The anatomy of a forbidden desire: men, penetration and semen exchange
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The rising popularity of unprotected anal sex (bareback sex) among men who have sex with men (MSM) is perplexing healthcare providers working in sexual health clinics. Epidemiological research on the topic overlooks several socio-cultural and psychological dimensions. Our research attempts to construct an appropriate theoretical edifice by which we can understand this sexual practice. In order to achieve this objective, a qualitative design was selected and 18 semiconductive in-depth interviews were carried out with barebackers from five European and North American cities. We then analyzed the data using two theoretical approaches that were sensitive to the issues of desire, transgression and pleasure. These theories are those of the late French psychoanalyst, Jacques Lacan, and those of poststructural thinkers, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari. These theoretical frameworks helped shed light on the significance of bareback sex, and can potentially influence healthcare providers in gaining a better understanding not only of their clients, but also of their own role in the circuitry of desire at work within bareback. We found that while the exchange of semen constitutes a dangerous and irrational practice to healthcare professionals, it is nevertheless a significant variable in the sexual lives of barebackers that needs to be taken into consideration in the provision of healthcare services.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
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 | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.029 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 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".