterile lab where condoms are used to block HIV viruses there might be some merit to the “nothing to worry about if you
use a condom” school of thought, but not in a bed holding on to your short time experience where you both are covered in sweat, naturally occurring lubrication liquids, and so on. Newsflash, you don’t contact HIV because the virus
swims up your pee hole and into your bladder.. but when body fluids come into contact with ANY open sore where it can reach your blood stream. A condom only covers ‘part’ of your penis, you can have a sore on the upper shaft not
covered by a condom and contact HIV. You can have a pimple on your ass that you popped and is bleeding and contact HIV. You CAN catch HIV through saliva though the odds are slim. How about a hang nail? Scraped knee? Cut yourself shaving? Ya, touch
her, touch your face.. it can happen.

The REALITY is contacting HIV ‘can’ happen in a brazillion different ways and no one thinks it will be them. And no, I didn’t assume “good girls” wouldn’t be infected, but I did assume anyone with
common sense would know that. And no, I don’t think testing, using a condom, or any of the proven methods which have drastically reduced HIV transmission among many different societies is “out of touch with reality”, not unless
you’re going to discount all the success being made on these fronts.

HIV/AIDS, especially in this part of the world, is a very real threat. It’s the death hand. It doesn’t matter how small the odds are that you’re contact HIV/AIDS in any way.. once you have it. My best friend died of AIDS/HIV
in 1993 from infected blood given in the 80’s. I’ve worked and written features about the temples (and people in them) who are now AIDS hospices with cremators running 24/7. I’ve done features on children dying from AIDS.
They all had one thing in common, they didn’t think it could happen to them because.. “Because” was usually disguised as ignorance or just unlikely odds they knew they were playing.

You get to choose your universe. Will you choose Korski’s universe where men are nothing more than out of control irresponsible animals who can’t help themselves from jumping from a whore to a young university student and you
won’t get tested because you’re ‘afraid’ to know? Or will you choose a universe where you’re responsible for your own behavior and the health of those you come in sexual contact with? Will you write an entire
submission based on nothing more than conjecture and hearsay basically excusing irresponsible and deadly behavior while at the same time questioning the integrity of someone you don’t even know? Or will you break open your search engine
and spend a few minutes educating yourself and maybe passing on the information to those who haven’t done so yet? I think most will end up choosing a universe in their own image as we’ve already seen examples of. (Korski bag, funnier
than shit…)

One more thing. While I’m not a monger that doesn’t mean I haven’t spent a lot of time around mongers and the scene in general. In fact, that would be a gross (wrong) assumption. Korski goes to great lengths to paint
mongers in a bad light, irresponsible, afraid to know the truth, can’t control themselves, can’t find 20 minutes for a health check every month, and the list goes on and on. This isn’t my experience of mongers “in general.”
In general mongers are young and old professionals and blue collar workers, bankers, lawyers, steel workers, oil riggers, fishermen, and mostly a fairly accurate representation of society in general. Society in general is a responsible bunch,
they pay their bills, seek health care when appropriate, have consciences, exhibit self control, and are pretty much just like you and me. Sure, there are some hard cases out there as there always are, but I’m not buying that mongers in
general are anything like Korski portrays in his submission. Choose your universe.

One more ‘fact’ before I wrap this up. I have over 20 years experience living in Asia. That’s 20 years of dating, bonking, marrying, divorcing, working, living, observing.. Asia. This “third option” as it’s
been called has worked very well for me, and believe it or not I have enough self control to conduct myself appropriately and this has paid off with huge dividends. I’ve ONLY dated from the local “good girl” pool, though some
have been bad girls..;o) I’ve always been honest and upfront 100% of the time, and I’ve never went longer than I care to without female companionship and I’ve never paid a pro. Most Asian girls don’t really expect nor
are they looking for Prince Charming on a white horse. They just want a nice guy who is neat, clean and well mannered. That’s it guys. “Well mannered” includes being honest and upfront, it includes having self respect, and
it includes treating the women like you want them to treat you. This won’t happen all the time but it’s never hurt me to be this way regardless. This is my universe.

During my time in Asia I’ve met and observed a lot of ill-mannered individuals, watched them crash and burn, watched them make others crash and burn. Those who can do, those who can’t usually end up trying to teach others that
it’s “ok” to be like them. If you expect the worst from people then you’ll probably get it. If you are the worst to people then you’ll probably end up thinking the world is just one big scum pit, and jumping
right in with the others, right into their shallow little universe…

Until next time..

BTW – On a personal note, coming through the lobby the other day a security guard I chat with regularly came at me with a big smile on his face and a message in his hand. My massage girl is back in town and wanted to let me know she’s
working for herself now. Needless to say this is very welcome news and thanks to the few of you who own massage places who have offered to set me up.. She’s back in town!!! More on this later.

Stickman's thoughts:

The HIV / AIDS debate could go on forever and ever, so unless anyone really has a new angle on it all, I suggest we put this one to bed.