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Thanks for Writing My Next Comedy Story For Me. A Note to A Brit Without Wit
A very tongue in cheek story of mine was curated for PS I Love You today, which is typical of my style of humor. Those who know and read my work are well aware of when there is a serious poke in the ribs going on. Which, forgive me for pointing out, practically leaps off the page.
To that, this afternoon, I received this from an Englishman who has apparently fashioned himself as the sex politics police:
One of the problems we humans face in this modern world is that we are hardwired to reason from anecdote and have no capacity for accurate risk assessment. That’s why people become terrified by mass shootings but happily get into their automobiles and drive. The risk of the former is negligible despite all the ad-revenue-boosting media hype while the risk involved in the latter is significant.
When it comes to sex, especially because the USA is so neurotic and repressed, we dramatically over-estimate the actual risk of contracting a STD. One useful statistic from the days before HIV was a manageable disease: as a white middle class person with health coverage your lifetime risk of contracting HIV was only one-third of your lifetime risk of being struck by lightning. And that in turn was very, very, very low indeed.