Bareback Sex: A Conflation of Risk and Masculinity
Bibliographic record
Abstract
From a healthcare perspective, there is an underlying assumption that most gay and bisexual men do not intentionally seek to have unprotected anal sex. This paper presents the results of a qualitative investigation conducted in three Canadian gay bathhouses regarding unprotected anal sex among men. It is our contention that much epidemiological research, though helpful, obfuscates essential factors in the practice of bareback sex. Consequently, the paper addresses two themes: the identification from the participants’ perspective of the risk factors involved in the practice of bareback sex and the identification of specific risk-reduction strategies used by barebackers. Our research results indicate that the majority of the participants were informed about health risks and took steps to avoid harmful practices even when engaging in high-risk sexual activities. Many participants, regardless of their HIV status, used risk-reduction strategies because the majority wanted to protect both their partners and themselves.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.008 | 0.013 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.009 | 0.055 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.009 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".