Stephen Reynolds is a business strategist with a graduate degree, a wife, a good job and a son named Tynan. He enjoys going to Cape Cod with his family and playing on the beach. Life was going well until he got a perpetually sore throat. His doctor couldn’t figure out what was causing the soreness. Finally, the doctor biopsied his tongue and found stage IV squamous cell carcinoma—throat cancer.
How did Reynolds get throat cancer? He didn’t smoke or drink heavily. But then he found out that he was infected by the STD human papillomavirus (HPV). In his younger years, he did the “oral sex thing” as implicitly encouraged in a recent article in Student Life. Now he doesn’t know who gave it to him, and even worse, who he has infected.
Which brings me to the sexual naïveté of sex columnists and misguided sex-vangelists who occasionally share their wisdom with the campus community. I read the article “Oral Sex” in Monday’s issue and wondered what value it added to the important discussion of sex and college students. I learned that semen tastes salty. Thanks.
Wouldn’t it be better to relate the latest stats from the Center for Disease Control (CDC)? This week, they reported that there were 56,000 new cases of HIV in the U.S. in 2006. Fifty-three percent were among gay and bisexual men and 43 percent were among young black men. Also, the virus is incurable and costs about $20,000 a year to treat. Now that is sex information that students could discuss and use.
Or how about the data estimating that one in four teenage girls has or has had an STI? HPV in particular has no symptoms and is a leading cause of warts and cervical cancer among women. It can be transmitted through “tasty” oral sex. I wonder if the author considered how cancer tastes.
Back to Reynolds who related his story in the August edition of Reader’s Digest. He had no idea HPV infected men. Maura Gillison, M.D. at Johns Hopkins University, has found a connection between HPV and head and neck cancers in young non-smoking men. According to estimates, six million people get HPV each year in the U.S. and of the more than 35,000 people diagnosed with oral cancer this year, 25 percent will connect the diagnosis with HPV infection. Many of those oral sex pioneers of the ’70s and ’80s are now in their 40s and getting cancer. Who knows how many men and women they have condemned to the same fate or worse?
What is devastating is that once these men settle down with the women they love and have kids, they get cancer. Then, they must answer questions like three-year-old Tynan asked his dad. “Are you sick Daddy? Why are you going to the hospital again?”
Imagine your future: months of chemo and radiation. Was it worth that taste of someone you didn’t even like? Someone whose name you don’t even remember?
It is time that columnist Lucy Moore and other sex-vangelists like Planned Parenthood take responsibility for their advice and the culture they encourage. Maybe they should be liable for any medical costs associated with the diseases or infertility that future alumni may have. They may argue that their efforts were to “lower the risk” of students contracting an STI. But can you imagine an organization saying that Russian roulette is neither right nor wrong but seeking to lower the risk of blowing your head off? Why are they trying to just lower the risk of cervical or throat cancer rather than trying to eliminate the risk? Because they won’t admit that their worldview has failed. Information has rarely stopped mistakes made during passion, and the CDC numbers prove it.
I write this article not to condemn anyone, but rather to start an open and honest dialogue about sex that deals with the fact that casual oral sex with more than one partner is not a game nor a tasty treat. It has real consequences that stay with us for the rest of our lives.
