BootmanLA

1. Hepatitis is a disease involving inflammation of the liver that comes in multiple forms, the most common/widespread of which are Hepatitis A, Hepatitis B, and Hepatitis C (each of which is caused by a different virus). Which type he has/had had a lot of bearing on your risk. Hepatitis A is spread through the stools (ie poop) of an infected person. As such, coming into contact with his stools, IF he had hepatitis A, would put you at risk (though that is not the same thing as "infecting you"). There is no treatment for Hepatitis A, but once you've had it, you can't get it again (generally speaking). Hepatitis B is spread through bodily fluids - primarily blood, although other bodily fluids can contain the virus as well. Because this virus is spread through fluid contact, it's much harder for a top to contract it from anal sex unless the bottom bleeds while being fucked. There is no effective treatment for Hepatitis B, but it can be managed if it becomes a chronic disease. Hepatitis C is also spread through bodily fluids. However, it is much more serious than Hepatitis B. There is a cure for Hepatitis C, but it's expensive and requires a long regimen of oral medication. 2. There are vaccines available to PREVENT Hep-A/Hep-B infections. There is no vaccine for Hep-C, but it is much more rarely spread through sex. 3. You mention getting PEP. It's certainly your choice whether to bareback or not - or to restrict yourself to oral sex. That said, if you get vaccinated for Hep-A/Hep-B (assuming you did not contract them this time), you will be protected from that. You should also look into the HPV vaccine. With those, and with PrEP, you should be protected against most of the viral STIs. 4. The bacterial ones (syphilis, gonorrhea) are harder to prevent (although there is some work being done with antibiotic PEP (taking antibiotics after sex to ward off infection). It's true that only you can determine what level of risk you're willing to take, sexually. But I will note that it's not as easy as it sounds to avoid fucking - the desire will still be there. Unless you have a will of iron, you're better off taking reasonable steps to protect yourself instead. 5. Lastly, I'll note: sticking to "guys you know well" is no guarantee of anything. First, you can't really know who all they may be fucking when you're not around. They may travel and engage in a lot more risky sex while there, or they may "entertain" someone else who has an STI of some sort (even without either of them knowing it) and thus share it around your group of "guys you know well." Closed loops of sexual activity are seldom truly closed.

You could use sandpaper, but I suspect that's not going to help much given the typical weave/knit of the pouch. Sandpapering the crotch of 501 jeans was a thing back in the 1970's and early 1980's, but that fabric is much more tightly woven and the idea was to make the fabric thinner to show a crotch bulge better. I would wash it repeatedly. If it's white, wash it in every load of white clothes you wash, preferably with hot water, In between, you might consider washing it with rougher clothes like jeans. The abrasiveness of the jeans might well soften the texture up some more.

Because you accused me of saying something I didn't say only to shoot it down. THAT is the real "straw man" argument - a concept you seem to not really understand. A "straw man" argument is when you create a straw man - something that didn't exist before - only to shoot it down, and pretend you won the original argument. That's EXACTLY what YOU did, not me. You are free to argue whatever you want, but don't drag me into it by alleging I said something I did not. As for your insane, fucked-up idea that I have "foreskin phobia" or whatever, here's another hint: don't assume how I feel about anything, because you're probably not capable of figuring it out.

This would be laughable if it weren't so pathetically sad. Honey, if you look at American and western European culture and can't find any examples of "male masculinity" being promoted, you're spending too much time in the drag department. Or navel-gazing.

Also, just for the record: "English" is capitalized when referring to a language. There should be a space after the period, and I have no idea what "cizsing" could possibly mean. Maybe you're trying to give us an example of falling behind in English?

We've been falling behind most developed countries in those areas for more than 40 years - my entire adult life. When I was a teenager the mantra was that the Japanese, particularly, were studying so much harder than our students do that they were going to run the world in short order. Didn't work out that way. But in any event, one of the reasons we've (on average) been so behind other societies in our educational achievements is the appalling history of segregated (and, for the minority kids, grossly inferior) education in this country. And while "legal" segregation - forcing students into separate schools by race - was struck down, "de facto" segregation has continued apace, aided and abetted by governments that have consciously maintained disparate educational systems, mostly in the name of "local control". What that usually means is that each locality - rich or poor - is expected to pick up most of the cost of educating the students of that locality, and so of course areas with lots of richer (and usually whiter) people can provide much better education for their kids than the poorer (and usually browner/blacker) cities or counties. The state officials can simply say "But we're not discriminating against black students - we're just letting the locals decide how much they want to spend on education." If you want an example of Critical Race Theory and how it works in reality, in fact, you'd be hard pressed to find a better one than how we've maintained racial disparities in education despite ostensibly making such discrimination illegal.

