From: TURTLE              
To: THE SPECIALIST      
Subject: Not 15000 atall
Date & Time: 05/04/91 00:07:32
Message Number 16478

T>I won't even get into your "she has [two] lovers," [etc] preconception
S>Oh, no. I can't spot my flaw. Please enlighten me.
 
Well, to start with, it simply doesn't work into the big branching
pyramid that you describe. That sort of situation is inherently
unstable. It's nice in theory, but you won't see it happen in the
real world...human sexual interactions aren't that tidy.
 
Also, let us assume that someone in this mythical pyramid of yours
contracts a social disease. You seem to keep using that as an argument
against sexually open relationships, on the grounds that disease will
propogate through such a relationship...I got news for you, if
sexually transmitted diseases propogated that way, almost every sexually
active human being on the planet would be infected by now. Simple
epidemology shows that disease propogation through a given population
falls off as a function of 1/logn(x), where x is the number of
intervening steps between case 0 (the original point of infection) and
the point of interest, presumably yourself. If it fell off as a function
of 1/x like you seem to imply. the human race would have long since
ceased to exist...but it just plain don't work that way. AIDS, in
particular, is a very difficult disease to transmit; unless you engage
in homosexual sex or share contaminated needles or blood products, it's
only moderately transmissable, less so than hepatitis or any of the more
familiar STD's. In short, your argument doesn't hold up to reality
very well.