Do Lesbians Use Condoms for Safer Sex?

Some lesbians and other women who have sex with women do use condoms, dental dams, gloves, and other barrier methods during sex, but the rates are remarkably low. Studies consistently find that the vast majority of women in same-sex encounters report never using any barrier protection, with figures often above 80% for common activities like oral and digital sex. The gap between what public health experts recommend and what actually happens in bedrooms is driven by a tangle of low risk perception, poor product availability, and a near-total absence of safer-sex messaging aimed at women who have sex with women.

How Barriers Fit Into Woman-on-Woman Sex

When people hear “condoms” they picture the male external condom, which is designed for a penis. That specific product has a limited but real role in sex between women: it can be placed over a shared vibrator or dildo to reduce the exchange of vaginal fluids and bacteria. Beyond traditional condoms, the barrier toolkit for women who have sex with women includes dental dams (thin sheets of latex or polyurethane held over the vulva or anus during oral sex), latex or nitrile gloves for manual stimulation, and finger cots for single-digit contact. Some women also improvise by cutting a condom or glove open and laying it flat as a makeshift dental dam.

In practice, though, uptake of every one of these products is low. A study of women who have sex with women found that barrier use was least common during manual genital stimulation, with about 11% of respondents having ever used a barrier for that activity. Oral sex was similarly unprotected: roughly 84% to 87% reported never using any barrier when giving or receiving it. Barriers were slightly more common when a sex toy was involved, but even then about 62–63% of women said they never used one.

Dental Dam Use Is Especially Rare

Dental dams are the barrier most commonly associated with safer oral sex between women, yet they are also the one women are least likely to actually use. A study of Spanish women who have sex with women found that under 5% of those who performed cunnilingus and about 5% of those who performed anilingus reported always using a dental dam.

An Australian survey painted a similar picture. Among 330 women who had had oral sex with a woman in the prior six months, fewer than 10% had ever used a dental dam, and only about 2% used one often. That study also found that dam use was not significantly more common among women with more partners or those having casual or group sex, which you might expect if dams were being used as a risk-reduction tool. Instead, dams tended to appear in specific kink contexts (like rimming or fetish play involving blood) rather than as routine STI prevention. Gloves and condoms were both used by more women and more frequently than dams.

Part of the problem is sheer availability. A study examining barrier product access in a high-risk urban area found that the majority of stores stocked only one brand of male condoms with a limited selection of lubricants and no dental dams or internal condoms at all.

⁴ If a product is hard to find in a store, doesn’t come up in sex-ed classes, and isn’t recommended by a doctor, the chance it ends up in someone’s bedside drawer is slim.

Sex Toy Sharing and Condom Use

Shared sex toys are one of the clearest transmission routes for infections between women. A vibrator or dildo that moves from one partner to the other can carry vaginal bacteria, HPV, or other pathogens on its surface. Condoms are the standard recommendation here: put a condom on the toy, change it between partners (or between orifices), and the risk drops dramatically.

In reality, this happens rarely. A mixed-methods study of women’s sexual enrichment aid hygiene found that about a third of women who used sex toys shared them with partners, and among those who shared, only 14% regularly used condoms on the toys.

⁵ That study looked at women broadly, not just women who have sex with women, but the finding underscores how uncommon condom-on-toy use is even when sharing is routine. Many women rely on washing toys between uses, which is better than nothing but does not reliably eliminate pathogens like HPV, which can persist on surfaces.

The STI Risk That Gets Dismissed

A persistent myth holds that sex between women is essentially risk-free when it comes to sexually transmitted infections. This belief isn’t limited to the general public; it also shows up among healthcare providers and among lesbian and bisexual women themselves. Research has found a common perception that STIs simply cannot be transmitted between women, and that lesbians feel at low risk because they are excluded from the dominant sexual scripts that inform safer-sex negotiation.

⁶

The evidence says otherwise. Among women reporting only female sexual partners in one study, 13% reported a history of STIs, including chlamydia, genital warts, trichomoniasis, and pelvic inflammatory disease. Among self-identified lesbians (a broader group that may include some women with past male partners), 15% reported an STI diagnosis at some point in their lives. The same study found that every 500 additional sexual exposures with a female partner was associated with a roughly 20% increased likelihood of having had an STI, after controlling for other factors.

⁷

These numbers are lower than what you’d see in comparable heterosexual or male-male populations, and that relative difference feeds the perception that risk is negligible. But “lower risk” and “no risk” are very different things, and the dismissal of even modest risk has downstream consequences for screening, prevention, and treatment.

Bacterial Vaginosis and the Partner Concordance Problem

Bacterial vaginosis (BV) is not technically classified as an STI, but it behaves like one among women who have sex with women, and it illustrates why barrier methods matter even when the transmission route isn’t the one people think of first. BV is a disruption of normal vaginal bacteria that causes discharge, odor, and discomfort. Among female couples, it tends to track between partners at striking rates.

A study that enrolled both members of female partnerships found that when one woman had BV, her partner also had it in 10 out of 12 cases. Among women without BV, only 1 of 24 partners was affected.

⁸ That concordance rate is hard to explain without some form of sexual transmission, and it means that when one partner is treated and the other is not, reinfection is common. Barriers during manual and toy-based sex could plausibly interrupt this cycle, but the connection between BV and barrier use is rarely discussed in clinical settings.

