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The best way to prevent sexually transmitted diseases is to focus sex education not just around safety but also around pleasure — that is, making condoms “sexy,” new research says.
Researchers from the University of Oxford, UK and the World Health Organization set out to find out how effective it would be to incorporate sexual pleasure into sexual health education efforts. Billions of dollars have been invested in sexual health services and programs, the authors said, but sexual pleasure has been “inadequately addressed,” despite its positive benefits.
Analyzing studies on the effects of various sexual health programs that either emphasized or did not emphasize sexual pleasure, the researchers found that those programs that focused on pleasure “significantly improved” participants’ condom use.
The majority of programs the researchers analyzed discussed sexual pleasure in the context of behavioral skills, such as “making condom use fun or sexy” and “using lubrication to enhance sexual pleasure,” the researchers said. They found that doing so led to behavioral changes.
This improvement was seen in a variety of settings, including groups in the US designed for men who have sex with men and in youth and adolescent sexual health courses in Spain and Brazil. Their findings were published in the journal PLOS One.
Improving condom use outcomes, the researchers found, also reduced the incidence of sexually transmitted infections and diseases.
More than 1 million sexually transmitted infections are acquired every day worldwide, according to WHO. Most of these cases are asymptomatic, which can lead to longer-term problems for those who contract them, including an increased risk of HIV, fetal and birth complications, cancer and death. The best way to prevent it, according to the WHO and health care providers, is to wear a condom during sex.
One of the pleasure interventions they analyzed saw a 50% reduction in the incidence of HIV/STDs compared to a more traditional intervention, the researchers found.
THE World Health Organisation has said that good sexual health is fundamental to people’s overall health and well-being.
One of the representatives of the international organization, study co-author Lianne Gonsalves, said in a statement that traditionally, educational programs teach safe sex by focusing on risk reduction and disease prevention, but also ignore how safe sex can ” also to promote intimacy, pleasure, consent. and prosperity.”
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