No glove, no love: Women can use safer sex too

Think back to your experiences in high school sex education classes, if you were lucky enough to even have them. Condom on a banana, or wooden dildo, or perhaps the teacher’s fingers, and likely a slew of slides showing sexually transmitted infections, aimed at scaring you into abstinence. Class over.

One huge component missing from many of these sex ed classes is conversation around sex between women or female assigned folks. Outside of condoms – primarily spoken about in regards to penis-in-vagina intercourse, and perhaps occasionally anal intercourse – safer sex talks frequently seem to cover very few things that can in fact make sex safer, such as dams (sometimes called dental dams), gloves, and sterilizable toys. While HIV transmission rates are believed to be incredibly low within lesbian, queer and bisexual women’s communities, the rates of other STIs like herpes and HPV are consistently growing among these same groups.

So why aren’t these folks using barriers? Many of them don’t even know about them, and more have no clue how to access them. While condoms were handed out willy-nilly at Pride, few, if any booths, provided dams and gloves to attendees. You cannot buy dams at the store on the corner, and few people have conversations around how to share sex toys without sharing everyone’s body fluids.

Kalyn Bohl, 21, is a Denverite who learned about safer sex for all bodies while working at Rainbow Alley, the Center’s youth area. She was lucky to get this exposure, but it was the first time she’d heard about barrier methods beyond condoms. “Before I had worked at Rainbow Alley, I didn’t have much of an understanding of safe sex other than preventative birth control. I had no idea what a dental dam was and didn’t understand why gloves could be used for sex.”

Even with more sex education including female bodies as part of the safer sex conversation, folks in their 20s are not necessarily up-to-date on effective practices for their sexual activities. Bohl said, “In the conversations that I’ve had with female assigned folks of my age, I don’t think that a lot of people within our community are using safer sex barriers, even with toys. I think that using condoms on toys is something that hasn’t been mentioned enough and that’s why people don’t do it.”

Jennifer Pritchett, owner of the Smitten Kitten, said that more queer-specific communities have worked to disseminate information regarding safer sex and female assigned bodies. “Queer women have built our own cultural space for sharing this information in colleges, women’s clinics and sex-positive retailers and resource centers.”

However, Pritchett also pointed out that the conception that the misnomer that STIs are only transmitted when a penis is in the picture sometimes changes how those with vulvas view safer sex.

“On the whole, though, I get the sense that queer women don’t use safer sex supplies- they instead choose to test for STI’s and make decisions about sexual practices based on perceived risk of transmission and trust in their partners, for right or wrong,” she said. “I think this has evolved as testing has become more easily accessible in urban areas and as women still perceive that transmission from female to female is rare – something even the The Center for Disease Control perpetuates by still not having a classification for WSW (women who have sex with women) and HIV transmission data.”

Sometimes, people know the best ways to protect themselves, but aren’t sure where to get dams and gloves, or can’t afford them. Both Fascinations and Planned Parenthood of the Rocky Mountains sell dams, but they run $2.99 at Fascinations, and PPRM doesn’t carry them at all centers. Luckily, people have gotten crafty; you can make a dam by cutting a flavored or un-lubricated condom in half lengthwise; by cutting the fingers off a glove and cutting it open down the pinky side; or by using a sheet or plastic/cling wrap. Gloves can be obtained at any drug store or grocery store in the medical aisle, and condoms can be used on any type of sex toy to help prevent transmission of STIs.