Mirror of Justice

A blog dedicated to the development of Catholic legal theory.
Affiliated with the Program on Church, State & Society at Notre Dame Law School.

Tuesday, August 31, 2010

The disappearing social stigma of STDs

By Rob Vischer

I am not at all opposed to sexually active teenagers getting tested for STDs.  (I'm pretty sure that sentence has never begun a post on MoJ.)  I am troubled, though, that casual sex is such an accepted part of our youth culture -- a youth culture that is shaped in many ways by adults -- that MTV is running a sweepstakes in which prizes are given for announcing your presence at an STD clinic to all your social media contacts on Foursquare.  Much of the social stigma associated with STDs, I have always assumed, is not just that you contracted one, but that you were engaged in behavior that potentially exposed you to one.  Even accounting for the different social expectations of young men and young women when it comes to sexual "conquests," I would find it jolting to find a teenager who considered it a badge of honor worthy of proclamation to the world that he finds himself in the position of needing to visit the clinic.  I find this development to be a fascinating (in a car-crash sort of way) snapshot into the confluence of diminishing private/public boundaries and increasingly permissive sexual norms.

https://mirrorofjustice.blogs.com/mirrorofjustice/2010/08/the-disappearing-social-stigma-of-stds.html

Vischer, Rob | Permalink

TrackBack URL for this entry:

https://www.typepad.com/services/trackback/6a00d834515a9a69e20133f372f4ed970b

Listed below are links to weblogs that reference The disappearing social stigma of STDs :

Comments

Feed You can follow this conversation by subscribing to the comment feed for this post.

I think the point is not for teenagers to announce to the world that they think they may have a sexually-transmitted disease, but rather to encourage teenagers -- whom I am sure MTV assumes already to be sexually active and at risk -- to get tested when they might otherwise not do so. I have seen in several places the estimate that 1 in 5 people who are HIV+ don't know it. By my calculations (which I wouldn't want anyone to rely on too heavily), that would be over 200,000 people. The idea is not to make it a badge of honor to possibly have a sexually transmitted disease. It's to remove the stigma from getting tested, which I think is a good thing.

Some interesting statistics can be found here
http://www.guttmacher.org/pubs/FB-ATSRH.html

Among them are the following (the first one of which is surprising):

•Teens are waiting longer to have sex than they did in the past. Some 13% of never-married females and 15% of never-married males aged 15–19 in 2002 had had sex before age 15, compared with 19% and 21%, respectively, in 1995.
•Ten percent of young women aged 18–24 who have had sex before age 20 report that their first sex was involuntary. The younger they were at first intercourse, the higher the proportion.
•Of the 18.9 million new cases of STIs each year, 9.1 million (48%) occur among 15–24-year-olds.
•Although 15–24-year-olds represent only one-quarter of the sexually active population, they account for nearly half of all new STIs each year.
•Human papillomavirus (HPV) infections account for about half of STIs diagnosed among 15–24-year-olds each year. HPV is extremely common, often asymptomatic and generally harmless. However, certain types, if left undetected and untreated, can lead to cervical cancer.