As an aside, I wonder what role STDs played in the development of religion and the religious superstitions surrounding sex. Can monogamy survive in the long-term in a world without consequences to promiscuity?

Much more likely, the problems with promiscuity were related to 'bastard' children and their role in inheritance; and to the father's uncertainty that a child was biologically theirs. In addition, many religious outlooks favor abstinence from bodily pleasures of all kind, so forbidding sexual pleasure and especially promiscuity seems well in tone with this.

Did the old world have gonorrhea, herpes, genital warts, molluscum, trich, or any other visible STD? It seems like any one of those would be sufficient to cause a superstitious, iron age people to suspect something was plaguing the sexually promiscuous.

Notably, when syphilis was introduced into the Old World population, it was described as a very severe acute disease. It only became more chronic after a period of adaptation that took several decades. This might have made the initial societal reaction more extreme.

https://www.everydayhealth.com/syphilis/painful-history-odd-...

Chlamydia rarely has life threatening complications but gonorrhea and hepatitis can kill. And there aren’t any STDs that don’t often cause infertility. Religions favored not screwing around because you’re guaranteed to get an STD eventually if you do, and that will very likely lead to infertility or worse.

The problem is that not everybody likes to share their partner. The likely consequence of a partner sleeping with other people is separation or divorce.

Also, I'm pretty sure that STDs have virtually never stopped anybody from cheating on their spouse if they wanted to. So no, I don't think that a lack of STDs will have much effect on monogamy, if at all.

I guess define consequences? I sure as heck wouldn’t be ok with my wife having sex with other people just because STDs aren’t a problem… the consequence would be divorce with or without the STD.

Well yeah, sex is cool and all but I don't like strangers or sharing.

I've never understood the "promiscuous" lifestyle that a different part of society seems to be natural at. Thankfully that's not the norm, just one of many subcultures.

Ideally you're both monogamous so unless one had STIs before entering the relationship, it's incredibly unlikely either would acquire one and almost certainly not from intercourse but through some other means.

There are people more interested in the low risk stable sexual benefits of a trustworthy monogamous relationship. I personally doubt it's more than the number of people wanting an intimate relationship beyond sex though.

It's certainly not exclusive to monogamy.

Consequences to promiscuity are not limited to STDs. Bad framing of the issue.

Otherwise, have a blast.

From a cold, logical perspective there are certainly evolutionary benefits to having a pair-bond not least of which is future certainty of care, for yourself and your joint offspring.

So maybe natures optimal path is closer to pair-bonding + promiscuity, rather than either on their own?

Pair bonding is crucial to social organization and casual encounters erode the psychological capacity for such bonds, without nullifying the innate human desire for long term companionship. The result in a "sex positive" society is a growing proportion of perpetually lonely and frustrated people, or dysfunctional relationships. One of the few instances in my opinion where ignorance truly may be bliss.

So, to your question, it's quite possible that we will rediscover the purpose of monogamous marriage, if we can reason past the barriers of some recent ideologies.

Do you have any reading material on this to suggest?

Sure, but after how many people get sick? Seems like a very dismissive comment.

It's a bit of paranoia and maybe even unconscious bias against the group mentioned you're not aware of.

Heterosexual unsafe sex is just as likely to lead to virus mutations and it's certainly a higher proportion of the population, yet you choose to point out gay males in particular?

It's oversimplifying, but it's not wildly off base.

You're not technically wrong. It's just that up until very recently the ones not preventable by vaccine (HPV, albeit stupidly expensive for men to get vaccinated for which of course means that men don't get vaccinated for it) were mostly immediately obvious and always easily solved by a single dose of antibiotics (basically everything except HIV, HPV, and herpes, which isn't life threatening).

Our impending antibiotic resistant apocalypse is of course terrifying.

This is my main concern. We as a species seem to always be so sure we can engineer our way out of a catastrophe by focusing on reaction to problems vs prevention of problems and always pass costs to the future. I'm all for keeping reactive skills top notch but we need to think about simple and easy preventative measures.

The HPV vaccine reference is a great example. Men should also get vaccinated as a preventative measure but we play it off as too costly or low risk. Men partaking in anal sex can get HPV and not even know it, sometimes leading to penis or colon/anal cancer later in life. It's especially bad because men will likely go long periods of time completely unaware of such an infection. We vaccinate young girls because we know they're all at risk but we often don't vaccinate young men because we don't know who will or won't end up having anal sex and culturally assume men are somehow invulnerable to it because of it.

