This is very sad. The USA is deeply sexually repressed and deeply fearful and pretty much all the media is sensation-fear based. But all that does is create unnecessary terror in people. It’s a shame facts aren’t more widely known.

For example, with regards to STDs the standard US SexEd class is basically “don’t ever have sex, if you do you’ll contract terrible diseases, your genitals will swell up and then shrivel and drop off, everyone will know what you’ve done, you’ll be a pariah, you’ll die alone and then go straight to hell because god’s a bit cross with you.”

In reality, an employed person with a health plan in the USA is three time more likely to be struck by lightening than to contract HIV. Furthermore the total risk of all STDs except genital herpes (which can’t be prevented by using a condom) is, for the same group of people, something in the order of seven per thousand individuals. And all these can be cured with antibiotics.

Meanwhile with regard to pregnancy, although contraceptive pills have a 1% failure rate that’s per person per year, not per incidence of sexual activity.

I know facts have no purchase over emotions, but perhaps avoiding US media and instead seeking out real information from reputable sources such as the UK medical journal Lancet, or relevant studies via PLoS, or stats published by the CDC, would be better than allowing yourself to be terrified by utterly bogus media nonsense intended merely to grab eyeballs and thus boost the value of ad slots. You deserve much better than that.