Adventures in Safe Sex Awareness

There is something more than a little creepy about the safe sex brigade and their latest campaigns. I am talking here specifically not about their attempts to impose sex-consciousness upon ever younger children, but about the campaigns targeted at me and my fellow university students, all over the age of consent (16 here in the UK). Recently I noticed a large poster on my hall's noticeboard which appeared to be a cross between a public health notice and a club promotion. It was titled, in letters which the designers must have thought of as being 'funkily' splayed across the top, "Wee to Win." That's right, you can enter to win either an ipod or nintendo wii (how the poster makers must have glowed at their pun). Sounds good so far. All you need to do is give these people a vial of your urine for them to test for chlamidya. Right. So do they pick the winners from those who have it or those who don't?

In keeping with what appears to be the trend, you don't need to go to the doctor's office at all, because, being hip and with it, they will text your results to you, which is definitely the way I want to find out if I have a serious illness. There's something a little weird about an organisation that is trying this hard, and this ineptly, to make STD screening a fun, funky, 'relevant' activity.

I can only assume that this is the continuation of a campaign which I ran into a week or so ago. On entering my halls, I saw a table set up. Attracted by the lure of candy, I was greeted by a pair of people in their mid thirties. They did indeed have candy, along with condoms and little jars to urinate into and give them to test. Their greeting was, "Hello, are you sexually active?" I'm sorry, but these people aren't doctors, and this isn't a private space. And they're about fifteen years older than us and their attempts to be cool and 'down' with what they seem to imagine is the teen promiscuous sex scene were rather pervy.

The table set up in college proper wasn't pervy at all, merely degenerate. It at least had hot girls our age and ditched the pee jars for the more straightforward candy 'n' condoms assortment. Their candy selection wasn't up to much, but it actually provided quite good entertainment as I sat and watched how the Muslims, which college seems to be full of these days, would react. No fiery outbursts, I'm sorry to say, but there were some pretty quality glares.

Condoms have featured prominently in the news lately, with the Pope taking his world-class comedy act to Africa and claiming that condoms 'make the AIDS crisis worse.' This is fairly low-key stuff for a continent which has seen the South African health minister claim that AIDS can be cured with lemons, and where there is a widespread belief that (presumably if no lemons are available) sex with a virgin will also do the trick.

Still, I am fairly sympathetic to the much-maligned (by me as much as anyone) pontiff. He has been celibate for his entire 80+ years, and must be genuinely frustrated that everyone can't bloody manage it for 25 or so--just a measly little 25! Unfortunately, it is a tragic fact that while once monogamy might have halted the spread of AIDS, now so many people are born with it that it would spread even with universal, faithful monogamy. All in all, I think Gil Hornby in the Telegraph had the best reaction to it, which essentially was: "Suprise! The Pope is Catholic."