Safest sex is no sex, similar to safest car is no car

The Editor: How many teachers and religious leaders have finished their lecture on sex before marriage, or some similar topic, with words like “The safest sex is no sex”? Would someone lecturing on road safety end their lecture with “The safest car is no car”? If they did, then no one in the audience would take them seriously, especially, if they had taken a vow never to travel in a car.

One has to face reality. The concept that distributing condoms to adolescents will make them promiscuous is misguided, because, like it or not, adolescents are promiscuous by nature. They are curious about life. We learn best by experience not by rote, because experience satisfies our curiosity far more than mere instruction. Parents, teachers and even religious leaders should be telling children that promiscuity is a natural part of growing up. They should be helping them to achieve a mature attitude towards their developing sexuality, and not instilling them with feelings of guilt and repression.

Little wonder that today’s adolescents, who are better informed by the news media than we were, are turning away from religions that insist on chastity, but whose leaders cannot resist fornication, adultery, sodomy and paedophilia. Why is it that each new generation thinks that it has invented sex, and that the sexual activity of its parents, so to speak, was limited to the occasion when it was conceived? Is it because parents are so repressed that they can neither communicate adequately about sexuality with their children, nor show any affection between themselves in the presence of their children? Why is it that older generations keep saying that each subsequent generation is more promiscuous? Is it bad memory, envy of youth and its freedom, or hypocritical guilt felt for our own past promiscuity?

Why is it that the older generation, the generation of maturity, sagacity, benevolence and empathy is so against the widespread and free distribution of condoms? Why is it that we condemn the promiscuity of today’s adolescents, when, not too long ago, we were also promiscuous adolescents? Unlike today’s adolescents, we were not plagued with HIV/AIDS. Perhaps our uncaring attitude is because we are no longer in the fifteen to twenty-five year old age group, which is the hardest hit by HIV/AIDS and is in the most need of a free supply of condoms. And let’s not be hypocritical, don’t we use condoms when our sexual curiosity leads us to stray, and wouldn’t we want our partners to use a condom if they strayed?

Nigel Gains
Maraval