Men partaking in _any_ kind of sex can get HPV and not know it. It's just as transmissible through oral and vaginal sex, and vaccination among women is also extremely poor in the US.

True, it's definitely possible to overlook or ignore, although symptoms of HPV are far more likely to be observed anywhere else than inside the anus or vagina.

WHY??? 620€ in Germany/Austria for 3 shots is absolutely outrageous.

HPV is responsible for a high amount of penile, anal and mouth/throat cancers. Even if you already have or had a HPV infection, the vaccine can protect you from getting it again or strains you don't have yet. There is some evidence that the HPV vaccine can act as cure for existing infections. +anyone vaccinated protects unvaccinated people.

Fellow German here, this is what I really don't understand, this is the same argument that is used for every other vaccine. Why not this one?

Is it really 620€ I was thinking of getting it at some point, but that's a steep price.

We all live in a single Petri dish now. A few thousand years ago humanity existed in many many isolated communities and was much more resilient to disease. Regular pandemics every ~10 years are very much a side effect of technology.

The comment about dying early made sense: Just because we lived with unprotected sex for the last million years (and we changed genetically due to some viruses that we got along the way) it doesn’t mean that we’re now still willing to bear the consequences.

I’m willing to bet that nowadays we have far more sexual partners than we’ve had since we started “society”

As opposed to people being ignorant about statistics and constantly parroting crap like "people only lived to 30 before modern medicine"?

Many people can go their entire lives having the internet as their sole partner.

That indicates that the vast majority of people has at least one sexual partner, with many having a lot more thanks to sexual liberation.

For the record, I’m not saying that this is a bad thing at all. I was just alluding to the fact that we can’t compare life and expectations of safety to what it was even 100 years ago, let alone over “millions of years”

Remeber that unsafe sex is the natural norm, especially if you don't have to worry about unwanted pregnancy (as in the case of gay people). Safe sex only truly became a necessity because of HIV, an extremely recent phenomenon.

Also, people have been having "unsafe" sex for over 40,000 years. There's been gay unsafe sex and straight unsafe sex going on all that time.

I'm not sure how we all made it.

I am not a scientist or any kind of expert. But I thought I read somewhere that there are some ape species for whom SIV is endemic and harmless. Others get sick and die.

So maybe it just takes time for a species to adapt and it's very deadly right now because humans haven't been exposed for very long.

The difference between Stone Age and today is that our civilization managed to conquer most really serious risks that used to shorten the lives of people under, say, 70. Famines, unsafe water, most bacterial diseases are well under control. So, of course, the roster of threats now changed, some of them being civilizational (road accidents), some of them being relatively small holdovers from the ancient days, such as STDs, plus the very aging that makes our mortality curves shoot up in the old age.

But yes, realistically, people are going to bareback one another all the time. Which means that vaccines and cures for whatever bug is transmitted like that are necessary.

If you insist on people using condoms just in case a novel virus is circulating, then we should all be wearing masks too at all times well into the future. Respiratory viruses can be just as bad as sexually transmitted ones.

So, first off, you might have a valid point but your approach sounds pretty biased. The wild generalizations about behavior, especially stigmatized behavior from a marginalized group, detracts from point about concern over a super-virus. Yes, gay men are often the topic of convo when it comes to HIV but it's not like they're the only ones passing around STDs.

Also, I'm not sure its true that Prep has had a material increase in unsafe sex. Most gay men seem to think of it more as a means to not worry about dying from sex instead of an opportunity to dramatically change behavior. Thanks in-part to HIV gay men are probably also the population with the best insight into their sexual health - so if a concerning new STD did spread, they'd be the first to take the individual responsibility to stay regularly tested and informed.

Birth-control and abortion and other related tools likely had a similar affect on heterosexual sex that prep had on gay men. There is a lot more heterosexual people to pass things around too. So calling out gay men might not be the most important piece to your worry about promiscuity leading to a super-virus.

Prep-induced gay promiscuity inducing a new pandemic of super-STDs really sounds like a bad talking point for an extremist politician in a conservative country. Obviously, its possible, however improbable, but its probably not the best way to express this concern.

