Condoms are fantastic, they protect against pregnancy and STIs. They’re increased usage has massively reduced the number of people dying from such diseases and reduced the number of unwanted pregnancies, leading to lower crime levels too.
But there is one massive problem with them. After you’ve engaged in foreplay and your penis is full erect and ready to go, the last thing you want to do is stop in the middle of it all and put a condom on.
Also, what if you can’t find a condom? That is a nightmare situation to be in. Do you stop? What else can you do? Put on a very, very baggy pair of trousers and hot foot it down to the local convenience store?
The reason I mention it is because I recently had a discussion with a good friend of mine. We both consider ourselves to be quite intelligent, well educated, rational human beings. Yet, we have both, at previous points in our lives, been in a situation where we were in the middle of foreplay and found ourselves unable to find a condom.
Interestingly, we both had the same thought process – “can I just risk it? It will probably be OK…” Luckily, we both came to the same conclusion, that it wasn’t worth the risk. But I had to think about it for a 30 seconds.
So here is my concern. If me and my friends are having to have a serious think about whether we could justify risking having unprotected sex with a new partner, what about people who are less well educated?
Actually, is it any wonder that so many people do have unprotected sex? When you’re in the middle of it, your rational mind is otherwise occupied and while I’ve never engaged in it, it really took some thinking to decide that and so I can easily understand why other people may end up making less wise decisions.
It probably goes as far as justifying why 14% of students had unprotected sex in Freshers’ Week.
How do we tackle such a problem? I guess the answer would be education. Restlessly drilling into people that you absolutely always do need to use a condom when having sex with a new partner. But the rational part of the mind is quickly overwhelmed by the emotional one and in some ways, we may be fighting a losing battle.
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Tags: condoms, pregnancy, protection, sex, stis, unprotected sex
This entry was posted on Wednesday, December 7th, 2011 at 12:43 pm and is filed under Thoughts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.