STDs in the Honorverse

Daryl wrote:We are obviously talking at cross purposes. You can catch most common diseases by having sex with an infected person, but STDs require sex by any of a variety of ways.
Skin in most cases doesn't need to be abraded, but that helps. Anal sex obviously increases the risk. As Stephen Fry pointed out many gay males don't practice sodomy.

I think yourvery valid point is that it is almost impossible to contract an STD if you are monogamous. More importantly; STDs cannot become epidemic much less pandemic in a culture where monogamy really is the norm. In cultures where the majority of people abstain before marriage, marry young, stay married and seldom commit adultery then STDs will die off.

TFLYTSNBN wrote:This is why anal sex is taboo in most cultures and monogamy is the nominal normal.

ldwechsler wrote:Much of this is nonsense. Monogamy was the norm before people were aware of the transmission of STD's.

Anal sex is not all that uncommon in many cultures. Victorian England with its insistence on the more disgusting elements of sex figured heavily in off-putting anal sex. And, of course, male homosexuals used it for millenia.

TFLYTSNBN wrote:The ancients did not understand germ theory but their taboos leave no doubt that they understood what was risky behavior.

If talking about Europe, syphilis and gonorrhea were unknown before the age of discovery. Before modern medicine or the germ theory, diseases of all types were so common that just living was risky behavior. The only prominent sexual taboos, that I know, were about incest or loss of female virginity before marriage. The one about virginity probably had more to do with primogenitor property rights than with disease. Certainly Greece and Rome had no taboos about homosexuality.