Give Me a BreakIsn't it great the way we so-called adults bemoan the lack of morals and discipline in the younger generation? We're teaching them so much by our behaviour, writes Kate Holmquist
Take Brian Cowen's sensible Vat cut on the price of condoms, for example. It was the Union of Students in Ireland who celebrated the lower price, while the Catholic Church condemned it and the rest of us older folk shook our heads wearily and thought "nothing to do with us".
Condoms are for young people. Sexually-transmitted diseases, unwanted pregnancies, drunken sex with relative strangers . . . Oh my. Let those young people fight it out with the Vatican if they want to. We've had our day.
Listen up, all you boring, middle-aged people out there in book clubs, golf clubs and wherever else it is you're getting your jollies, the younger generation (don't you love that expression?) are the ones who are getting it right. Teenage pregnancies are on the decrease, most teenagers wait until university age to have sex, and when they do, a large proportion of them use condoms.
It's the 35- to 55-year-olds who are behaving irresponsibly. The Crisis Pregnancy Agency says that sexually transmitted infections (STIs) and crisis pregnancies are increasing rapidly amongst us dull old cardigan-wearers because - guess what? - we're not using condoms. We're having it off with our partners and, sometimes, relative strangers whose sexual history we know nothing about. Or we're playing pregnancy roulette within marriage, once in a blue moon, thinking that because we're past it we can't get pregnant. And if it's not our partner and somebody we just happened to meet in a convenient situation, we don't even think about getting an STI because crisis pregnancy and STIs are young people's problems.
Surprise, surprise, we 35-pluses are the ones with the STI and crisis pregnancy problem. Come to think of it, why should we be surprised? We're so good at denial. We could teach the kids a thing or two.
A female acquaintance said in passing a while back: "I'd love an affair. Just for one weekend. No strings attached. Just to remind me that I'm still alive."
There's nothing like a life-threatening STI or relationship-threatening pregnancy to remind you that you're still alive. She had the affair. A business trip. Nobody would know. No one would be hurt. That "happy" ending may very well have happened if she'd used a condom. But she didn't.
Cut to the crisis: she got pregnant and her gynaecologist advised her to have an Aids test. Yikes.
This isn't just a female issue. An STI doctor, Dr Derek Freedman, gets men in their 70s and 80s consulting him about their STIs.
The Crisis Pregnancy Agency says that women aged 35-plus are under the misapprehension that they're too old to get pregnant. Yet even at 45, there's a chance.
We mid-lifers may not be as honest about the implications of sexual activity as young people are, especially if we grew up in Holy Catholic Ireland. We think that if we carry condoms - just in case - it means we're out looking for it, and that makes us very bold girls indeed. The sexuality of us 35-to-55s developed in the 1970s and 1980s, when sex education in Ireland was even worse than it is now.
People born in the 1980s and 1990s have their eyes open, in most cases. I know of young people who waited until they were 18 and in a steady relationship and then talked a lot about their first time and how it should be (condoms included) with the person they intended to have sex with. But that's boring, isn't it? No, we adults prefer to be swept off our feet - maybe even in a hotel room somewhere, under the influence of expensive cocktails, so that we don't have to think about what we're doing.
Because if it just happens, spur of the moment, heat of passion, etc, with another married person who is in the same mid-life predicament, then it didn't really happen at all, did it? We can write it off as a mid-life folly, and go home and cherish the memory. Until we discover we're pregnant or have an STI.
I'm not being judgmental. There's a human need for passion and fun and, if we feel the clock ticking and are not getting that fulfilment, then the promise of it can be irresistible.
But, as young people can teach us, the irresistible can also be responsible. Moral questions of no-strings-attached sex or fidelity aside, we adults need to protect our health and that of our partners.
Can you imagine saying to your kids, "Mommy's pregnant and has an STI. Don't do what I did!"? It's a horrendous thought. No wonder more and more 35-pluses are in crisis, and considering going over to England, where the dirty little secret can be erased.
Sometimes I really do think that we "adults" need to let the young people give us a good, strong lecture on morality.
