Our Moral Superiority About Sex Is Proving Deadly

[marmar]

From CommonDreams.org:

Published on Friday, November 24, 2006 by the Guardian/UK
Our Moral Superiority about Sex is Proving Deadly
by Sarah Boseley

We're obsessed by sex. Sex sells underwear, perfume, cars and almost anything else you want it to sell. Sex pervades our magazines, newspapers, literature, music and films. The image used to promote Casino Royale is no less steamy for being a damp Bond in swimming trunks emerging from the sea in place of the usual nubile and scantily clad female paramour. Sex is the most powerful force we know.

Which is why it's so strange that we can't deal with its fallout. Do Bond girls get syphilis or have abortions? No one wants to know. We like our sex erotic and exciting and free from disease and reproductive consequences. This is fantasy sex. Perhaps it should come with a health warning: the real thing can damage your life.

In enlightened Britain, where we think we are so praiseworthily open about sex, we have the highest rate of teenage pregnancies in Europe and rising rates of sexually transmitted disease. The Department of Health has just launched a campaign to "normalise" condom use among young people. All power to it, but there wasn't much evidence that girls and boys were slipping condoms into their pockets before a night out after the last campaign two years ago. It may be the right road, but we've got a long way to travel along it.

If we can't sort out our own problems we're in a poor position to moralise about those in other countries whose lives are far, far more difficult than ours. Yet how many of us secretly think that Africans have brought the devastation that Aids is doing to their countries upon themselves? There is a tacit assumption that Africans sleep around, that they are sexually abandoned and that they are reaping what they sowed.

But a courageous series on sexual and reproductive health, currently running over six weeks in the Lancet medical journal, proves that wrong. The papers show that we are more promiscuous than Africans. We in the rich world have more sexual partners than they in that benighted, disease-ridden continent. We have recreational sex; they are too busy trying to survive.

The consequences of such moral superiority are grave - not only in the fight against Aids but across the whole field of sexual and reproductive health. We have the US preaching abstinence from sex as the answer to Aids in Africa and refusing funds to any family-planning clinics across the world that provide abortions or even counsel women about them. This head-in-the-sand attitude towards abortion leads directly to women's deaths. Every year nearly 20 million unsafe abortions are carried out on desperate women in ill-lit rooms and illegal clinics. You don't stop that happening by refusing to talk about it. .........

The rest of the article is at: http://www.commondreams.org/views06/1124-23.htm

[xchrom]

1. it's shocking that we in the west have recreational sex. shocking.

:eyes:

i find this article disturbing -- i guess i should say.

of course people in the west have more sex{more women can chose when they want to have babies} -- and of course
you're going to run into more incidents or more accurately cycles of venereal diseases.

i feel like the author can't manage to come down on some hard line moralistic approach to the subject -- but really really wants to.

[Commie Pinko Dirtbag]

3. Glad to see I wasn't the only one. -nt

[Porcupine]

2. They just can't admit that to be pro-health you must be pro-sexuality.

The data is in and has been clear for some time. The countries with the best records for reducing teen pregnancy and venereal diseases of all kinds are the ones with the least restrictions on nudity, porn, sexuality, prostitution and birth control.

Sex is a natural and enjoyable function of EVERY human body with many ways of expression. Desire for sexual expression as vs. desire for touch develops along with puberty. Where these desires are repressed a number of diseases seem to be intractable along with high rates of sexuality-related abuses of power. Where sexuality is seen as natural and normal all sorts of disease rates drop dramatically.

What could be more clear.