There's a connection?
I think so. It's like this: we've had twenty years, or so, of the Religious Right (which has become the Religious Reich, and I don't use such rhetoric lightly, unlike some folks) going on and on about,
Sex is bad!However, after three hundred and fifty million years of the evolution of sex on this planet, we're talking about something that's hardwired into our lizard brains (the lower part of the brain).
Sex is Evil!
Boo! Boo! Boo!
And, by the way, AIDS is God's Punishment (tm) for having sex, and against homosexuals!
(Never mind that this makes lesbians God's Chosen People (tm))
Now, before some self-proclaimed Christian jumps up and down, and falsely accuses me (remember that abjuration, about "not bearing false witness"?) of encouraging everyone to go forth and screw everything that moves, let me make it perfectly clear that I'm saying that sex is hardwired into us, and especially teenagers think of SEX almost (adj, meaning, "not quite all the time) constantly,
So...it's part of our basic mind structure, and we do have to deal with it. So, we have a well-known myth, of ilving undead, that is, vampires, who have had a heavy sexual undertone, at least in the last thirty years or so, and one glance makes it easy to see why so may folks identify with them - you get to have a sex-analog, and not die from it; in fact, you can live forever, in a shadowy and magical world.
Goths, of course, are vampire wannabees.
And shaved crotches? The subconscious idea that I get out of that is sex with someone who appears prepubescent is probably safe, that you won't get AIDS from them. For that matter, with one of the primary sexual characteristics gone, others are enlarged, to make up for it... so tits go from large, to ridiculous, to absurd. Note, btw, that with the exception of wide hips, since "lots of kids" is not a popular idea these days, the media-promoted "female ideal" looks an awful lot like the Gibson Girl of a century ago (when sex was also publicly disavowed...).
Oh, and speaking of a century ago, don't forget that, until early in the 1900's, syphillis and gonorrhea were both long-term, and fatal, diseases...just like AIDS.