JONATHAN COHN OCTOBER 28, 2010
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As any visitor to Europe can attest, attitudes about sex over there are a lot different than attitudes about sex over here. All you have to do is turn on a television, open a newspaper, or walk through a train station and look at the billboards. Messaging about safe sex is not only more common. It's also a lot more explicit.
Rachel Phelps has collected some examples of these ads in a slideshow at Slate (starting with the image above). And she thinks they make a difference:
In both Europe and America, the age at which most people start having sex is 17. But that's where similarities about teen sexuality begin and end. Teen pregnancy rates in the United States are three to six times higher than in Western European countries. This means that one out of every three American teenage girls becomes pregnant at least once before she reaches the age of 20. (Even poor countries like Algeria, Sri Lanka, China, and Estonia have lower teen birth rates than we do.) The gap between Europe and the United States for sexually transmitted diseases is even greater--gonorrhea and chlamydia rates are 20 to 30 times higher here than in the Netherlands, for example.
What explains these hugely varying outcomes? At the heart of the answer lies a contrast in attitudes toward teen sexuality. This is clear from research about how families talk about sex. And it's also clear from advertising campaigns. The caption for this light-hearted German ad reads "Prevents Shortsightedness." Can you imagine an ad like it in the United States?
This is not an issue on which I've kept up to date, so I can't vouch for Phelps' assessment of the latest research. But it certainly sounds plausible. And it's consistent with what I observed many years ago, on a trip to Brazil sponsored by the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation.
At the time, Brazil was winning international acclaim for its fight HIV. The effort had many components, including the decision to produce its own, unlicensed versions of anti-retroviral drugs so that it could afford to treat its HIV-positive population. But a key to its prevention efforts was an aggressive public information campaign about condoms.
Brazilians, like Europeans, have far more liberal attitudes about sex than Americans do. The campaign reflected that:
The Brazilian initiative dates back to the 1980s, and it is perhaps best understood through some of the public service commercials that have aired on television since then. In one, dancers from Carnival, costumed in ancient Roman garb, remind viewers that condoms have a long, distinguished history: "In Rome and ancient Egypt, no one knew who they slept with. Marco Antonia used to wear it. . .. Cleopatra demanded and believed in it. ... Hey, put on a condom." Another spot you might describe as "Father Knows Best" meets "Queer as Folk" takes place in a suburban home and preaches the virtues of tolerance toward gays as well as safe sex. Some ads play out like soap operas, such as the one in which a man cheats on his wife, picks up the AIDS virus, then gives it to his spouse. This commercial, too, promotes condom use. ...
Brazil estimates that just 600,000 of its citizens are HIV-positive today--about half of what the World Bank had predicted. The death rate from AIDS has fallen, too--by more than 70 percent in the last decade.
1 comments
"As any visitor to Europe can attest, attitudes about sex over there are a lot different than attitudes about sex over here." That is a generalization (and American masturbation fantasy). Attitudes vary from country to country and each country has its contradictions, especially Latin countries. I know the post is about safe sex campaigns, but let me dwell on this a moment. You could certainly make the case that Northern Europe is more liberal--still, we have to ask what exactly it means to be liberal about sex, and how does a society's liberalness manifest itself? In a higher tolerance for phone sex ads in the metro and nudity on billboards? Easy access to contraception (meaning: condom dispensers in subways and on street corners, as opposed to just drugstores and bathrooms)? The amount and explicitness of safe-sex promotion? Or the actual likelihood of getting laid? A few years back a British paper did a sexual liberalism/promiscuity ranking of countries of more than 10 million. The U.K. was #1, Germany #2, Netherlands #3. USA was #6, ahead of France (having studied at both Duke University and the Sorbonne, this doesn't suprise me, and I say this as someone who thinks Duke's supposed hook-up culture is wildly overblown). Italy came in at #11, behind Turkey. Interestingly, the U.K has a highly visible teen pregnancy problem. Is this simply because the UK is (paradoxically, but plausibly) both more promiscuous and less sexually liberal than Germany? Or are there other factors at play here? To get to the roots of the problem in America, we need to get down to demographics (not just geographical regions) in which teen pregnancy is common. Here in NYC there is as much sex in the media as anywhere else I've been, and the city has also undertaken free-condom-giveaway campaigns. Yet teen pregnancy exists here too. However, I would venture a guess that it occurs mainly in communities in which it is not especially taboo. The now-infamous fact that 70% of black Americans are born to single mothers is not irrelevant to this discussion, though obviously it only accounts for part of the discrepancy between the US and Europe. When young, single mothers are a cultural norm, and fathers are not expected to provide for their children, the incentive to use condoms drops. Sadly, as a TNR article points out, black Americans account for half of HIV cases, despite being only 13% of the population. While aggressive safe sex promotion would no doubt be beneficial to the black community, is sexual moralism the root of the problem? Seems unlikely. I am certainly in favor of more aggressive safe-sex promotion. I would like to see condom dispensers in every subway and street corner. And I don't doubt that Red-state, moralistic opposition to sex education is part of the problem (but only part: pop culture has a way of wiping out regional backwardness. Listen to Bristol Palin talk and it's clear she knew what she was doing). But the fact is, most American teens undergo sex education. They know what condoms are. The fact that some choose not to may be due to both cultural and socioeconomic factors that do not necessarily correspond to trends in Europe's more homogenous societies.
- shaltiel
October 28, 2010 at 5:53pm