My Black Book

My Black Book is just what it sounds like - a simple online database that lets you input detailed sexual history information. The site has a few features, like the ability to track trends over time by hour of day, week and monthly activity, that makes it really interesting. The site claims that a survey found that 1 out of 3 survey respondents claimed to have a sex log of some kind (no, not a log they had sex with. That's gross. A black book!), and so this is the web 2.0 version of the traditional black book.

It's still pretty beta and raw, so FYI. But, it's working well enough to go ahead and make an entry. Some things that I wish it had. I wish it had the ability to differentiate between true health risks. For instance, if you're married and do not use condoms during sex, then you're going to get labeled as a high sexual health risk person, even though there's little to no sex risk since you're connected to the larger sexual network due to the monogamous nature of the relationship. So, it'd be nice if it could try to be a little more sophisticated, or at least allow you to note whether the partner was your monogamous partner (e.g., spouse).

Interestingly, for my research, the site does theoretically allow you to measure concurrency. Morris and Kretzschmar in 3 different papers, worked out the implications of different rates of concurrency in a sexual network, and showed that higher rates of "temporal overlap" (i.e., concurrency) in sexual relationships will result in a faster spreading STI. It will depend on the rate of transmission of the individual STI, the kinds of sexual practices which are engaged in (i.e., anal sex, unprotected vaginal sex, etc.), and the connectedness of both parties to the rest of the network, as well as the overall connectedness of the network itself. Morris and Kretzschmar work out the conditions in their various papers, which can help think through how that type of temporal spacing of partners will affect the overall epidemic itself. But, back to Black Book 2.0, because the site allows you to record each session by partner, time of day and day of week, you can theoretically measure the degree to which pairings are concurrent. Since that is such a high health risk, not just individually but collectively, it'd be good if the site would consider trying to post that information back to the user.

That said, I've opened up an account. Even though it's going to be rather boring since mine is a monogamous account, I still couldn't help it since I love data and pretty graphs.