Having more sex and talking about it is great, but eschewing the condoms because they’re “icky” or “uncomfortable” is just plain dumb. News flash: Sex can actually still kill you. By Jennifer Armstrong

Deep into a make-out session, Jack retracted his tongue from my mouth to pant something into my ear, but it was hardly a sweet nothing. “You’re on the pill, right?” Leave aside the presumption inherent in that—my almost-32-year-old self, despite my healthy ego, felt pretty lucky to have landed this 27-year-old Orlando Bloom look-alike, so I wouldn’t have been surprised to learn he got his way on the regular. I was far more taken by what I, even through a wine-and-hormone haze, realized he really meant by that: Namely, that some other form of contraception wouldn’t be necessary, were he to get his aforementioned way.

What should’ve been a classic you-go-girl, “How Stella Got Her Groove Back” kind of moment for me dissolved into a suddenly all-too-sobering Socratic dialogue about condom use. I barely knew him; we’d met in a bar just a week prior. (But baby, don’t you believe me when I say I’m clean?) I was a hypochondriac on a normal, healthy, sunny day; surely I didn’t need to give myself something legitimate to worry about, like, you know, an AIDS test. (But condoms are so … uncomfortable for me.) Didn’t he listen in sex ed? (But baby, don’t you believe me …?)

I couldn’t believe someone was actually saying all the lines teachers had warned us about in health class, and thinking I’d stake my life—or even an unpleasant rash in an unpleasant spot—on them. When I told this story to friends later, more than one asked, “How old is he?” When I answered, the stories poured forth: Anyone who’d dated someone under 30 seemed to have a similar experience in their repertoire. Perhaps even more disturbing is that many of the anecdotes I heard were about young women eschewing condom use, hardly the traditional sex ed video scene I’d played out with Jack. If even young women are throwing caution to the wind—or at least to pills, patches, or rings, none of which provide that handy physical barrier to disease—we could end up reversing years of good, clean scare-tactic effectiveness.

I ended up keeping Jack at a literal distance, returning his flirty text messages but then ducking his date requests at the last second, afraid of the margin of error if I allowed myself to see him again. All well and good, since we were hardly about to get married (or, like, find one thing we had in common). But a year later the situation still vexes me. Why would someone voluntarily risk nothing less than his life when such a mind-blowingly brilliant little layer of latex could save it? It’s such a relevant question, of course, because it wasn’t just him—it’s so many 20-somethings. It’s hard to get a real, accurate picture of something like condom use, since it relies so much on self-reporting in surveys. But turns out he really is a pretty classic case, across cultures: One recent U.K. study showed that sexually active people under 25 equate condoms with lack of trust. The review of more than 250 studies of sexual behavior showed, basically, that young folks decide whether to use condoms based on fleeting assessments of appearance and how they know their partners socially, whether they’re in England, Australia, Mexico, or South America.

Not that this is any different from the way things have been since, well, the dawn of time—or at least the dawn of rubbers. It’s more of a perceptual issue: We’re talking about sex more than ever, and having plenty of it to boot. Good for us. But folks of a certain age are at least vaguely aware that our sexual freedom comes at a price. (That is, the price of a box of ribbed-for-her-pleasure, extra-lubricateds, or the price of death after years of hospital bills. Your choice.) The younger ones, though, seem to have gotten the super-fun, yay for modern life, instant gratification message about sex (yeah, that’s me blaming “the media”) without reading the bummer of a footnote about safety.

And what about girls, in particular? Of course the old carrying condoms=whore stigma still holds in some countries, according to that British survey. But there are plenty of more complicated factors at play, too, particularly in America, where the Internet has pornified women to a startling degree, pressuring us to find new ways to keep dudes interested. Apparently that includes riding bareback, at least according to tales told by some of my guy friends. Younger women have literally offered condomless sex to them as a kind of bonus, they say, something special to take things to the next level. “She practically begged me once after a fight,” one 30-something who dated a young 20-something says. “It was her way of apologizing, I guess.”

Meanwhile my little sister, who’s in her early 20s, reports that she’s pretty much the only person she knows who worries about prophylactics of any kind—and she’s the last one who needs to, since she’s had the same boyfriend for years. (Hypochondria runs in the family. Good job with the sex talks, Mom!) Her friends have the pregnancy scares to prove their nonchalance—it seems a fair number don’t use anything, not even pills. “No one even cares anymore,” she says. “It doesn’t occur to anyone that they wouldn’t have to be so scared of pregnancy tests if they just used something.” A recent date of mine, a 40-year-old gent who’s been known to dip younger even than my rather youthful age, was kind enough to corroborate her testimony about girls in her demo: “What ever happened to The Pill?” he asked plaintively, even nostalgically. I couldn’t help but wonder, Carrie Bradshaw style: Had Jack scoped me out for just that reason? Hmm, she’s a little older, responsible, brain capacity to remember to pop a pill around the same time every day … Paranoid? Yes. But you already knew that about me.

That’s not to say every sweet young thing is running around unprotected, of course. I have younger friends who are as meticulous as us old folks learned to be during the early AIDS-scare days. Statistics bear this out: Condom use among 16- to 44-year-olds increased from 1990 to 2000 according to another British survey. Yet Sexually Transmitted Infections rose during the same time. Why? Those with multiple sexual partners aren’t using condoms consistently, the same survey tells us. Essentially, we’re burning through more rubber, but we’re also having even more sex. And that lesson we learned back in health class still rings true: One time is all it takes.

