This is the second question I've received over thepast few months about human papillomavirus (HPV), and as I said in my July 9column, both the general public and the medical community are often misinformedabout HPV because research about the virus is evolving so quickly. I don'tthink that your friend's doctor would deliberately lie to a patient, but I dothink that he or she was wrong. Doctors are human just like the rest of us, andunless the doctors themselves are part of the LGBT community, they often havethe same level of ignorance about lesbian sex that other people do. It's a commonmisconception that women who have sex with women are not at risk for sexuallytransmitted infections (STIs), and if you add confusion about HPV to thosemyths, you have a recipe for incorrect information.
In my previous column on HPV, I addressed a readerquestion about the risk of HPV transmission when performing oral sex on awoman, which you can read here.HPV can also be spread through skin-to-skin contact, which for lesbian couplesmight mean genital-to-genital rubbing, touching your own genitals with yourfingers and then touching your partner's genitals immediately afterward, orpossibly using a sex toy on your genitals and then using it on your partner'sgenitals immediately afterward. It's difficult to quantify the level of riskinvolved in these activities because most research about STI transmission isn'tfocused on, say, how likely it is that HPV will hang out on your dildo. So allwe can really say is that it appears to be possible to transmit HPV in theseways, and if a woman knows that she has HPV, she may want to take extraprecautions to avoid transmitting the virus to her partner(s). This means usinglatex or polyurethane dams during oral sex, avoiding direct genital-to-genitalcontact, putting condoms over shared sex toys and changing those condoms whenswitching the toy from one person to another, and/or wearing latex or nitrilegloves and changing those gloves when moving from touching your own genitals totouching your partner's.
With that said, most of the time HPV is not actuallysomething to freak out about. The majority of people will be infected with HPVat some point in their lives. People are not usually "diagnosed withHPV" either they are diagnosed with genital warts (annoying, buttreatable and harmless) or they have an abnormal Pap smear that has detectedprecancerous cervical cell changes that are linked with HPV infection. Yes,"cancer" is a scary word, but the reason that women get regular Papsmears is to detect and treat precancerous cells before they evolve intosomething serious, and the treatments we have are very effective. So, HPVinfection is very difficult to avoid if you're sexually active, and having HPVis not the end of the world. In addition, abnormal Pap smears usually show upyears after someone is actually infected with HPV. So, I'm not sure what youmean when you say that your friend was diagnosed with HPV, and it's importantto realize that just because she was recently told that she has an HPVinfection, this does not necessarily mean that her most recent ex was theperson who passed this infection along to her.
If that previous paragraph is confusing, I recommendreading more about HPV at the two Web sites I mentioned in my July column, the American Social Health Association (www.ashastd.org)and the National Cancer Institute (www.cancer.gov).Another site I like is Lesbianstd.com , which summarizes the often scarceand hard-to-find research or current thinking about STI transmission betweenwomen.
Want Laura to answer your questions in SEXpress?Send them to laura@shepex.com.Not all questions received will be answered in the column, and Laura cannotprovide personal answers to questions that do not appear here. Questions sentto this address may be reproduced in this column, both in print and online, andmay be edited for clarity and content.
Laura Anne Stuart has a master’s degree inpublic health and has worked as a sexuality educator for more than a decade.She owns the Tool Shed,an erotic boutique on Milwaukee’s East Side.
