Dear AMP,

The city of Dallas has the 50th-highest rate of STDs in the entire United States, and I’m worried about staying safe and bug-free during the hedonistic escapades of my youth. What precautions do you recommend for the next time I put on an outfit that’s more skin than fabric and wake up in somebody else’s inflatable swimming pool?

Dear concerned disciple of the Dionysian School of “You Put WHAT In Your WHERE?”,

We are so glad you reached out to us. As proud virgins from the least sex-having secondary education community in the metroplex, we are thrilled to present solutions we haven’t actually researched. 

Before we begin, let us thank white Jesus for the impeccable Texan public education we were lucky enough to receive, it’s by all metrics the best in the world. A dutifully learned lesson from its sacred annals — and occasionally, its afterschool sacred anals — that we wish to impart upon you is the gift of abstinence. If you never have sex, you will never catch an STD, and since rape is illegal you never have to worry about transmission against your will. By enrolling in UTD, your chances of sexual encounter decrease by 200%, and you can drop those numbers another 500% by installing “League of Legends” on your PC.

Now, we know what you’re thinking. Sexually transmitted diseases are passed through sex, but how do you even define what sex is? According to the world’s leading researchers (Mormons and weird lesbophobic men at bars), only penetrative intercourse qualifies as such. You can hork on an HPV-positive hen all you like, and that oral intercourse won’t be able to infect you no matter how angry the virus gets! So shouldn’t these other forms of pleasure keep you safe? Not so fast. In 1988, a teenage girl from Lesotho swallowed (as Joseph Smith intended) — but immediately after, her ex broke into her house and started a knife fight with her boyfriend that ended with a stab wound to her gut. Nine months later, she wound up in the hospital with labor pains. Yes, this really happened. If you have any beef with your exes, we recommend against putting your mouth anywhere, lest a stray dagger carve a clean path to your loins for the STD to take. 

Why are you looking at me like that? Of course that’s how biology works. And, hey, don’t forget, babies are the most common STD of all.

I’m sure you have taken our sage advice and promptly enrolled at UTD to keep yourself safe. For listening to us uncritically, we commend you as a true Comet. However, we understand that not everyone is morally pure enough to practice abstinence. The debauched and sinful among us, however, can still stay clean. Barriers like condoms and dental dams reduce your chances of catching a bug, but the problem many face is not having one on hand at the right time. We get it. Everyone thinks they’re so prepared until you’re seven clubs deep into the bar crawl, pockets emptied three buildings ago by the only person who deigned to kiss you all night, and a beautiful young Tobor asks to meet you in the bathrooms. You’re without protection or the money to find more — whatever will you do?

To address this critical issue, we encourage all UTD students to protest outside President Benson’s office until he approves a line of Temoc-brand condoms. Seeing our cherished mascot’s titillating smolder and lickable six-pack on the packaging, not to mention the condom’s Baja Blast flavoring courtesy of our local Taco Bell, will commit you to its safekeeping like a knight pledging fealty to his princess. You will never forget it, and carry it everywhere you go. If a pickpocket steals it when you’re drunkenly stumbling into walls, you will be consumed with such righteous anger that you’ll sober up and beat them into a fine red mist on the quest to retrieve your precious. Only downside? You might spend more time admiring its cometlike beauty than sleeping with your new bedfellow.

As college students, it’s our responsibility to drive progress toward a world free of suffering, and at a STEM school like UTD we can dance across technology’s cutting edge. Using one of our esteemed biology labs, you can transcend your human form and inject your consciousness into an amorphous paramecium, whose asexual reproductive strategy will defeat the need to get laid. To take it a step further, turn the tables by uploading your mind onto a retrovirus and become an STD yourself, secretly infiltrating their ranks and devising counters to their misanthropic plots. You’ll have to evade the chlamydia industrial complex’s firing squads once you return to human form, of course, but you should feel lucky to die for such a noble cause.

If natural science isn’t your forte, then UTD’s award-winning robotics programs could be your next best friend. By engineering a F*** MACHINE 3000®, you will bypass the revolting constraints of mortal flesh and attain the divinity of steel, silicon, and pistoning hydraulics. Robots don’t have STDs. Robots don’t get tired. Former President Trump might even commission you for one for his own use, because robots don’t need to consent! If this straight-shooting path to the Nobel Prize somehow doesn’t work out for you, then you can always just marry Hatsune Miku like that one guy in Japan did in 2010. Miku doesn’t have bugs, either.

What if all these strategies fail and you’re left with a nasty infection — or worse, a pregnancy? Don’t fret, dear reader. Even though Governor Greg Abbott’s recent Order 66 has banned all sexual and reproductive healthcare within Texas, this is still Biden’s America, where the woke mob hands out abortions and gonorrhea medication like crack on street corners. Just don’t let Abbott see all the coat hangers you’re smuggling home in your backpack.

Some concerned readers may point out that our advice stigmatizes people with sexually transmitted diseases because it suggests contracting one is morally low and physically disgusting, made especially problematic by the fact that Americans with STDs are disproportionately from marginalized minority groups. To this, we say hell yeah. As citizens of the People’s Republic of Texas, nothing is more important to us than oppressing the underclass. When our beautiful land finally secedes from Bisexual Biden’s failed state, we will personally implement mandatory genital inspections to ensure all our citizens are bug-free. Amen. 

Donate to your local sewer system for more hard-hitting bullshit and patriotic advice.