What do you think “safe sex” is?
No, I asked you first.
You don’t want to define it incorrectly, because that would mean you’re having unsafe sex, right? Or sex that’s less safe than the sex that guy over there is having. Or maybe, if your definition is really wrong, we’ll all finally know that you’re not having any sex at all. Or perhaps if your definition of “safe” differs from that of the person with whom you’re having sex, one or both of you have been having unsafe sex without even knowing it.
“To me, there’s just no excuse not to be on a really strict birth control regime and use condoms every time,” Cooper Lewis ’11 said.
“Safe sex isn’t just about the physical relationship. There’s an emotional and psychological aspect,” Eric Rubenstein ’04, the founder of Sex Week at Yale, said.
“The only 100 percent safe practice is to abstain from sexual contact with another person,” Rebecca Schrier, the Student Health Educator at YUHS, wrote in an e-mail.
Safe sex, it seems, is a dilemma of semantics. As the discrepancies among these definitions reveal, we all have our own variations of safe sex — based on practical criteria, yes, but also on our genders, sexual orientations and backgrounds. The result of this ambiguity can range from emotional distress to physical danger, both of which, sources say, are not absent from this campus. The bottom line is perhaps surprising: Even here at Yale, sex may not be as safe as we’d like to think.
TOO SMART FOR YOUR OWN GOOD
A 2008 report published by New York City’s Department of Health and Mental Hygiene on the sex lives of New Yorkers found that tens of thousands of the city’s inhabitants were having unsafe sex. A July segment on NPR’s Youth Radio by Pendarvis Harshaw claimed that sex without a condom is the new engagement ring. The widely read blog “Jezebel” sent readers into a frenzy two summers ago with semi-facetious questions like: “Wait, there’s something wrong with using pulling out as a method of contraception? Other than, you know, the chance it gets in your eye?”
Mass panic over the AIDS crisis has long since abated, and for the generation raised in its aftermath, sexual safety precautions are so deeply ingrained that it’s easy to take them for granted. We might feel bad admitting it, but using a condom sometimes seems like a mandate on par with flossing — we know that we don’t get cavities every time we’re lazy, but we don’t want to feel ashamed when we have to confront our dentists.
But we’re at Yale. We know better. Don’t we?
Students at this ivy-clad institution are above par intellectually, at least based on their SAT scores. But interviews suggest that test-taking skills don’t necessarily translate into sexual-health savvy. So are Yalies are having unsafe sex despite their brains? Or could the very sheltered bubble of erudition in which they live has given them a false sense of security?
“I was asked at Yale: ‘Is pulling out as a form of contraception going to keep working?’ ” recalled Alice Buttrick ’10, who is an active member of RALY, Yale’s reproductive rights organization, and has served as an on-campus intern for Planned Parenthood.
“Sex is not academic. It’s a different type of intelligence,” Buttrick said. “Here people tend to think too often: “We’re at Yale. No one has syphilis here, right?”
Not necessarily.
Although he was unable to release exact statistics, Yale University Health Services Director Paul Genecin said while the most common STD that YUHS sees is chlamydia, there are a few cases annually of gonorrhea and syphilis, as well as a steady occurrence of other sexually transmitted diseases and infections.
“We see students at Yale with HIV and AIDS at about the same rate as the general population,” Dr. Genecin wrote in an e-mail. “That is about 0.5 percent of the population; we see HIV in both Undergraduate and Graduate and Professional students, male and female, gay/bisexual and straight.”
HPV, he added, is likely as common at Yale as in the general population (about 20 percent) and herpes occurs so frequently that there are no statistics. It is probable that up to 80 percent of the young adult population (and Yale is no exception) have been exposed to Type I Herpes and about 20 percent to Type II.
Molecular biophysics and biochemistry professor William Summers, who teaches the infamous class “Biology of Gender and Sexuality” (“Porn in the Morn”), explained that — even in a purely academic setting — he consistently receives disturbingly erroneous answers on the class’s three exams.
“It surprises me how misinformed students are about what seem to be basic facts, what seem to be giveaway questions that everyone should get an 100 on,” Summers said. “A lot of students don’t know their own anatomy.”
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