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It's because all men secretly want to pay child support.

For men with smaller or chopped foreskins, condoms interfere with sexual pleasure and frankly, when I'm in bed with a beautiful naked girl, the last thing I need is for a cock sock. Pretty naked girl overrides sanity, to the point where if the condom gets in the way, the logical answer is to rip it off and go without.

Slashdot, news for nerds. Now bringing you, sex for geeks.

Maybe because it feels like you're trying to mate with a garden hose.

Because it feels like picking your nose while wearing a latex glove....?

I will take that $400k now, thanks.

They smell bad, they distract from the spontenaity of the moment, they decrease sensitivity, they're never handy at the moment you want them, they're disgusting to take off, they're awkward to dispose of.

Despite that they're a good trade when weighed against the possibility of 18 years of child support, or your penis turning green and falling off.

it can make your dick go limp

its the same as being in a sexually arousing situation and suddenly being asked to fill out form 1040A and pay your taxes right now

(with apologies to all of the IRS fetishists)

Stimulus....package

Too easy. (not hard?)

STOP NOW!

So, if only TWO PEOPLE on government health care (Medicaid, Medicare, Veterans or Prisoners) DON'T get AIDS as a result of this study, then it saved us money.

I'd say that's a pretty good investment.

Condoms are the biggest con around. You have to buy them in a three pack, you use one to test for fit, then you notice they have a use-by date only four years away!!

Because bareback is the way mother nature intended and it feels a hell of allot better. My first girlfriend at first insisted on using condoms each time and I had no problem with that. Then one night right in the heat of the moment my rubber broke while putting it on. She pretty much just said to hell with it and we did it with no condom. At that point we liked the feeling so much better that we stopped using condoms and I just pulled out every time. After a scare she decided to go on birth control which increased the fun as I could now finish the job without worrying about being a father. She put on some weight (like 7 pounds) and that was enough for her to quit the pill. We went out for three years and contraception was only used for a total of about 6 months of that with no pregnancy. Not too bad. Although after her I always use rubbers after learning a friend got his girlfriend pregnant even though he pulled out.

So its a big fucking no duh as to why men don't want to use rubbers. I still wish I could be that naive and uncaring but I have to be smart.

I knew when I saw this news item that it would turn out to be dishonest. There is one very obvious reason why men don't like to wear condoms ("it doesn't feel as good...duh"). So I suspected immediately that this isn't actually what the study is about, and it's just a matter of a politician or lobbyist phrasing it this way to try to score a cheap shot at the expense of the public welfare. Because, of course, there is a huge public benefit to condoms: The reduce unwanted pregnancies, which often end up imposing a substantial financial and social burden on the public. And they reduce the spread of diseases that also end up costing the public money, not to mention placing those dear to us in peril--sometimes mortal peril.

And while men don't much like condoms, there are many reasons for them to want to use them--to protect themselves against disease, to protect themselves against unwanted financial obligations, and even out of consideration for their partner's well-being.

So any change that would shift that balance a bit to encourage correct usage of condoms, even by a small amount, could provide a huge public benefit.

But of course, there are always going to be some selfish people who don't care about protecting other people's health, or reducing the financial burden on the public from diseases and unwanted pregnancies. All they see is a chance to score a benefit for themselves or their own cause--and if it ultimately at the expense of the public, well, that's not their problem.

I discovered that housepaint is made from latex. Condoms are made from latex.

Now I keep a can of Sears Weather-beater next to my bed.

Erick: Hey Steph, I'll give you $100,000.00 if you sleep with me a few times.
Stephanie: How many times is a few?
Erick: Until we reach statistical significance.
Steph: Cash?
Erick: Sure.

Two weeks later, Erick pockets the other 300 Grand.

... and the study mentioned in the article makes perfect sense. The article is propaganda that intentionally misunderstands what the study is about in order to stir up their readership.

In one of our studies of (mostly queer) sexually active teenagers. One of the key things we look at is condom use knowledge and condom errors. Most people know that they should use a condom if they're having sex, but quite a large swath of the population doesn't know how to *properly* use them and what they do and do not protect against. Some people are perfectly willing to use condoms, but they get frustrated because they're using them wrong, and so the condoms break or come off, and they stop using them out of frustration.

One measure we give is we have 20 different "steps" for using a condom properly, and they're out of order, and some are not real steps. Out of ~250 teenagers, most of whom have taken sex ed, been exposed to safer sex info all their lives, only 6 got that exercise 100% correct (all real steps in proper order, all fake steps removed), and only 42 got all the real steps in the correct order (but kept some of the fake steps). The kids have been taught, but retention isn't so hot - we're coming up with better ways to teach this.

Another measure we have is taking an inventory of experiences with recent condom use, and most of our participants report some level of difficulty with condom use, with most of those reports coming along the lines of it being too confusing to remember all of the steps they were taught while in the heat of the moment etc. They want to use condoms, but they've learned all of that in a very "academic" environment - we're trying to develop interventions that will help teach people how to handle themselves when they're not at their most rational.

A final measure we give which is related to condom use is an HIV & STI knowledge quiz with true, false and "don't know" answers. Most of our participants score 70% or better, but certain segments average scores below 30%. By identifying the lagging segments and then examining what it is that is leading to this dearth of HIV & STI knowledge, we're able to come up with plans to get this information out to those groups because the current techniques clearly aren't working.

It's neither an obvious nor simple area of research, despite what some in this thread will say. $400k to potentially save quite a few lives (or protect the quality of many lives) is a bargain. If you're a wretched excuse for a human being and you think that people who get HIV "deserve" it, you probably don't care that a lifetime of treatment for a single case of HIV infection will run around $400-500k (minimum) so this kind of research is also cost effective from that standpoint.