Recently, I have been thinking about how people have sex. Not because I am preoccupied, but because I am scared.
Scared that a lot of us educated and critically thinking students do ‘it’ wrong. Scared that at such an open-minded university, we fail to talk about sex, while a lot of us do it or think of doing it. Scared that all we’ve learned is the famous condom-on-a-banana trick and that STDs are ‘really bad’. There are still risks we simply don’t know about, don’t think about, or choose not to know about.
This new fear of mine started with a news publication saying that one out of five people in the Netherlands under the age of 25 does not use any contraception, and that this percentage is growing. I couldn’t believe it and decided to ask everyone I know about their sex life and how much they actually know about sex.
Some students I talked to said that using condoms is not worth the discomfort and awkward moment it may cause. A lot of them have done it without protection at least once. Crazy, stupid, and dangerous, because one time can be all it takes. When we talked about the risks, their biggest fear was an unwanted pregnancy, while they were not truly afraid of STDs.
How come we don’t have a sex counselor at the university that we call a safe space?
One guy said, ‘I don’t know much, but there are not that many spaces to talk about it. When I have a question, I ask Google or my best friend after some drinks.’
Google is great, and it’s also great that this guy has a friend he can talk to, but neither are the most reliable sources of information. And what if you don’t have a friend like that? Or if you don’t want to have sex, but feel pressured to?
I think we do not talk about sex enough from a critical-thinking perspective. How come, at the university that we call a safe space, where we take pride in critical thinking and openness, advocating health and human rights, we don’t have a sex counselor?
I understand that the intricacy of this topic and the taboos around it make it more complicated, and that having a sex counselor might be seen as propaganda for sex. But I believe that a young and curious person should have a safe space and an educated professional at the university to talk about sex. To learn about the risks and how to prevent them, in a better form than putting a condom on a banana.
LIZA KOLOMIIETS