Rhona is talking about fourteen-year-old girls who go out at weekends to get drunk and have sex. "They're pathetic!" she says. "They don't realise how stupid they look when they're falling down drunk and letting boys do stuff...." She says these girls are scornful of Rhona and her boyfriend for using condoms. "They say condoms are stupid and it's better without! Can you believe that?"
We look at each other, aghast. How could they possibly think that? They know perfectly well what happens if they don't use condoms! This is the very opposite of everything that they've been taught!
So I find myself wondering.... These young people aren't stupid. Okay, they get drunk - ridiculously drunk - and drunk people make mistakes - but, even so, why would they deliberately take the risk of not using a condom? Once upon a time it would have been simply a matter of ignorance and male irresponsibility and of course these problems persist. But I wonder how much the recklessness of unprotected sex is also an expression of young people's curiosity about all the things in life over which they have no control? It's as if there's something compulsive about playing the lottery of pregnancy and sexually transmitted infection. Will I get caught this time or will I escape? Would it ever happen to me? What would it be like to live my life uncontrolled, unprotected by anyone or anything?
Their curiosity may be inevitable but it's heightened by the unwillingness of adults to engage with young people in thinking about the big things like death any dying and the meaning of our eventual non-existence. Young people think about these things far more than is popularly supposed. But we close the conversations down. "Death's the last thing on their minds!" we tell each other. "They've got their whole lives ahead of them. Why would they want to be thinking about death? That's morbid! They'll worry about that when they're much older."
Nursing our own anxieties about death, this may be what we'd like to believe but it's not true. And because we find this hard to acknowledge, the danger is that young people end up enacting their curiosities for lack of opportunities to talk with anyone about them. We get flustered when they ask "What's the point of anything?" and, rather than engage with such an excellent question, deflect it with platitudes. Yet it's a crucial question for young people to be asking. "What's the point of life if we're all going to die?"
Sex and death focus our most physical and philosophical anxieties. I wonder whether unprotected sex is one of the ways in which young people unconsciously explore these anxieties. How much control do I have? How much of life happens randomly? Yalom (1980) describes sex as ‘death defeating' for some people because "death is connected with banality and ordinariness" (p194) whereas sex promises to be exciting and magical. He notes that there's often an increase in the sexual activity of people diagnosed with life-threatening illnesses and that, for these people, their behaviour is a ‘repression of death anxiety'. I wonder whether young people start to realise that they have a life-threatening condition called mortality and, for some, unprotected sex becomes a response to that realisation.
Reference:
Yalom, I.D. (1980) Existential Psychotherapy. New York: Basic Books.
