The New Anal Lube Debate
Today Queerty is reporting on a post from the LA Times' health blog about a new study that suggests that using anal lubricants may actually increase your risk of contracting STDs, including HIV, during anal intercourse. From the original LA Times post:
"Epidemiologist Pamina H. Gorbach of UCLA's Geffen School of Medicine and her colleagues studied 879 men and women between October 2006 and December 2008. The participants were tested for gonorrhea and chlamydia and queried about their sexual behavior in private, computer-based interviews, which have been shown to elicit more truthful answers than face-to-face interviews. Of the 879 participants, 229 men and 192 women reported having receptive anal intercourse in the past year, and about half said they used lubricants. When the team analyzed the data, Gorbach told a Pittsburgh microbicides meeting, they found that those who used lubricants were three times as likely to have contracted a rectal infection.
A partial explanation for the increased risk may have been provided by Charlene Dezzutti, a reproductive science specialist at the University of Pittsburgh, and her colleagues. They studied the effects of six of the most popular lubricants on rectal cells and tissues in laboratory dishes. They found that many of the products had high concentrations of dissolved salts and sugars that draw water out of cells, weakening and even killing the cells. Some of them even stripped away significant portions of the surface epithelial cells on the rectal tissue, the layer of cells that serves as a protective barrier. They also studied the effect of the lubricants on beneficial bacteria in the rectum."
Now, what we—along with some of Queerty's commentors—find troubling about all this is that neither Queerty nor the original LA Times post mention anything about condom use. We cannot imagine that condom use wasn't factored into the UCLA study, yet all the article says is that "those [study participants] who used lubricants were three times as likely to have contracted a rectal infection." And the University of Pittsburgh study merely looked at the way lube reacted to rectal cells in lab dishes.
So here we have Queerty—and the LA Times—trumpeting, in true gossipy, sensationalist blogosphere fashion, the fact that anal lubes might increase your risk of HIV infection. And yet, if we learned anything from a million sex ed classes—back when we wanted to be sexologists—and from reading everything Tristan Taormino ever wrote, it's that using water or silicon-based lube with condoms during anal sex decreases the risk of the condom breaking. Conventional wisdom was that the lube would also decrease the risk of the rectal tissue tearing. But while these new studies suggest that dissolved salts and sugars in lubricants may in fact damage rectal cells, so far we haven't read anything that suggests that silicon and water-based lubes increase your risk factor when used with condoms. Plus, we find it pretty frustrating that these studies don't seem to have made a distinction between silicon and water-based lubes, which are not only totally practically different, but also chemically different.
Bottom line, we really hope that Queerty's...hundreds?...of readers don't stop using lube, sensibly, with condoms, simply because of a rather lazy, sensationalist blog post about another lazy, sensationalist blog post about a surprisingly incomplete study that leave a lot of questions unanswered.
Read more: Lubricants may increase disease risk of anal sex, studies show [LA Times]
So Now Anal Lube Increases Your Risk of Getting HIV? [Queerty]
