TOXIC SEX TOYS:
You spend $30-$40 dollars on a new vibrator or sex toy, rush home to open and use it only to find an overwhelmingly toxic plastic smell wafting from your love toy. Most people wash it off, ignore the smell and use it anyway. My mantra is: if it smells toxic, it probably is toxic. A large number of sex toys and vibrators have been constructed with plastic products that contain pthallates, a family of chemicals known to disrupt hormones and stimulate the growth of certain cancers.
Since we worry about what our water bottles are constructed with, what’s in our food, what kind of food containers and serving utensils we use, why not be equally concerned about the contents of objects that we use to penetrate into various orifices of the body?
Pthallate-free sex toys are usually more expensive and are not as readily available as some of the cheaper models. So instead of tossing all of your old products away, toss a condom on top. The condom provides a barrier between your body and the toxic plastic tickler.
Even though a German study found that using the sex toy for periods under an hour reduces the risk, in my opinion, that’s still too much risk. Add either a latex or polyurethane condom to your sex toys and it will not only protect you from a toxic vibe, but it will also help keep the clean-up process to a minimum. TEEN TRAINING:
When it comes to HIV/STI prevention & teen pregnancy prevention, culture dictates that it is the woman’s responsibility to manage the pregnancy thing and the man’s responsibility to manage the condom thing. She’s supposed to take the pills and he brings the condoms. Besides being sexist, this thought process is quite unproductive. Statistics show that people do not use condoms consistently and correctly; the largest group of newly diagnosed cases of HIV are found in young minorities below the age of twenty-five and parents need to start training their young men to use condoms. . .because the schools and the government will not.