What’s happened in the interim, since the glory days when we were all so scared of AIDS it weighed heavily even on my 12-year-old mind as I slow-danced with approximately 14 to 16 inches of space between me and my partner? For one thing, the personal became even more political. U.S. Republicans pushed, um, let’s just say overly optimistic abstinence-only agendas to the forefront, making condoms in schools blasphemy. And leading women in HIV-ravaged African countries adopted a similar party line, with the likes of Kenyan first lady Lucy Kibaki publicly stating that young people have “no business” using condoms. Though that country’s government itself, it should be noted, does promote condom use, as the situation is dire—1.5 million Kenyans have died of AIDS-related diseases since 1984. (We’re at about a half a mil since the disease was first spotted here, FYI.) Will we have to match their stats before it’s politically safe for our government to do the same?

The fact is, over here in America, AIDS just doesn’t scare us like it used to. And neither do all the other icky sexually transmitted diseases that—guess what?—are still around making millions of us sick every year. Things like gonorrhea, chlamydia and genital herpes may not have that fear-of-death stigma, but the weird smells, odd-colored fluids, burning sensations and red bumps that come with them should be enough to scare everyone into safety, right? It’s almost like we got lax about the condoms because of AIDS: First we got scared of it, then we got over it, and in the meantime we forgot about all that other unplesantness in between health and death.

Our apathy runs deep. On a good World AIDS Day (that’s Dec. 1, by the way), we might wear a red ribbon or give a few bucks to some HIV charity, then go back to worrying about global warming. But back in the early days of dire prophecies, it seemed, especially to our young minds, that we were pretty much all going to get HIV and die instantly. Then, however, we learned the other important lesson about AIDS, that we shouldn’t shun its victims because, well, we couldn’t get it that easily. So if it wasn’t all that transmissible in everyday life, how could it be that frightening to us? Next came major advances in drugs that made the disease much more manageable—and much more invisible. An awful lot of us don’t know someone with HIV—or, just as importantly, don’t know we know someone with it. No matter how many TV movies depict HIV-positive diagnoses, we’re not really going to believe we’ll get it unless we experience it directly. Otherwise we’d all get our own starring roles on Lifetime, right? But we should be scared of something far more serious than Tori Spelling eventually playing us. HIV rates among young gay men ages 13 to 24—you know, the ones who were really supposed to be scared—declined by 30 percent from 1994 to 1998, but then bounced up a whopping 41 percent from 1999 to 2003. And straight folks are far from safe. Diagnoses decreased throughout the ‘90s, but started ticking back up each year in 2001, reaching 45,669 in 2005. From 2000 to 2005, cases increased 17 percent among women.

As usual, the answer is simply that we need to get comfy talking about—and using!—condoms. Or, at minimum, we need to get good and scared into it. Not surprisingly, stats show most people—61 percent in one survey—don’t really dig chatting new partners up about breaking out the Trojans. And yet 30 percent of those questioned regretted not using a condom at one time or another. (That goes up to 36 percent for those ’80s-sex-ed-scarred 35- to 44-year-olds. Personally, I can think of few worse things than sitting around convincing yourself you might have AIDS, then waiting weeks while people in a lab analyze your blood just to set your mind at ease.) But how do we get over this chronic societal shyness? You know Sirens is all about frank sex talk, so that’s a start. But more importantly, educational policies need to change, and we need to consider that when we’re choosing our candidates—what sounds like a fluffy issue of whether we sully our kids’ virginal little brains really could save future lives. (By the way: The dirty thoughts get into their heads thanks to nature’s persuasive little messengers, hormones, not bananas with rubbers on them. Does that image make you want to get it on?)

Incidentally, it also wouldn’t kill our pop culture purveyors to work in some consequences with all their sex (which I’m totally in favor of, make no mistake! I love when pretty people on TV make out!). And I’m talking outside melodramatic issue movies. Abortion episodes, for instance, can be seamlessly woven into regular, mainstream series without necessarily promoting abortion; they can deomonstrate, instead, what little fun the after-effects of unprotected relations are. The N’s Canadian teen drama “Degrassi” (you know we’re obsessed with it, but it’s for good reason!) did this beautifully, only to find the episode originally banned from U.S. airwaves, one more indication of how much we don’t talk about things. That whole other hot-button issue aside, there’s no reason someone—on a teen or adult show—couldn’t, say, turn down a night of passion due to lack of provisions, or go crazy with worry because they didn’t. We’ve come a long way since Julia Roberts sweetly declared herself a “safety girl” in the world’s most mainstream hit, “Pretty Woman.” Who knew we’d find ourselves actually wistful for the enlightened days of hookers with hearts of gold who find true love with gorgeous, well-meaning millionaires … who, furthermore, happily choose—and use—a condom?

Educate Yourself: AIDS is more than just a red ribbon. Find out what STDs can really do to you. Scared the hell out of us!
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Jennifer Armstrong is the co-founder and editorial director of SirensMag.com.

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Tags: condoms, safe sex, Sex

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