The “facts” About Condoms Taught in Many Schools Are Wrong
Friends, you were lied to. I mean, probably in different ways, but especially if you have had any non-sex health activities. Today we are going to document all the false and misleading “facts” you may have learned about condoms.
Between 1996 and 2010, our federal government allocated $ 1.5 billion for sex education that promotes abstinence. Some abstinence-only curricula do not mention contraception at all, while others state law only allows refusal rates to be specified without any discussion of benefits. A 2004 congressional committee report found that 80 percent of curricula dedicated exclusively to abstinence contained “false, misleading, or misleading information” about reproductive health, including contraception and condoms.
If you had a good sex lesson or missed the lesson and learned about safe sex from well-informed buddies on the playground, you can read this post and have a laugh. But these myths were taught and in some places continue to teach children and youth. Here are the facts.
Condoms don’t have terrible failures
There is no perfect birth control method, so it’s fair to talk about the number of failures. (Of course, even abstinence has a failure rate. Teens who only get sex with abstinence are actually more likely to get pregnant than their peers.)
You may have heard that the probability of condom failure is about 18 percent, but that doesn’t mean what you think.
There are two different types of birth control failures: flawless use, where you use a method (such as condoms) consistently and correctly; and typical usage is the number you get when you are going to use a method, but you may not be doing it all the time.
The typical condom failure rate is 18 percent, which means that 18 percent of heterosexual couples who use condoms will eventually become pregnant after using them for a year. However, with ideal use, this figure is only 2 percent . So if your teacher tells you that abstinence is “100 percent effective,” know that condoms are 98 percent effective on the same metric.
Condoms do not break or slip off very often
If you have the misconception in your head that condoms fail all the time (which they don’t!), It is easy to assume that they fail by breaking, slipping, or not creating an effective barrier against sperm or disease. … We’ll look at the barrier issue in a minute, but let’s stop and talk about breakage.
Condoms break or slip off in 1.6–3.6% of cases . It sucks when that happens, but teachers with bad sex are pushing the wrong catastrophic numbers. (Googling and you’ll see talk about 40 percent of breakages; you’ll have to use a condom very, very wrong if you see it break four out of ten times.)
What then is the rest of the failure rate, if not breakdown? Most often it is the inability to actually wear a condom and / or misuse. One review of condom errors found that they included the following:
The most common mistakes include not using a condom during sex , not having enough space at the tip of the tip, not squeezing air out of the tip, inverting the condom, not using water-based lubricants, and removing them incorrectly.
This is my emphasis. Guess condoms don’t work very well if you don’t use them. However, other factors are important here and contribute to these break and slip rates. Before getting started, make sure you know how to use and put on a condom .
Even if a condom breaks, you won’t get pregnant automatically.
This 2 or 18 percent of failure occurs among heterosexual couples who use (or intend to use) condoms throughout the year . This does not mean that you have an 18 percent chance of getting pregnant any day.
Yet some teachers offer their students a simulation in which you roll the dice, and if your number comes up, your condom “doesn’t work” and you have a baby. This is not how you can get pregnant.
In fact, without any contraception, your chances of getting pregnant are between zero and 10 percent, depending on where you are in your cycle (and assuming you have a fully functioning uterus, and so on).
There are no tiny holes in condoms
Some sex education classes incorrectly teach that viruses like HIV are small enough to pass through the microscopic pores in condoms. The only problem with this theory is that there are no microscopic pores in condoms, and the research that looked for them has been unsuccessful . (Trudnoubivaemy One myth says that there are pore size of 5 microns; it turned out to result of research rubber gloves , not condoms.)
People who use condoms are 80 percent less likely to get HIV than people who don’t. But this does not mean that condoms fail 20% of the time, this is just a typical rate of use. People forget to wear condoms, and people are at risk of contracting HIV not only through sexual contact.
For a more accurate measurement of HIV transmission, we must look at this study, which followed 245 couples over 22 months, in which one partner had HIV and the other did not. During the course of the study, no one contracted HIV. Inanother study of 305 couples followed for three years, there were three new HIV infections in couples who used condoms consistently, compared with 16 in couples who used condoms sometimes, but not always.
Bottom line: Condoms may not be perfect, but they are very good at their job. For HIV prevention, they are an effective ( but not the only ) way to protect yourself.
Condoms do reduce the risk of pregnancy and HIV transmission. (They also lower the risk of some other STDs, although they can’t do anything about STDs, such as herpes, which can be spread through skin contact.) If you found out about high failure rates or holes in the rubber, you were lying – but now you know the truth.