HPV and Me (TMI) Part 1

My fanny and I have been close, not to say bosom buddies, for many years and have had many adventures together. She's been a wonderful companion, helping me experience much pleasure and to bear two (sometimes) lovely kiddos. We're both getting older now, and I'd assumed we'd drift gently into an affectionate dotage together, but lately she's got the hump with me again. It's her story I would like to relate here.

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Once upon a time, a long, long time ago in an era called the 1970s, there was a short-lived golden age, sometimes called 'the era of free love', when young people could explore their sexuality free of fear.

In this era, young women (and through them, their male partners) now had access to new hormonal contraceptives for the first time, which prevented the Big Bad Bogeyman of unwanted pregnancy spoiling their fun. The most popular of these was The Pill (it was always capitalised in those days), which many young women would swallow on 21 out of every 28 mornings.

The young women liked it because they could please and keep their boyfriends without ever having to worry about pregnancy excepting those 30 seconds it took to swallow The Pill. The young men liked it even better, because now their girlfriends were available for spontaneous sex anytime and anyplace and they were absolved from worry of a shotgun wedding, from anything so fun-spoiling as placing a latex barrier between their johnson and their girlfriend's fanny, or anything so embarrassing as having to ask a chemist for a pack of condoms. In fact, condoms were extremely fuddy-duddy in those days and sales were at an all-time low.

And it was (somewhat) good for everyone, and most especially the young thrusty men who for sociobiological reasons that they didnt understand wanted lots of no-strings sex with lots of partners.

In the 1970s (as I recall), there were only two sexually-transmitted infections (STIs). There was your gonorrhoea (clap) and your syphilis (pox), but both were eminently treatable by antibiotics, so no one cared about those. It was only at the end of the 'free love' that anyone started to hear of some new ones that were less treatable, such as non-specific urethritis (which grew up to be chlamydia) and herpes. HIV and AIDS were still a twinkle in an African green monkey's eye.

It wasn't till the 1980s that young people started to be warned, using leaflets and cinema adverts showing tombstones and icebergs, that there were other new STIs and some of these could be fatal. It turned out condoms (or a nasty granny's plastic rainhat called a Femidom) could prevent all STIs except pubic lice (crabs) being transmitted, as well as preventing pregnancy. But it was too late for a whole generation of young people, both gay and straight, who'd had quite a lot of spontaneous fun in the preceding decade.

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One of the non-important STIs that were floating around in the 70s were genital warts. These were just like a wart on your hand or a verruca on your foot, except you'd get them on your johnson, fanny, geffizit (perineum) or ringpiece (anus). They weren't sore and if one was cosmetically bothered these could be easily burnt off with podophyllin or frozen off with dry ice. No big deal it seemed to us, until it became clear (some years later) that the virus that caused these warts- human papilloma virus (HPV)- came in many subtypes.

Now, clever doctors had always suspected that cancer of the cervix (once a major killer of women) was mostly a kind of STI, because nuns and lesbians hardly ever got this. Clever virologists learned in the 80s that infection with some subtypes of HPV (ones which didn't themselves cause warts) turned out to be the main cause of cervical* cancer.

It turned out that almost all sexually active people (excepting exclusive celibates, lesbians or virgins who'd entered a monogamous marriage) were carriers of HPV of one subtype or another. Men mostly remained asymptomatic apart from the odd wart, but women infected with a nasty HPV subtype while having unprotected fun could develop cervical pre-cancer, and later cancer, if not treated.

*Cervical- Pronounced serv-ikal in reference to the upper region of the spinal column, and serv-eye-ikal when in the fanny context

/To Be Continued