Posts Tagged ‘sex’

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.

While attending the Atheist Society talk this week, I picked up a copy of Leeds Student which had some interesting statistics.

43% of people pulled last week and 23% threw up. That’s to be expected.

However, I was quite shocked that 14% of people said they had had unprotected sex.

I mean, seriously? Lets assume that one third of people had sex in freshers’ week. That is quite a lot I believe, not just because that is generally a lot but because only 43% of people pulled, which would mean that most people who pulled, also went home with someone.

But if we assume that such a high figure is true, that means that half the sex had during freshers’ week was unprotected. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not going to pretend condoms are a great solution – they’re a massive hassle when you’re in the middle of it, and lets not pretend otherwise, but given the prevalence of STIs and most of these events being one night stands, surely people at one of the best universities at the country are smarter than that?

Yesterday, the first session of Intimate Details took place at Leeds Atheist Society. Intimate Details is a course which looks at sex, relationships and surrounding issues from a secular perspective – and indeed given it covers a lot of the same material as UCCF’s Pure course, some have cheekily nicknamed it “Impure.”

Yesterday’s session looked at sexuality and the various sexual orientations that exist, taboos and fetishes and the attitude towards sex in society such as sex in the media and education system as well as pornography, prostitution and religion.

Next week’s session will be looking at dating, relationships and sex. You can join us for that at 7pm on Friday 10 December.

We held the first planning meeting for a new course today which will hopefully be piloted by Leeds Atheist Society next year. It will focus around issues on sex and relationships but in a way relevant for atheists, in particular students.

How much this will be abstract discussion and how much will be real issues is yet to be worked out but the idea behind the course is to actually make it useful for attendees – for example nobody really needs advice on what contraception is available and how it works because this gets taught in school and we all know it anyway. But things like breaking up with people for example aren’t really looked at.

Development will continue for the next few months though if you have any ideas or feedback regarding the project do get in touch (or even just comment on this blog post).

There having been much talk about Thursday Night Dogging as a house activity when we first moved it and it being so highly requested when we passed round the A-Soc sports sign up sheet we finally got a dogging evening going yesterday.

Despite the cold weather some people were still braving it and all that attended had fun so I’m going to count this one as another victory in terms of events. Good times.