This site blocks visitors whose IP address resolves to a Utah or Louisiana location, because of restrictive laws in those states (see this topic for more information).

There are no bathhouses in New Orleans any longer. The last one closed many, many years ago. There are a few ABS's in seedier parts of the suburbs but none in an area I'd want to set foot in.

While the name hasn't changed, southern US history textbooks (and by extension, those used in much of the United States) papered over "slavery as the root cause of the Civil War" for decades. Widely used and approved high school history textbooks taught concepts like "the slaves loved and depended on their masters for protection" and "slavery taught many slaves skills and trades they were able to use to better themselves" and other apologetic horseshit. And when it comes to the war itself, it was frequently painted as due to some vague concept of "state's rights". What right was in question, for the states? The right of the state's residents to own slaves. What right were the Confederate states most worried about losing? The right to own slaves. What rationale did almost every southern state cite, in their declarations of secession, as the cause for removing themselves from the Union? Preservation of white supremacy and the right to own slaves. I support the teaching of Critical Race Theory - AS IT IS PROPERLY DEFINED AND UNDERSTOOD, which means not in any way, shape or form in the caricature presented by GOP idiots and mouth-breathing "conservative" shitheads - in the setting in which it is intended - that is, advanced collegiate courses and law schools. "Critical Race Theory" - again, understood properly - has NEVER been taught in elementary or secondary schools. But opportunistic GOP/conservative divisive operators - like most GOP politicians today - have managed to convince poorly educated Americans that "CRT" is something else entirely AND that it is being used to brainwash young minds. Nothing could be farther from the truth. These politicians attempt to make "critical" mean "criticizing" - and then further twist the phrase to suggest that CRT means teaching white students to be critical of, and ashamed of, their whiteness. "Critical", in this case, means "essential" - as in "Critical Care Unit" in a hospital, or as in "It is critical to eat food regularly if you don't want to die of starvation." And in this case, the phrase, as a whole, means that studying the role of race in American history is critical - that is, essential - to understanding almost any problem in contemporary culture - that racism, historically speaking, underlies so much of what's wrong with America. That doesn't mean "hate white people." It means "Understand what was done in the past, and how those effects linger in hundreds of ways today, often unseen," so that we can solve those problems at their root and not just at the symptomatic level. That sort of understanding, of course, would doom the prospects of the Republican Party, so it's no surprise that they're willing to malign and misrepresent CRT as a threat to children. "Think of the children!" is their go-to method of distorting reality on almost every social issue there is.

Which, specifically, "North American and European cultures" have feminized men? I'd be fascinated to know. Or do you mean any time we socialize men into not grunting, belching, farting, and otherwise being obnoxious boors means they're "feminized"?

I am not saying that circumcision prevents HIV. Please do not attribute statements to me that I did not make. Challenge what I said, not what you imagine, in your mind, that I said. To quote -with extraneous clauses omitted: "the study in question...SUGGESTS that being circumcised provides SOME additional protections over being uncircumcised" (emphasis added). I do not know how you translate "SUGGESTS" and "SOME" into "prevents". Maybe a dictionary is in order here.

I get your point to a certain degree, but your post reeks of pre-sexual revolution ideas like women not wanting to have sex outside of marriage or a committed relationship. The idea that straight men can't freely have lots of sex is by no means universal. And as for straight men not having raw sex: Dude, that's exactly why the pill was invented (and it's been around for 60 years), and even beyond that, the huge number of unintended pregnancies - whether carried to completion or not - kinda makes the point that there's an awful lot of bare sex going on with straight people. Maybe it's true that on average, a typical straight guy won't get as much random sex as a typical gay guy, but even averages can be misleading. I know a buttload of gay men who won't hop into bed (figuratively speaking) with random guys, saving sex for someone they're actually interested in dating. And I know quite a few women who have no problem sleeping with a guy at a first encounter if she finds him attractive enough.

Actions always have consequences, sometimes minor and sometimes not. If someone isn't prepared to be judged for what he's said, maybe he shouldn't say it. Because free speech (as a concept, not tied to a particular legal implementation like the inapplicable-here First Amendment) necessarily means others can speak too, including judging what the first person said or wrote. And as for "if not here, then where?" I would point out that even this site has rules, so it's not a case of "anything goes". There's a huge difference between (A) providing a site where people can discuss behavior that may be frowned upon by society at large, but which isn't harmful to anyone else and (B) providing a place for people to brag about doing truly malicious things. Celebrate being a shit person if you want, but don't demand that no one else call you out for being a shit person.

