I cannot tell you how many heterosexual-identifying married men I tested and counseled for HIV in the past. Can you guess their primary reason for taking an HIV antibody test? Men who have (and secretly act on) same-sex attraction yet are married to women and refuse to identify as bisexual or gay. This is precisely why the CDC has the category, “men who have sex with men”…Your lips to God’s ears Joe. In my AIDS/HIV work with the MSM community and hearing the stories of sex workers, the vast majority of their clientele are married men.
In other words, a very large number of the men in the US who say they got HIV from a woman actually got it from a man. That’s right. They’re lying.
I remember early in the epidemic back in the 1980’s a man who had some sort of high office in public health in New York said that they had had several hundred men in New York so far who said they got HIV from a woman. However, via careful and long-term questioning of these men, their partners and their friends and associates, it was discovered that every single one of these men was lying. They had all gotten HIV from via gay sex with a man.
A prominent public health official some time ago described HIV transmission in the US this way:
HIV goes from men to women, and then it stops.
This is the main reason why the “heterosexual HIV epidemic” never took in the US.
That is not to say a man cannot get HIV from a woman in the US, but it is definitely a difficult way to transmit the virus.