Safety is sexy

I was concerned but not entirely surprised to read today's news that "Almost half of under-25s never use a condom with a new partner." As someone born in the 80s and raised in the teen magazine heaven that was the 1990s, I'd like to think I could never be as cavalier with my health or that of my partners as the interviewees in this piece, who simply shrug that using condoms for sex doesn't feel as good as sex without, and who seem to take contracting gonorrhea and chlamydia in their stride. Most worrying of all, one in ten of interviewees say they have never used condoms, and the consensus seems to be that if the female partner is using birth control, there is no need for one.

Now, I appreciate that sexual shaming gets us nowhere, and I do not wish to stigmatise anyone who has an STI. What I want to remark upon is how attitudes have shifted in my lifetime, and how it seems more and more difficult to get people to care about sexual health. It's not just the demonised demographic of feckless youths who don't seem scared by the prospect of catching incurable conditions; the over 50s have been highlighted as another group who think that calls to practise safer sex don't apply to them (so THERE, Dad!). In both cases, this complacency seems to boil down to "As long as no one gets pregnant, we're fine!" which is pretty frightening considering the havoc an undiagnosed STI can wreak on one's reproductive system, and in the case of HIV, your immune system and your whole life.

Thanks largely to the problem pages of Just 17, Sugar and Bliss magazines, I knew as an 11 year-old in the mid-90s all the myths surrounding safer sex, and I also knew exactly how to debunk them. I wouldn't be sexually active myself for nearly another 8 years, but I was armed with the knowledge that you could get pregnant the first time you had sex, even if you did it standing up or in water or if the guy promised to pull out before he came, and there was a lot of emphasis on how if a male partner refused to use protection, you should show him the door. Protecting yourself from pregnancy wasn't enough, the magazines reminded us; you were still at risk from STIs if you failed to use a barrier method, and one of those STIs was HIV, which took over your immune system and ultimately killed you. How is it we've shifted from that wealth of awareness two decades ago, to 21st century young people being either unaware of or unconcerned about these simple facts?

Now, I'm not advocating a return to the terrifying AIDS-awareness tombstone adverts of the 1980s which traumatised a whole generation of kids and also added to the demonising of gay men as the source of what was, horribly, known as the "gay plague" or "gay cancer" for much of the 80s and 90s. For one, the information in those ads is now totally out of date, because HIV-AIDS has gone from being a terminal condition with low life expectancy, to a chronic condition that can be managed so effectively that, with the right meds and all other things being equal, carriers can expect to live to old age and join the rest of us in grey hair, false teeth and a love of playing bridge. Which is brilliant news. But it shouldn't be cause for complacency.

None of us have lived a sexual life without mistakes or regrettable incidents, and I'm certainly not going to claim that I've never taken risks or been careless with protection. However, now I'm now longer a twatty 19 year-old who was long on seeking oblivion and short on self-care, I refuse to play roulette with mine or my partner's health. Being non-monogamous adds to my motivation to be safe ; the incentive to get tested regularly is increased when you know that failure to do so could harm not just you, but your lover(s). Even if you have a devil-may-care approach to your own health, you don't have the right to impose that on your sexual partners; not getting into bed with someone knowing you could possibly pass on STI on them seems like a basic tenet of human decency to me.

I know that situations where both partners are sober, in their right minds and have remembered to bring their own contraception can be rare, especially in those wonderful heady days of your late teens when getting blackout drunk is merely a competitive sport rather than a cause for concern. Perhaps it's time to recommend a buddy system, then: just like you wouldn't let your friend drive drunk, don't let them fuck without precautions. If you see your housemate about to leave the club with some pretty young thing they spotted across the bar, get yourself into the bathroom quick, stick some coins in a slot machine and go slap some condoms into their hand. I actually did this for a friend in my second year of uni. Because I was fairly sober and she was fairly wasted, and while I didn't doubt she was definitely up for sex with the fine specimen of man she'd been snogging on the dancefloor, I figured that friends don't let friends go home without condoms. And as she reported back the next day, much fun was had by all, with no need for a eyes-cast-downwards visit to the GUM clinic afterwards.

That's not to say the GUM clinic is a place of shame--it's just like any other hospital department, and if you don't know where your local one is, consider if that's because you've genuinely never needed it, or because you're too afraid to ask. If the latter, just bite the bullet and go. I've been to mine probably twice a year since I've been out of long term mono relationships (and yes, I also made sure that both partners got tested in said relationships too - I've never understood the logic that says only one-night-stands or casual sex bring risks of STIs; however much you love or trust your partner, there is no harm in gathering some info that reinforces that trust in the form of an all-clear from the clinic) and the only part I hate is the use of needles, which applies pretty much everywhere else in medicine too. But I still put my big girl knickers on, go and get tested, let the nurses laugh at me when I go pale and break into a cold sweat and have to elevate my legs after the blood test, then I receive a nice text message a few weeks later telling me I'm good to go, and everyone's a winner. No judgemental health professionals tutting at you--the staff could not be nicer or more pleasant, and there are no shocked expressions, gasps or lectures when you tell them you have many or concurrent sexual partners. All they want to know is info with which to calculate your risk from STIs, nothing more, nothing less. They also now ask you if you are afraid of anyone you live with, which I think is a fantastic and simple way of detecting concerns over domestic violence.

In a culture where sex itself is still seen as dirty, I think the idea of adding another layer of dirt and shame in the form of STIs is probably what deters teens and young people from confronting the risk head on. It's easy to tell yourself that what you don't know can't hurt you (which must go down as the biggest lie ever told to humanity!) or to set up a false dichotomy in your head whereby you convince yourself you're not one of those people who are most likely to contract an STI. You tell yourself that "well, I'm not a sex worker/gay man/polyamorous person, ergo I'll be fine," disregarding the fact that these groups are actually more attentive to their sexual health and are much more likely to get regularly tested and practise safer sex, partly because of the way they have been demonised by the mainstream media. And also simply because we can do the maths; as a nonmonogamist myself, I know that multiple partners put me at greater risk of contracting STIs, so I mitigate those risks via honest communication with all partners, ground rules and specific discussions about what sex acts are and aren't permissible without barriers, and yes, I'm afraid there's no getting away from it, kids, getting regularly tested, especially when new partners come into the equation.

I'll leave you now with a call to sexual health by the bizarre phenomenon Tim Westwood, which was broadcast on Radio 1's excellent Sunday Surgery when I was a teenager: "WRAP IT UP BEFORE YOU SLAP IT UP!"

To find your local sexual health clinic, you can search by postcode here