The International Rectal Microbicide Working Group has released preliminary results of their Internet survey on people's preferences for the lube they used. There's a lot of great stuff here, and you can find the results in Powerpoint format here. In particular, I was interested in the data on why respondent's indicated they sometimes did *not* use lube. You'll see that a majority indicated they instead used saliva and that just short of a majority indicated lube wasn't available.

As we know, liberal application of lube is a prevention strategy - it reduces the potential for HIV transmission. This data gives us a few clues for prevention. First, that we ought to think seriously about the fetishization of saliva use that I think is paired with the fetishization of bareback sex and the idea of "natural" / raw sex (which I talk about here). Second, while this data isn't a representative sample, it suggests that for many people lube still simply isn't available. Finding new ways to distribute it (other than those packets of the cheap, sticky, gross lube that I find just repulsive to pull out during sex) might be a key prevention strategy.

Here's the chart I'm referring to: