Why do guys prefer bareback sex

San Francisco Bay area psychologist Walt Odets was one of the first mental health professionals to question why gay men who had thus far escaped becoming infected with HIV were placing themselves at risk for becoming so. Interviewer Did you think about it later? For one thing, sex without condoms feels much better and is vastly more spontaneous than having to stop the action, unwrap a condom, and properly put one on. These factors illustrate how intrapsychic and interpersonal issues converge to influence an individual's likelihood of taking sexual risks. In the San Francisco study, fewer men reported engaging in barebacking when the behavior was defined as intentional unprotected anal intercourse with a non-primary partner. Without gaining access to the various meanings that each man who barebacks brings to specific sexual situations and acts, there is no way that each individual can be certain that he is making the kinds of decisions that will leave him feeling good about himself, his sexual partners, and the acts they engage in together. He was so worried about whether or not he had become infected during a recent weekend-long sexual orgy that it was interfering with his very demanding job. Barebacking as an Example of "Sensation-Seeking" Again and again, we return to the poignant question of why a person would put his life in jeopardy for pleasure. I mean this was even better because I came inside him. Early in the second decade of the AIDS epidemic Odets wrote, "Now that a decade of prohibition has made semen exchange relatively unusual and 'special,' it has become all the more powerful and meaningful" Odets, , p. This seems to mesh perfectly with her previous thesis about bareback sex being related to meeting the need some gay men have to be conspicuous about not being part of the mainstream.