Considering PREP is targeted almost exclusively to gay men, and HIV is mostly a concern among the sexually active gay male population, saying "young, gay, men" is pretty fitting.

Obviously the value-judgement about how much sex is too much or too risky can't have data to back this up. To me, as long as there is a net reduction in risky behavior that might impact society (not spreading a disease faster than eradicating it), its probably good, but this doesn't seem to be OP's view.

I do not want to discuss a higher incidence of HIV in the group of gay males compared to the whole population. That is a fact that is attributable to the fact that unprotected anal sex comes with a higher infection risk then unprotected vaginal sex.

But the OP claimes that "specifically [young] gay males think as long as they are safe from HIV, they are safe enough." That may be the result of unfortunate wording. But if not it is an allegation that the OP will have a very hard time to prove.

To your comment, I'd at least say there's evidence that treatments to previous STI epidemics hasn't caused the downfall of humanity, and so a vaccine or treatment for HIV/AIDS likely won't either.

You of course may get drug resistence in std's just like other non-sexual infections, but im not sure why the emphasis on unprotected sex.

But now that I think about it, I'm curious which cavities in the body present the widest mucosal surface areas if you cut and open them up and measure them. The pharynx, the throat, the anus and colons, the urethra, the vagina cervix and uterus, how do each of those measure out. I've heard the colon is susceptible to infection because of the large network of lymphatic tissue just on the otherside and because it's designed to absorb stuff being the last mile of the digestive tract where traces of anything left behind at that final stage and still useful can be absorbed by the body. The application of suppositories come to mind in this space.

Another angle might connect with the point brought up by the other individual about bacteria being a frequent origin of STDs, and bacteria generally share genetic material from what I understand. Maybe that bacteria to bacteria mingling is where the risk comes in?

Yes, this data exists and can be measured. Viral Load, detectable load, etc are common terms when discussing HIV.

Not a doctor, but from what I've heard the colon is the mucus membrane that presents the greatest risk for STD transmission.

> Maybe that bacteria to bacteria mingling is where the risk comes in?

I think its "simpler" in that we've seen bacteria become resistant to antibiotics. So bacterial infections could become resistant. I'm not sure its a valid concern since most people will kill the infection before spreading it (which increases rate of mutation), which is easier to do for an STD than something airborne by a hospital patient who can't leave.

Generally bacteria-based stds are not the scary ones as we have very good treatments for them (antibiotics).

Antibiotic resistence is a concern of course, but still, virus based stds are much scarier.

Probably just because the thread context is a rise in unprotected sex and a coincident rise in STI transmission.

This is actually a good point applicable to the broader context, that I hadn't really thought about. Billions of people get cold/influenza infections every year. Why don't we see more mutations of strains that are highly virulent/tending to more severe outcomes?

I get this, but it doesn't intuitively follow to me that the incidence of severe strains would be as low as they are. The evolutionary pressure against severe strains shouldn't be enough to stop them from emerging in the short term. And yet, for example, all the severe coronavirus strains seem to be zoonotic, rather than mutations of strains already circulating in humans.

> Higher virulence is occasionally seen though, as was the case with the swine flu some years ago.

I guess higher virulence is also hard to measure. If there's a rhinovirus strain one year that infects twice as many people as normal, who's going to notice that?

(Just pure speculation. Not my field)

I guess maybe it's not widely known, but half of STIs are bacterial, so antibiotic resistance is exactly the thing people are worried about.

Both HIV and COVID came from animal hosts originally. They weren't "bread" by humans.

> Watching covid varriants pop up worries me, but perhaps a quicker to production mRNA vaccine will allow us to remain ahead of it.

Well its possible that covid will mutate to escape the vaccine, its hardly a sure thing and hasn't happened yet (variants dont matter much if existing vaccines take care of them). Its entirely possible that new mRNA vaccines not only would be fast enough, but that we will never actually need them at all.

The jury is out on COVID. We don't know.

What we don't know yet is how it jumped from bats to humans. Is it direct? Is there an intermediate host? (pangolin?)

The more reasonable conspiracy theory is that the virus escaped from the Wuhan lab, possibly as a result of gain of function experiments. But originally, it is still bats, and what they could have done is not something nature is incapable of.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html