Maybe you are out on a date. Maybe you and your partner are just hanging out at the house.
Somewhere during this time, things start to heat up. With hope, at some point, someone will ask, ‘do you have protection?’
I asked a number of young adults, ages 18 to 28, about their use of protection, which I defined as anything that prevents pregnanct and the transmission of disease.
The only ubiquitous answer that I got was condoms, although that is not surprising considering that you can find them sitting outside the Wellness Center next to the Games Room in the University Center.
The second most common answer was birth control, and one engineering student even listed the ‘pull out method’ as his first response.
The lack of knowledge of any other forms of contraception and the outright ignorance of categorizing the ‘pull-out method’ as a form of protection shows how limited most young adults’ knowledge is concerning protection.
As this article was constructed and analyzed, there appeared to be a distinct pattern of unprotected sex.
Most of this was during monogamous relationships, but even those within a monogamous relationship have a tendency to stray.
Looking at the large number of young people who cheat on their significant other is shocking. This becomes more surprising when one thinks about how many people are not using protection.
The Kaiser Family Foundation survey found that 56 percent of teens, both males and females, agreed with the statement, ‘Having sex without a condom every now and then is not that big of a deal.’
Some polls gauge that half of all Americans will have a sexually-transmitted disease at some point in their life. Half of those people will contract one by the age of 25, and a large majority of these cases involve people who engage in unprotected sex.
These numbers are staggering, especially considering that ’25 percent of people diagnosed with new infections are teenagers.’
When looking over more statistics and comparing them with the responses of the people that were interviewed for this column, it ceases to be staggering and starts to become logical.
The majority of the interviewees, said their parents either avoided talking about protection, or they discussed the matter after their first sexual encounter. According to teenhelp.com, ‘condom use was found to increase only when parents talk to their teen about condoms before the teen’s first sexual encounter. A discussion after a teen’s first sexual intercourse was found to have no effect on the rate of condom use.’
Schools do not seem to do better a better job. A former classmate of mine from Bellaire who attends Stephen F. Austin University said that sex education in high school was ‘easily forgettable.’
These classes often breeze through education about STDs with limited discussion of condoms. No one forgets watching a birthing video, which I have heard is a pretty good sexual deterrent. The subject is covered in as bland a way as possible and with little detail, but it is not just the schools’ fault.
This is endemic of the entire American population. According to ripnroll.com’s analytical piece on teen sex, ‘often, we promote ideology over information – such as when we deny people comprehensive sex education in favor of ‘abstinence-only’ programs even though government studies show they don’t work. Our television networks regularly put sexual content in primetime programming, but restrict or even forbid ads for condoms during those very shows.’
It just seems politically safe for elected officials to promote abstinence while having an affair with an intern or, worse yet, a page.
However, it appears that the problem is not only parents, schools or television.
The true problem is all of us. There seems to be a vicious cycle of misinformation. We are living in contradiction and fear, and we need to wake up and start acting with rationality.
As my co-worker and recent graduate said, ‘Fear has too often been a factor in sex education. We need to take a more medium approach. Teenagers are going to make mistakes and it is better if they knew how to approach those mistakes responsibly rather than not know how to approach them at all.’
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