HPV and the Cervical Screening Gap

Human papillomavirus deserves its own mention because it carries consequences that go well beyond an acute infection. HPV can be transmitted sexually between women through skin-to-skin genital contact, shared sex toys, and possibly hand-to-genital contact. Case reports and prevalence studies confirm that HPV circulates among women who have sex exclusively with women.

⁹

The trouble is compounded by the fact that lesbians attend cervical screening at much lower rates than heterosexual women. The reasons loop back to the same risk-perception problem: if you believe you aren’t at risk for HPV because you don’t have sex with men, you may see Pap smears as irrelevant. Some healthcare providers reinforce this by not recommending screening to patients who disclose same-sex-only histories. The result is that HPV-related cervical changes can go undetected longer in this population, even though the underlying risk factors are shared with heterosexual women.

⁹

Why Risk Perception Stays Low

Several forces work together to keep barrier use low among women who have sex with women, and most of them are structural rather than individual choices.

First, sex education almost universally centers on heterosexual intercourse and pregnancy prevention. Condoms are taught as pregnancy-prevention tools; dental dams, if mentioned at all, get a brief aside. Women who have sex with women leave these settings without a framework for when, why, or how to use barriers in their actual sex lives. Researchers have described this as the absence of a “sexual script” for lesbian safer sex, meaning there is no widely shared cultural template for how the negotiation of protection is supposed to go.

⁶

Second, healthcare providers often don’t fill the gap. A study of general practitioners found that for almost half, a patient’s non-heterosexual orientation created a barrier to discussing sexual health. The difficulties centered on lack of knowledge about lesbian and gay sexual practices and uncertainty about what language to use.

¹⁰ When your doctor doesn’t bring up safer sex because they don’t know what to say, you leave the appointment with your low-risk assumption unchallenged. Nursing and obstetric researchers have specifically called for clinicians to learn about the diversity of women’s sexual behaviors and develop more inclusive sexual-health conversations.

¹¹

Third, the identity category “lesbian” can itself create a false sense of immunity. One qualitative study identified three distinct stances women adopt toward STI vulnerability: feeling essentially invulnerable, feeling “socially inoculated” (protected by the nature of their relationships or community), and feeling fundamentally vulnerable. Some women shifted between these stances over time, often in response to actually getting an infection or knowing someone who did.

¹² The “invulnerable” and “socially inoculated” stances are particularly resistant to public health messaging, because they frame risk as something that belongs to other populations entirely.

Practical Workarounds Women Actually Use

Given how rarely dental dams and gloves are used, it’s worth noting what women actually do in practice to manage risk during sex. These strategies are not as effective as physical barriers, but they are common and often the only risk-reduction behavior happening.

Many women avoid oral sex during menstruation or ask their partner to use a tampon during oral contact, which reduces exposure to blood-borne pathogens like HIV and hepatitis.

³ Hand-washing before and after sex is another commonly cited practice, though studies note that even awareness of this recommendation is inconsistent.

¹³ Keeping fingernails trimmed is widely understood as a way to prevent cuts and abrasions that create pathways for infection, though this is considered general sexual etiquette rather than a public health recommendation.

Some women negotiate STI testing with new partners as a form of risk management, treating a negative test result as a replacement for ongoing barrier use. This approach has obvious limitations (testing windows, infections not included in standard panels, the possibility of inaccurate reporting) but it functions as the de facto safer-sex practice in many lesbian relationships where barriers feel impractical or pleasure-reducing.

When Women Do See a Reason to Use Barriers

One consistent finding across the research is that women who have sex with women are not philosophically opposed to barriers. They simply don’t perceive a reason to use them most of the time. A qualitative study found that participants viewed gloves and condoms as acceptable, provided there was a specific reason, usually an STI-related reason, to use them, and provided the products were presented in the context of sexual health and pleasure rather than purely as disease prevention.

¹³

That framing matters. The public health strategy of fear-based messaging (“you could get an STI!”) has limited traction in a population that already perceives its risk as low. Researchers have suggested that positioning barriers as part of sexual play rather than as medical interventions could shift attitudes. Gloves, for instance, are sometimes adopted in kink and BDSM communities for sensation and hygiene reasons that have nothing to do with disease prevention, and they happen to serve a dual purpose. Condoms on toys can be framed as a convenience (easier cleanup, less irritation from toy materials) rather than strictly as infection control. Whether this reframing could move the needle on population-level barrier use remains an open question, but the underlying finding is clear: the barrier to barrier use is perception, not objection.

Where the Healthcare System Falls Short

The low rates of barrier use among women who have sex with women don’t happen in a vacuum. They reflect a healthcare system that often treats this population as an afterthought. Sexual health guidelines are overwhelmingly written around heterosexual intercourse and male same-sex intercourse. Screening protocols for STIs and cervical cancer assume penile-vaginal contact as the primary risk factor. When women who have sex with women do seek care, they face providers who may not know what questions to ask or what to recommend.

The consequence is a feedback loop. Women receive no guidance on safer sex from their doctors, conclude that risk must be minimal since nobody is warning them about it, and continue without barriers. The studies cited throughout this article consistently identify this provider-level gap as one of the strongest drivers of low barrier use. Fixing it would require changes to medical education, clinical guidelines, and the availability of products like dental dams in places where people actually shop for health supplies. As long as a woman has to order dental dams online from a specialty retailer while condoms are at every checkout counter, the message about whose sexual health matters is hard to miss.