TooShiftyForYou: LPT: Don’t get your science information from Cosmopolitan magazine.
littleM0TH: /r/shitcosmosays at its best. Or worst depending on how you look at it. Lord knows how many people they harmed with that bullshit.
TheCannon: Just add this to their long list of bullshit, like that men like it when you pull their pubic hair out with your teeth.
Just1morefix: I get 99% of all of my medical knowledge from Cosmopolitan articles. The other 1% I soak up at Buzzfeed.
HouseSomalian: [Here’s the cover of the article](https://i.pinimg.com/originals/b9/04/39/b904396650d9a216fd3a470aa4266c43.jpg)
[From this source](http://community.seattletimes.nwsource.com/archive/?date=19930731&slug=1713646):
>Written by Dr. Robert E. Gould, the article disputed what it called “the false impression that an IV drug user passes the AIDS virus on to his or her partner through vaginal intercourse.”
>Gould’s article decried “the continually mounting fear and false alarm that may make it difficult for any of us to enjoy sex.” Soon afterward, the magazine’s editor, Helen Gurley Brown, defended the article on national TV.
>”We have come so far in relieving women of fear and fright and guilt,” she said, “and now along comes this thing to scare the daylights out of everybody forever. And since there isn’t too much proof that AIDS is spread through heterosexual intercourse, I think our side should be presented, too.”
>Brown was speaking on the ABC program “Nightline.” Host Ted Koppel zeroed in on the key point during the Jan. 21, 1988, broadcast: “When your readership, 10 million mostly young women, read an article like that, and draw the conclusion that, therefore, maybe they don’t need to urge their partners to use condoms, do you feel entirely comfortable with that?”
>”I feel quite comfortable with this,” Brown replied.
And then… it happened again
>Despite all the criticism, since then, Cosmopolitan has devoted scant coverage to AIDS risks. And the magazine continued its don’t-worry be-happy approach by publishing a lengthy article in March 1992, “AIDS: The Real Story About Risk,” which again downplayed AIDS dangers.
>Sometimes, for ideological reasons, political commentators have also denied the reality that AIDS puts most people at risk. In November 1991, Patrick Buchanan wrote a scornful syndicated column about what he called “The Myth of Heterosexual AIDS.”
>Promoting his political theology of hatred toward gay people, Buchanan complained about those who “want to ignore the traditional morality, but never pay the price.” A few months later, campaigning for the Republican presidential nomination, Buchanan told radio listeners: “AIDS is nature’s retribution for violating the laws of nature.”
Rosevillian: Odds of a woman contracting HIV from vaginal sex with an HIV positive man: 1 in 1,250
Odds of a man contracting HIV from vaginal sex with an HIV positive woman: 1 in 2,500
Odds of HIV from a BJ: negligible.
Handjobs are good to go.
Edit: *Unprotected*
austinmiles: I hate to say it but I think that Magic Johnson contracting HIV was the best thing that could have happened for AIDS. It changed the dialog almost immediately.
pfeifits: I’m afraid that people who make decisions about their health based on Cosmo articles are probably not going to do that well at life anyways.
Titus____Pullo: People are shitting on Cosmo here and normally I would be the last person to defend them but most redditors don’t understand just how ignorant we were about AIDS/HIV in the 80’s/90’s. Totally different time. I was told by a science teacher at school Magic shouldn’t play in the NBA because HIV might transmit through sweat glands.
Jslip: It was also accompanied by a survey that told you whether you were ‘sassy’, ‘naughty ‘, ‘dominant’, or ‘a sweetie ‘.
GoodnightElizabeth: To be fair, missionaries have a fairly low HIV rate.
JimiSlew3: I work at a University and talked with a Bug Guy who was in grad school working on mosquitoes when HIV / AIDS first hit the MMWR [(morbidity and mortality weekly report)] (https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/hiv_aids20.html). He told me half the grad school was excited about federal funding for bugs and the other half were thinking about building survival bunkers / toasting the end of the world in case it turned out to be transmitted via mosquito.
DingDongInDaPingPong: So while it’s an outright lie that HIV cannot be contracted by a woman…there’s a twinge of truth in that HIV is very hard for a man/woman to contract from one another through traditional sex.
While HIV is certainly existent in heterosexual populations, statistically speaking, the risk of getting it through vaginal intercourse is nowhere near what it is for gay intercourse.
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**You can certainly get HIV through straight sex but if you compare the numbers, the risk is astronomically higher for gay partners.**
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The reason why HIV was originally believed to be a “gay disease” is that anal sex is more high risk. Because your anus has so many blood vessels and because these can easily be broken during anal intercourse, the passage of HIV infected fluids through the anal cavity made it a much greater danger for the gay community.
So while stating that women aren’t at risk of HIV from traditional sex, the idea that gay men are equally at risk of contracting HIV to straight women is definitely not true.
quackadilly11: I read the other day of a conspiracy theory that Cosmopolitan magazine purposely promotes bad dating advice to women in order to keep them single and buying their magazines
I_are_facepalm: Spoiler alert: they were wrong
ONLY_EATS_A–: I only eat ass
pxtleo: Attention: If you or a loved one contracted HIV while in the missionary position, you may be entitled to financial compensation.
sglville: A while back I found an aids brochure from the 80s and it basically said that if you were not a gay man or an iv drug user you didn’t have to worry about getting aids.
TransGirlInCharge: This is what happens when the government gives no shits about AIDS and HIV information.
Look up some of the shit the Reagan admin did to try and not talk about AIDS. Ignoring internal memos was the tip of the fucking iceberg.
Omnipotent_Goose: When you read Cosmopolitan, you have 100% of skipping straight to AIDS, because that’s what that magazine is.