More Premarital Sex == Less HIV

I need to buy the Elizabeth Pisani book The Wisdom of Whores; it sounds like it will be interesting in the same way that Alexa Albert's Brothel was. Anyway, she offers some data from the developing world that seems to bolster Steven Landsburg's argument that if the total amount of sex went up (via increased frequency among those who do it less frequently now, rather than hyper-sex amongst those already most frequent), STD rates would decline. This argument was made in More Sex Is Safer Sex.

The full quote should be read over at the MR post where I saw this story, but one bit that I found interesting:

At the start of the 1990s, 57 percent of twenty-one-year-old men in Northern Thailand trooped off to the brothel to do their philandering. More than half the sex workers who soaked up their excess energy were HIV-infected....