Slashdot Mirror
NIH Spends $400K To Figure Out Why Men Don't Like Condoms
The National Institutes of Health has given $423,500 to researchers at Indiana University's Kinsey Institute to figure out why men don't like to wear condoms. The institute will also study why men have trouble using condoms and investigate "penile erection and sensitivity during condom application." "The project aims to understand the relationship between condom application and loss of erections and decreased sensation, including the role of condom skills and performance anxiety, and to find new ways to improve condom use among those who experience such problems," reads the abstract from Drs. Erick Janssen and Stephanie Sanders, both of the Kinsey Institute.
Also, if they made one that felt BETTER, we could eliminate women altogether.
You sir, are lining up for a darwin award.
No man would rather wear a condom if people didn't have pregnancies and STDs to worry about.
There should be more R&D funding into liquid condoms, which are basically a spermicidal lube infused with nonoxynol-9. Problem is that many women complain about nonoxynol-9 being too harsh, causing itching or burning. Nevertheless, the liquid condom would be the best solution because, let's face it, condoms do not prevent bodily juices from getting into uncovered parts.
Finally, condom manufacturers should offer more variance with respect to sizes. My favorite kind, Trojan Large, have been discontinued. The Magnums are too large for my weenie and regulars are too tight.
My endorsements for men with slightly above-average penises are Kimono and jimmiehatz, which are black and may be weird for you and your partner if having a black dick is a problem.
Disproven? Seems scientific double-blind studies disagree with you.
To quote: "Male circumcision has been associated with a lower risk for HIV infection in international observational studies and in three randomized controlled clinical trials."
No man would rather wear a condom if people didn't have pregnancies and STDs to worry about. There should be more R&D funding into liquid condoms, which are basically a spermicidal lube infused with nonoxynol-9.
"Although [nonoxynol-9] was at one time widely promoted as a protection against sexually transmitted infections including HIV, subsequent studies have shown that it can in fact increase the risk of infection by damaging the physical barriers of the rectum or vagina."- Wikipedia (with reference!)
So, not much help on the STD level.
... and the study mentioned in the article makes perfect sense. The article is propaganda that intentionally misunderstands what the study is about in order to stir up their readership.
In one of our studies of (mostly queer) sexually active teenagers. One of the key things we look at is condom use knowledge and condom errors. Most people know that they should use a condom if they're having sex, but quite a large swath of the population doesn't know how to *properly* use them and what they do and do not protect against. Some people are perfectly willing to use condoms, but they get frustrated because they're using them wrong, and so the condoms break or come off, and they stop using them out of frustration.
One measure we give is we have 20 different "steps" for using a condom properly, and they're out of order, and some are not real steps. Out of ~250 teenagers, most of whom have taken sex ed, been exposed to safer sex info all their lives, only 6 got that exercise 100% correct (all real steps in proper order, all fake steps removed), and only 42 got all the real steps in the correct order (but kept some of the fake steps). The kids have been taught, but retention isn't so hot - we're coming up with better ways to teach this.
Another measure we have is taking an inventory of experiences with recent condom use, and most of our participants report some level of difficulty with condom use, with most of those reports coming along the lines of it being too confusing to remember all of the steps they were taught while in the heat of the moment etc. They want to use condoms, but they've learned all of that in a very "academic" environment - we're trying to develop interventions that will help teach people how to handle themselves when they're not at their most rational.
A final measure we give which is related to condom use is an HIV & STI knowledge quiz with true, false and "don't know" answers. Most of our participants score 70% or better, but certain segments average scores below 30%. By identifying the lagging segments and then examining what it is that is leading to this dearth of HIV & STI knowledge, we're able to come up with plans to get this information out to those groups because the current techniques clearly aren't working.
It's neither an obvious nor simple area of research, despite what some in this thread will say. $400k to potentially save quite a few lives (or protect the quality of many lives) is a bargain. If you're a wretched excuse for a human being and you think that people who get HIV "deserve" it, you probably don't care that a lifetime of treatment for a single case of HIV infection will run around $400-500k (minimum) so this kind of research is also cost effective from that standpoint.
Since I can't tell them apart, I treat all ACs as the same person.