Official websites use. Share sensitive information only on official, secure websites. New York, NY E-mail: ks cumc. For about 30 years, soon after the onset of the AIDS epidemic, sexual-health messaging has emphasized personal responsibility for using condoms to protect from acquiring or transmitting HIV or other sexually transmitted infections. We analyzed accounts—excuses and justifications—from qualitative interviews with adults who had unprotected sex in the past 3 months with at least two different partners met online ages 18—50, mean: Many participants made excuses that aimed to defer responsibility for unprotected sex: they claimed that consistently practicing safer sex was impossible, that they got carried away by sexual passion, that they were inebriated, that they were influenced by emotional or psychological problems, or they put fault on their partners.
Participants also provided justifications, claiming that unsafe sex had been acceptable because the risks taken were likely minimal or negotiated with their partner.
Understanding the accounts heterosexual adults offer to excuse and justify condomless sex with partners met online can be helpful in developing prevention messages that debunk these explanations for their behavior. M any studies have documented how men who have sex with men, who use hookup websites and mobile applications, are at high risk for HIV and sexually transmitted infections STIs. However, a heavy reliance on samples of adolescents, college students, or people seen at STI clinics limited the generalizability of these findings.
Condoms are a highly effective barrier to HIV and many other STIs 12 and, after decades of HIV prevention messaging, people are expected to know when they should use condoms and to have the personal agency to do so.
Using condoms for casual sex should now be well engrained into the cultural scripts informing heterosexual men and women's sexual behavior. People's accounts tend to consist of explanations that they hope will elicit sympathy or understanding and depict them as less blameworthy. Accounts are generally of two types: they can be excuses in which actors acknowledge that the behavior was problematic but deny full responsibility for the act or they can be justifications in which actors accept responsibility for the act but deny its harmful consequences or claim there were mitigating circumstances.
