If yesterday’s icky statistics are anything to go by, the condom is in dire need of a rebrand. According to the UK Health Security Agency, we’re in the grips of a major STI surge: cases of gonorrhoea have gone up by 50 per cent in a year and the number of people with syphilis is the highest since 1948.
The advice from Agency experts — who were at pains to point out that condoms were the only way to guard against most of these diseases — basically amounted to “grab your rubbers, singletons, it’s getting itchy out there.” And given that successive public health surveys have shown that condom use has been steadily falling — particularly among young people — conditions may not improve for some time.
One particularly damning Public Health England poll, in fact, found that almost half of young people didn’t use a condom when they slept with a new partner — findings which led to the first government-backed campaign in almost a decade that promoted condom use among sexually active young adults. A few years on it seems safe to say that the campaign has all but failed.
Sex education in general has been shown to leave Gen Z feeling disenfranchised — when the student discounts site Student Beans surveyed 1,600 Gen Z respondents earlier this year they found that a staggering 87 per cent felt that the sex ed they’d received in school wasn’t inclusive, while 39 per cent felt they weren’t taught how to access contraception. The picture is of a government — and health body — struggling to keep up with the demands of an age where most teenagers get their information via digital mediums, like porn where condom use is vanishingly rare.
Post-Covid, we’ve clearly entered our risky sex era — and that’s not just young people. Yes, a third of STI cases were found in those aged 15 to 24 but rates of infections also doubled among pensioners. It’s not exactly surprising that the demographics hardest hit by Covid restrictions are the ones who are now seeking out comfort, irrespective of the risk. It’s perhaps telling that the last time rates were so high was 1918 for gonorrhoea and 1948 for syphilis, after the First and Second World Wars respectively. Clearly, an existential risk is good for the sex drive. We just need to find a way of making safety as sexy as spontaneity.
