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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.
It's because all men secretly want to pay child support.
For men with smaller or chopped foreskins, condoms interfere with sexual pleasure and frankly, when I'm in bed with a beautiful naked girl, the last thing I need is for a cock sock. Pretty naked girl overrides sanity, to the point where if the condom gets in the way, the logical answer is to rip it off and go without.
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I could have answered that question for half of what they paid.
Most of the stuff on
They smell bad, they distract from the spontenaity of the moment, they decrease sensitivity, they're never handy at the moment you want them, they're disgusting to take off, they're awkward to dispose of.
Despite that they're a good trade when weighed against the possibility of 18 years of child support, or your penis turning green and falling off.
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
Stimulus....package
Too easy. (not hard?)
STOP NOW!
Lurking at the bottom of the gravity well, getting old
Another issue, and one might say more important, is that there are so few options for men for birth control. Let's see, we have... condoms or sterilization. Great. One isn't reliable and the other can have serious side effects. How about we put that money into researching new and improved methods that have fewer and less severe side effects? Personally I would absolutely take hormonal treatments if the side effects were reasonable. It drives me crazy that as a society we are complacent with half our population not having a reliable and effective means for preventing unwanted pregnancy. Better yet things like RISUG would be absolutely wonderful, yet they don't get researched in western bureaucracy because it wouldn't be profitable enough than having people constantly paying for condoms or hormones. The injustice that has befallen us males is absolutely cause for a revolution in how we conduct health care in our society.
If it's to study "why men don't like condoms", as it is being widely reported, then yes, the study is a waste of money. The reason is obvious to anybody that's ever used one.
However, if the study is "how can we FIX what men don't like about condoms", then the study becomes very important, and might benefit society immensely. If a condom could be constructed that didn't impede feeling at all, there would be huge benefits, a great reduction in unwanted pregnancies.
Also, if they made one that felt BETTER, we could eliminate women altogether.
the lifetime cost of treating an HIV-positive person exceeds $400,000 and can run as high as $648,000
(http://www.advocate.com/news_detail_ektid19334.asp)
So, if only TWO PEOPLE on government health care (Medicaid, Medicare, Veterans or Prisoners) DON'T get AIDS as a result of this study, then it saved us money.
I'd say that's a pretty good investment.
Condoms are the biggest con around. You have to buy them in a three pack, you use one to test for fit, then you notice they have a use-by date only four years away!!
They whose government reduces their essential liberties for temporary security, receive neither liberty nor security.
"Come on baby, it's for science!"
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.
Two reasons: 1. I'm too drunk to know better 2. I'm usually by myself
its the same as being in a sexually arousing situation and suddenly being asked to fill out form 1040A and pay your taxes right now
Are you really, really bad at putting on a condom, or are you really, really good at filling out your taxes?
$400k isn't worth even contemplating. To put it into context $15 billion dollars is roughly $1 per week per person living in the US. $400k is such a tiny amount of money that it would cost more to find things that small to cut than it would save to actually cut them.
But, despite your "insightful" comment, it is in fact a very important thing to be studying, follow up research to remedy the problems could very well save multiples of that amount on things like STI education.
Confucius say, "if it floats, flies or fucks, it's cheaper to rent."
We don't have a state-run media we have a media-run state.
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.
The average aids patient in the US will spend $600k on treatment throughout their lifetime. Assuming the aids infection rate in the US is 50k people per year, that's $30 billion dollars per year being lost to HIV related medical expenses. If this study comes up with some general guidelines that encourage a mere tenth of a percent more people to wear condoms, that's still preventing 50 cases of aids in the US each year. That's a potential savings of 30 million dollars per year on a one-time fixed cost one mid-sized mining truck. That's a 75x ROI in the first year alone.
Heck, if ONE PERSON avoids getting aids due to wearing a condom after reading this slashdot article, the program has recouped. And that's just in raw drugs cost alone, let alone lost work hours / family troubles, giving it to other people, etc. HIV is so hugely expensive that anything we can do to reduce infection rate is basically worth it against our bottom line.
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