Mosnews.com: Unsafe and Ignorant, Or How Russians Do Sex

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Unsafe and Ignorant, Or How Russians Do Sex
Rita Storm
MosNews

http://www.mosnews.com/feature/2005/05/23/stds.shtml

Everyone knows that when you’re sleeping with someone, you’re sleeping with everyone they’ve ever slept with. To anyone who’s benefited from Western medicine and education, regular STD testing is part of basic hygiene. Once a year or so, you go pee in a cup and get stuck with a needle and subject yourself to a few other medical procedures the descriptions of which we’ll omit here, then breathe a sigh of relief and forget about it.

On the other hand, an average Russian’s thoughts on safe sex include the following maxim: Having sex while wearing a condom is like smelling flowers while wearing a gas mask. In Russia, gays and drug users make up the two highest-risk groups for contracting AIDS, but plenty other unpleasant maladies await the modern roaming heterosexual.

As far as protection goes, Russians most frequently fall back on tried, and, well, not particularly true method of coitus interruptus — which does a lousy job enough of protecting against unwanted pregnancies and nothing to protect against infections.

Leonid Spivak, an urologist, says that it isn’t that Russians don’t know of the risks — “On one hand, the awareness is great, because everyone has heard tons of names of various diseases,” he clarifies the situation. “But people can’t quite wrap their brain around the information — what’s dangerous and what isn’t.” The plague of ignorance that breeds the plague of STDs is aided by another national trait — the “overall negligence,” Spivak says.

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