Dialogue: Promiscuous sex can never be safe

Isn't it fascinating how attitudes change. Back in the years when I went to school, an apple and half a pint of milk were made available to us free each day. Those were the times when New Zealand's child health was right up there with the best in the world.

But today, when we regularly read of dangerously undernourished children going to school hungry, and in the face of the fact that our child health has declined to somewhere below the middle of the international field, what the powers that be propose to do for our schoolchildren is to provide them with free condoms.

Back in my schooldays, when I was given an apple and bottle of milk, I was expected to eat the apple and drink the milk. So it seems logical that the same applies to schoolchildren today: having been given condoms, they will be expected to use them.

"Waste not, want not," my mother used to say with monotonous regularity, and had I been given a condom when I was a schoolboy, I would certainly not have wasted it. I would have blown it up like any other balloon and when it was hard enough stuck a pin in it, probably right behind the ear of one of those strange creatures we called girls.

I wouldn't have used it for the purpose for which it was made because, while I was vaguely aware of that purpose as early as Standard 6, I had no idea whatsoever of how to go about it and, furthermore, wasn't all that interested.

I knew what a "French letter" was because one of my schoolmates had found a stash of them in one of his father's drawers. His father had, he said, brought them home from the war. They held much less interest for us than his (and some German) medals, which were in another drawer.

Those were the days, of course, when schoolboys and schoolgirls played games and sports rather than with each other, when dirty books were so rare as to be precious and when unwanted pregnancies and venereal diseases were uncommon enough to be major scandals if they came to light.

I'm grateful that I was allowed to have a childhood, a good few years of innocent, carefree growing up, of being able to develop naturally from a child to a boy, from a boy to a youth, free from the tensions, anxieties and conflicts of immature sexuality that nowadays seem to afflict our children at an earlier and earlier age.

They came, of course, eventually, when in my adolescence I became aware of my maleness and, vastly more importantly, became aware of the other's femaleness. The age of innocence soon passed, but at least I had one.

There's no going back, of course - the sexual revolution that followed the arrival of the Pill, the heyday of the bra-burners, the decriminalisation of adultery, the easing of grounds for divorce and the legalisation of abortion all saw to that.

But we've gone far too far in our sexual liberation and perhaps it is time to take stock, to take a look back to see where we might have gone wrong.

I know that one way we've gone badly wrong is in putting our faith in "safe sex" education to try to staunch the rising tide of unwanted teen pregnancies and burgeoning rates of venereal diseases.

Yet that's what we're still doing, in spite of masses of evidence that it isn't working; that, in fact, it is probably making things worse.

Every time there is an increase in teen pregnancies and venereal diseases there are calls for more education, and every time we get more education there are more teen pregnancies and more cases of venereal disease.

The abortion rate has rocketed to more than 15,500 last year; and in three years from 1996 confirmed cases of gonorrhoea leapt by 42 per cent and chlamydia by 40 per cent.

The "safe sex" message, triggered by the arrival of Aids and based on the use of condoms, has never worked. And it has never worked because, for the sexually active, there is no such thing as "safe sex."

But, led on by bubbleheads like Youth Affairs Minister Laila Harre, aided and abetted by such benighted organisations as the Family Planning Association, we continue to try to fight the results of sexual promiscuity with sex education and condoms. It's like fighting a fire with petrol.

Because it is promiscuity that is the fundamental problem. Unwanted pregnancies, venereal diseases and a hundred other sexual dysfunctions are merely the symptoms of that. Until we address promiscuity, the symptoms can only get worse.

Handing out free condoms to schoolchildren won't help.

* garthgeorge@herald.co.nz