Columns

Hi everybody,

The joy of writing under a pseudonym is that you can say anything you want without fear of repercussion. It instantly silences the angel on your shoulder that tells you not to be needlessly crass or make libellous accusations.

As my name’s not on my work, I can imply that David Bain murdered his family because they didn’t approve of his gay love affair with Joe Karam (Bain shot Karam in the face, if you know what I mean). It also means I can call Sir Roger Douglas a dinosaur cunt, which no sane person would do if they knew their name would be forever attributed to the quote (mainly because a dinosaur’s nether region would be better described as a cloaca rather than a cunt, which is appropriate because Sir Roger Douglas is a vapid cock hole that spits piss and shit, and reeks of feral musk. Also he’s a cunt).

My needlessly crass and libellous point is this: I don’t usually filter myself when writing this column. It was pretty surprising, therefore, that a little voice chirped in my ear when writing this week and said “hold on, you shouldn’t write that.”

I had begun discussing the dripping dick diseases and pustulating pussy problems that can come from unsafe sexual practices. At the outset I didn’t see a problem in highlighting that chlamydia is as common as red hair in 20-24-year-olds, nor did I see a problem with suggesting that no ginger has ever had chlamydia because nobody finds them sexually attractive. I was finishing up the column when I stopped and thought, “What about those readers that haven’t had sex?”

The problem in medicine is we focus on disease; we don’t focus on healthy things as they don’t pay for our BMWs and yachts. Its easy to jump to genital warts and pelvic inflammatory disease, but the more pertinent topic is “what’s normal, healthy sex?” As topics go, that’s a big ‘un. Like “walking funny the next day because of how big it was” level big. So let’s break it up and cover sex, sexual health, and sexual illness across a couple of columns before going back to less sticky and shameful-to-the-Catholics-among-us topics like Fresher Flu.

The point I want to repeatedly thrust into you this week is that not everybody at Uni has had sex, and not everybody at Uni will want sex. The literature around age of onset of sex is messy, to say the least, but the general view is that onset of sex is far later than you’d expect.

Around 75 per cent of New Zealand high school students haven’t had sex, though older students are more likely to have done so. In America, the median age of onset of sex seems to be around 17-years-old, with guys starting very slightly earlier than gals. New Zealand doesn’t appear to have churned out a decent report on our boning habits for a while, but work from the ‘90s seems to agree that around half of people will have had sex before they’re 17, and half of people won’t have.

That means a large chunk of young adults like you won’t have had sex yet. Which is normal. Its also probably an underestimate as it doesn’t account for things like homosexuality (where age of sexual onset is generally thought to be later due to heteronormative social pressures), asexuality, and lying.

Normal, healthy sex is a big topic which is full of things you wouldn’t think of. So strap in (and strap on) for the ride next week.