Many teens say they use condoms “sometimes” but not “always”, according to a national survey on the sexual behaviour of young people.
Why make use of condoms at all if you are going to use them only “sometimes”? It’s like playing Russian roulette – the chances of HIV infection and unwanted pregnancies are sky-high.
It is easy to jump to the conclusion that teenagers are just irresponsible. A group of 20 grade 11 learners who attended my HIV workshop at Florida Park High School recently were equally stymied.
One person who does not jump to conclusions is Dan Ariely, author of the book Predictably Irrational – the hidden forces that shape our decisions. A social scientist, Ariely would say that there must be a reason why teenagers do not make consistent use of condoms.
The workshop at Florida Park High School was designed to clarify Ariely’s ideas. It was obvious that the learners were less likely to engage in unsafe sex armed with new insights concerning their own make-up.
Ariely points out that we have two sides to our personalities. He refers to Robert Louis Stevenson’s famous classic, Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, to illustrate the point. The true gentleman, Dr Jekyll, and the uncontrolled criminal, Mr Hyde, turn out to be one and the same person.
He proves that when we are emotionally aroused the reptilian brain takes over and we find ourselves saying “yes please” to sex instead of “no thanks”. He has a whole litany of phrases to describe that condition: emotions on the boil; impassioned state; someone else has taken over your body; half out of your mind; hormones raging at fever pitch; and sexually aroused. He points out that in the throes of passion we have very little control over our behaviour.
“If we want to help teenagers avoid sex, sexually transmitted diseases and unwanted pregnancies,” says Ariely, “we have two strategies: either we can teach them how to say no before any temptation takes hold or before a situation becomes impossible to resist, or we can prepare them to deal with the consequences of saying yes in the heat of passion – by carrying a condom, for example.”
At the workshop, we ran through the nature of Ariely’s experiment and the answers it provided.
In Ariely’s own experiment, volunteers answered questions in a “cold state”, later they were asked to answer the same questions in an aroused state. To achieve this each volunteer was required to view a set of erotic pictures and masturbate. They entered their responses on a specially adapted computer.
The results shocked the experiment’s participants. Their desire to engage in a variety of odd sexual activities was nearly twice as high when they were aroused. They were also twice as likely to engage in immoral activities in an aroused state. They were 25% more likely to practise unsafe sex when aroused – even though condom use had been preached to them over the years.
The Florida learners revealed that Ariely’s scientific experiment had made a big impact on them. None of them had realised before that they could be their own worst enemies. Like the volunteers, they had no conception of how different reactions can be once you are aroused. All your resolutions and promises fly out of the window.
You become, in fact, someone else.We now had the answer to the mystery of why sexually active teenagers use condoms “sometimes”.
In the light of this breakthrough, adults will have to revise what we tell teenagers about protecting themselves against HIV and unwanted pregnancies.
Joan Dommisse is an educator in the field of HIV. She can be contacted on [email protected]. Watch Joan Dommisse on Wednesdays on Learning Channel’s Teacher Time on SABC1 at 11:30. In partnership with Learning Channel.