Indeed. Back in 2016, I was happy to support Hillary Clinton, even though I understand a lot of generally progressive people had issues with some aspect of her candidacy - issues that were largely ginned up by her opponents, rather than being true "issues". What I could never grasp is how so many people who ordinarily would have held their noses and voted for the Democrat anyway, failed to do so or in some cases even switched sides to vote for Mango Mussolini. I did a lot of detailed analysis of the trifecta of states she lost that are widely considered to have tipped the election to Trump (WI, MI, and PA). The biggest takeaway is that a lot of Obama support simply failed to turn out to vote for Clinton. Partly that might be that people thought she had the election in the bag. Partly it may have been old-fashioned misogyny - people have hated her since her days in Arkansas as the governor's wife - because she was an ambitious woman. But if anyone has any doubts as to how things would be different if she'd been president: We wouldn't have any of the three turds that Trump put on the Supreme Court, for one thing. I don't think even Mitch McConnell would have blocked a viable Clinton nominee for four years for Scalia's seat. Kennedy might not have resigned, but he was among the more tolerable conservative votes on the Court. And Ginsburg might well have resigned early enough that McConnell wouldn't have had to block her replacement. In other words, we might well have had Sotomayor, Kagan, Breyer, and at least two, maybe three other progressives/liberals on the Court instead of six conservatives and just three liberals. We wouldn't be wondering if these people were going to reverse Roe. We wouldn't be wondering if these people were going to reverse Obergefell. We wouldn't be looking at further gutting of the Voting Rights Act. We wouldn't be looking at gutting almost all firearms laws. And we almost certainly wouldn't be looking at the incredibly insane Independent State Legislature cases. How anyone can justify failing to vote against this kind of crap is beyond me.

If we define "sex" as a sexual encounter with another person, I would argue every single person who has had sex got a "hands on" introduction. Everyone who's had sex had a first time, and no matter how much porn someone has read/watched, I think it's highly likely the more experienced partner, in such cases, did some basic introduction work to the act in question.

FWIW, I don't disagree with your approach in general, @JimInWisc, and I recognize the dynamics in play that you report, @BlackDude(though I would say that those generalities do not always hold true for the Democrats). That said: elections are, in essence, a zero-sum game. In the end, one person wins, one person loses. More often than not, I'm not particularly inclined to vote for either candidate, regardless of party, but I do recognize that one of the two is going to hold that office when the dust settles. And in every case, even if I can't find a reason to vote FOR either candidate, I can almost always find a reason to vote AGAINST one of the two candidates. It's rare that both candidates are equally bad, even if neither is someone I'd pick from an open field of thousands of possibilities.

I'm not sure if you can separate party leadership - which are the elected officials who govern the party - and its funding base. The leadership accepts the policy goals of the funding base - big business and the very wealthy, basically - as policy goals for the party, whether formally and loudly or informally and quietly. But the party leadership also knows that tax cuts for the rich and benefit cuts for the working class are not popular even with their electoral base. So the party leadership manufactures divides on social issues - as I've noted, historically race-based, but also sexual orientation-wise and now trans rights. And almost always, it's in the name of protecting the children. As in "Would you want your kids to go to school with one?" when it was black people in the 1950's and 1960's. Or "Would you want your kid taught by one?" when it was gay people in the 1970's and 1980's. And now it's "Would you want your kids to see these people in a library reading to your kids?" when it's trans people and drag performers. The specific language keeps shifting, because as Lee Atwater candidly admitted in 1981, conservatives could say "N----- N------ N------" in 1954, but not in 1968, so they had to switch to code words like "forced busing" and "state's rights". And by the time of Reagan, they had to use terms like "welfare queen" and "cutting welfare fraud", but the underlying message was always "white supremacy". But it's always safer for them to hide behind "protecting children."

Harper became Prime Minister on February 6, 2006. Same-sex marriage became legal in the province of Ontario on June 10, 2003, nearly three years earlier. You're simply misinformed about what happened under Harper. Same-sex marriages had ALREADY been legalized before his government took power. His government attempted to "reopen the question" - that is, repeal the previously enacted legislation that created same-sex marriage nationwide - and it LOST that vote. Harper may, or may not, have been personally opposed to or in favor of same-sex marriage - I don't pretend to know what he believed himself. But I do know that he had nothing to do with it being legalized either in Ontario or in the country as a whole. The calendar simply refutes the entire premise.

Not true. First, passage of the Civil Marriage Act happened AFTER courts - not Canada's parliament, not provincial government - had mandated recognition of same-sex marriage in eight of the ten provinces and one of the three territories. By the time the government "acted" same-sex marriage was already the law of the land for >90% of Canadians. The act in question merely extended the status quo to the less than 10% of Canadians who weren't already covered. Moreover: the act in question (the Civil Marriage Act) was introduced under the PREVIOUS government, a coalition headed by the Liberal Party, and it was during THAT government's leadership that the Act passed the House of Commons, the Senate, AND received royal assent - all in 2005. The Conservative government didn't take power until 2006. Under them, in fact, the CONSERVATIVE government tried to UNDO the Civil Marriage Act, and was handed a defeat in Parliament. So basically your entire statement is incorrect. Calendars are tricky things, but it's a lot easier if you just focus on the years so you can see the Act passed in 2005 and the conservative government was elected in 2006.

