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Facebook Leads To Increase In STDs in Britain
ectotherm writes "According to Professor Peter Kelly, a director of Public Health in Great Britain: 'There has been a four-fold increase in the number of syphilis cases detected, with more young women being affected.' Why the increase? People meeting up for casual sex through Facebook. According to the article, 'Social networking sites are making it easier for people to meet up for casual sex. There is a rise in syphilis because people are having more sexual partners than 20 years ago and often do not use condoms.'"
Correlation is not causation. Facebook usage may correlate, but doesn't cause it.
"Don't drink and park. Accidents make people."
Wow, that's about as enlightening as saying bars and nightclubs lead to more casual sex. People socializing more, and it leads to sex? No shit. Doesn't really matter how the contact is made, does it?
...I wouldn't say this is a problem with Facebook so much as a problem with fucking stupidity. It's not my place to question someone's sexual activity, but come on...who has sex with a stranger without using a condom?
Living With a Nerd
...as they pointedly do NOT mention MySpace. Hmm. Wonder why that could be, NewsCorp?
That's what you think.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
So someone says social networking sites are to blame, instead of the amazing coincidence that syphilis cases increased as the government stopped their public awareness campaigns against STDs. I'm thinking someone needs to expand their search for causalitis.
"These are your genitals. THESE are your genitals on Syphilis. Any questions?"
I'll state the obvious then.
This is about sex education and access to reproductive health services/products. Facebook is just a way to shift blame.
You mad
Its all the stupid people having sex that leads to the STDs.
"Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
Sorry, what does race, let alone "racism", have to do with this?
Have you ever been to a third world nation? I don't think you have, otherwise you'd realize how poor the hygiene and sanitation is in such regions.
In some countries, especially where overcrowding is an issue and sanitation is poor, people urinate and defecate directly on the streets, and sometimes even into the water that they drink and bathe in. You wouldn't believe how this promotes the spread of all sorts of diseases that are basically unheard of in Western nations.
There are some African countries where over 50% of the population is infected with AIDS. That means that if you slept with just two people, there's a good chance that you've gotten AIDS. It doesn't help that in some African nations, rape is commonplace. So not only does the woman become pregnant and get AIDS, but her child is born with AIDS, as well. Plus there's a good chance both of them have also acquired several "lesser" diseases, too.
I'm sorry that reality doesn't correlate well with your fantasy land where everybody lives in Western-style conditions.
How bout, facebook makes it easy for women to filter and select the few men they all want to sleep with, so those men sleep with huge numbers of women (and disease spreads rampantly).
Degaussing scares the bad magnetism out of the monitor and fills it with good karma.
It sounds like the answer here is to join Facebook, but use an alias instead of your real name. That way, the people from your past can't find you, and if you need to disappear because one of your new hook-ups turns out to be a psycho, then it'll be easier since you can just create a new alias and start over.
But honestly, this Facebook hookup thing sounds like a lot of work, alias or no. Wouldn't it be easier to just join AdultFriendFinder for casual sex? Probably not; it seems like women want to believe that men they meet might actually be interested in something long-term, even though it's plainly obvious that they're not, so they need men who tell them all kinds of lies, like "my wife are I are married in name only", "we're separated but staying together just for the kids", etc. Then they act all surprised, like Tiger's girlfriends, when they find out that he's been lying to them.
Women, is it really so hard to just be honest? If you want casual sex, stop making men jump through hoops and make up lies for it. If you want a long-term relationship, then find a man who's actually single (not one who's married and supposedly "separated"), and keep your legs shut until you actually know him well enough to know he's the one you want to have kids with, or at least know him well enough to know he's not a psycho or a liar.
There's already a rebuttal here: http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/greenslade/2010/mar/25/sun-dailytelegraph.