Source: DailyTexanOnLine
August 31, 2007 Author: Maya Srikrishnan
A survey taken at the University of Texas School of Public Health in Houston suggests that women using Internet date services often engage in risky sexual behavior they would not normally partake in offline.
"About 500 women all over the U.S. who actually posted ads online were self-surveyed," said Paige Padgett, the study author. The majority of the women were between 20 and 49, with about a quarter between 20 and 29.
"When you're communicating online, you are drawn to expressing yourself more personally than when you meet a guy in person," Padgett said. She calls this feeling "accelerated intimacy."
Most women use safety measures for the first meeting, such as meeting in a public place or carrying pepper spray. The problem, Padgett said, comes in the heat of the moment, when women end up having sex with these men. In the survey, 30% of the women had sex upon their first meeting with online partners.
"Most of the women didn't use condoms. They have sex in situations they may not have had if they had met the guy in person first, because they had this sense of intimacy with the men they had been talking to," Padgett said.
Seventy-seven percent of the women participating in the survey did not use condoms during their first sexual encounter with the men they met via the Internet. MORE