Another patient - this is the fifth - has had HIV eradicated from his system following a stem cell transplant - a transplant in his case necessitated by treatment for leukemia. As others have noted, while stem cell transplants aren't going to be in the works for people in general, the fact that this technique continues to work may open up some new frontiers in treatment of, and eventually curing, HIV. [think before following links] https://thehill.com/policy/healthcare/3866819-fifth-person-cured-of-hiv-after-stem-cell-transplant-researchers-say/

I will agree with you that the party, on its own, does not do much, if anything, for people. I will, however, acknowledge that "the party" is shorthand for "Elected members of the party". If we accept that shorthand - which I think EQP would - then what the Democratic party has done FOR us, and what the Republican party has done TO us, are a lot clearer.

By "partly" I mean that I don't think the Republican party can reform itself the way you hope. I think it's an impossibility at this point.

"My" last Veep? "I" don't have a "Veep" of my own, last I checked - could someone verify that for me, please. But since the only vice-president in recent years to have served as a state governor is Mike Pence, I will kindly ask you NOT to refer to him as "my" anything. I haven't voted for or supported a Republican for ANYTHING in decades, and you really, really, SERIOUSLY need to learn to read what I write and stop inferring ignorant takes on it, because you're just embarrassing yourself at this point. But by all means, point out hypocrisy. I do as well. And feel free to call yourself gay, queer, radical queer, or a little teapot, short and stout, for all I care. You're free to self-identify as you wish. What you're not free to do is to pretend I said something that I did not, and have it go unchallenged.

I partly agree. But I think there are a few problems prohibiting the R's fixing their problems. First, there's a hard core of support for Mango Mussolini that will not turn out to vote if he's pushed out of the running - ESPECIALLY if he continues ranting that he's been cheated by machines or mail-in vote fraud or stuffed ballot boxes or whatever. Call that chunk of the R electorate the "Trump Chumps". They didn't vote before 2016 and probably won't vote if he's not on the ballot. Second, there's a divide between those in the party who think the problem is their positions - a minority within the R's - and those who think the problem is just Trump being Trump. These latter ones are the ones who try to placate Trump while also boosting DeSantis, Haley, or whomever - hoping another far-right candidate without Trump's criminal baggage will be able to defeat a Democrat. The former - those who recognize the party has lost its collective mind - aren't in sufficient number to see that a more moderate nominee gets the nod. The base is composed of far-right fascist types - who earnestly push for extreme positions - and the Trump Chumps, who don't have much of an opinion on anything except that Trump is their guy, regardless of what his positions are. What that tells me is that no one but Trump is going to unify that base; anyone else taking the lead is going to see a big chunk of the base stay home - the millions of older, first-time voters in 2016 and 2020 who voted for Trump and only Trump. That's why I think the party has to die in order for a new party to arise on the right. The Whigs had to die after the 1852 election debacle which they lost, 254-42 in the electoral college, in order for their remnants, the Free Soil Party, and others to create the new Republican Party. We're coming up, I think, on something similar - not necessarily by 2024, but in my lifetime.

Because you keep seeing things I'm not saying instead of what I actually write. I never even HINTED that the GOP has ever done anything for gay people. I don't think it has. But you seem determined to paint anyone who disagrees with your radical views as a sellout, a quisling, a collaborator with the enemy. And to be CLEAR, since that seems to be an issue here: I am not suggesting we work with the GOP in any way, shape or form. I'm pointing out (like many others have) that just because the GOP party platform - for the institution - is anti-gay does not automatically translate to "All Republicans Hate Gays". It's equally possible - in my view, much more likely - that the majority of the GOP members doesn't "HATE" gays, but they're willing to tolerate the party's anti-gay stance in order to achieve their other goals. Whether it's because they believe the anti-gay stuff doesn't hurt them or their families directly (so why care about it?), or whatever, ACCEPTANCE of something does not equal SUPPORT of something. As many of my pro-choice friends point out, they themselves are not "pro-abortion" - they would never have one themselves. But they accept that abortions will occur, and don't see it as their place to dictate to others that the governmental position should be what they themselves believe. I know a number of Republicans who feel the same way about gay issues - they would never discriminate against a gay person themselves, but they accept that others do, and don't see it as their place to dictate to others that the governmental position should be what they themselves believe. That's not necessarily hate. It may be hate on the part of those *actively pushing* the policy, but not necessarily on the part of everyone who accepts the policy for their group.