Who knew?
This is what single people do in December: they put on cute, form-fitting red or white-based outfits, bundle up, and attend several Christmas parties where they drink too many cocktails and possibly wind up having sex with someone who looks great in bar light but maybe not so great in light-light. It’s one of the better aspects of being single over the holidays, right up there with not having to answer your significant other’s family’s questions about why you’re not pregnant, or engaged, or why you don’t have health insurance.
Because of this trend, the holiday season is an important time for single people everywhere to keep in mind one of the great truths of adulthood: When people drink a lot, they’re more likely to have sex—specifically, sex without a condom.
That drinking and unsafe sex are associated is obvious (not that that’s ever stopped anyone from investing time and money into studying something), but as everyone who made it through Freshman year of college year knows, correlation—even between alcohol intake and unsafe sex—doesn’t prove causation.
That’s what this study published in Addiction journal’s January issue is about. Through a series of experiments researchers at Centre for Addiction and Mental Health in Toronto, Canada proved that alcohol consumption increases a person’s desire to engage in unsafe sex and is thus specifically responsible for helping spread HIV.
Alcohol consumption, especially heavy drinking, has long been associated with HIV incidence. However, there have been doubts about the cause-and-effect relationship. Researchers weren’t sure if alcohol consumption caused HIV via unsafe sex, or whether certain personality traits in individuals, such as sensation-seeking or a disposition to risky behaviour in general, would lead to both alcohol use and unsafe sex.
The study, published in the January issue of the journal Addiction, summarizes the results of 12 experiments that tested this cause-and-effect relationship in a systematic way. After pooling the results, the researchers found that alcohol consumption affects decision-making, and that this impact rises with the amount of alcohol consumed. The more alcohol that participants consumed, the higher their willingness to engage in unsafe sex.
Using the same results, alcohol consumption can be blamed for other sex-related problems from HPV to unwanted pregnancy to unrelenting feelings of guilt and shame.
That’s the thing about alcohol—the more you drink, the more you do the stuff that feels good but that you’ll probably regret. It may be bad for your mind and your health—and public health for that matter—but at least it’s fodder for lots of internet studies.
Just keep it in mind when you’re spreading holiday cheer at the office Christmas party this year—for every Peppermint Schnapps drink you consume, you’re statistically more likely to spread (or catch) something much less cheerful while you’re at it.
[Via The Atlantic]
