CONDOMS
& THE SINGLE MANArabella Weir is even better known as the Fast Show's 'Does my bum look big in this?' and 'No offence, but...' women. Lately she's been appearing as Richard E Grant's posh foodie wife and annoying gay campaigners by incorrect use of the word 'fruits' in the Alpen ads. What on earth was an Aids mag doing asking her to write a column about sex, she wondered. Let's find out, shall we?
For a whole host of reasons, I am not the most obvious choice to write for Positive Nation. One of the reasons would be, I guess, because I am currently (so I'm told) persona non grata with certain more militant gay men. Word is, there may even be a fatwa issued any day now.
But of course there are other, more pertinent reasons as to why you might question me as the best person to write an article on how HIV and Aids feature in our lives today. I live with the father of my two children. Even if I were single and 'out there', I am over 40, rarely shave my legs and only clean my teeth if I find something growing in between them. I only give you a quick troll through my hygiene habits as I believe they pertain heavily to one's sexual appeal...
Hygiene
aside, in my devil-may-care, come-one-come-all youth, Aids was initially, almost
exclusively, talked about as a gay problem with the whole drug user issues trailing
on the agenda as a poor second.
The world, however, has changed and mercifully wised up since then - well, a bit, South Africa's president's ostrich imitation notwithstanding. Most of my male gay friends have adapted their, erm, lifestyles, being now more cautious yet without, miraculously, diminishing the quality of their enjoyment of the whole scene.
Where I've noticed more of a change though, over the last 20 years, is in my heterosexual friends - particularly the men. It seems that as a consequence of Aids awareness they've become more willing to take responsibility for the consequences of a sexual encounter.
Even more surprisingly, all the single men I know carry condoms. I say surprisingly because in my shagging years a tasty, sexually successful young man would no sooner have agreed to use a condom than he'd have elected to wear a pair of girl's pants to school. (See, I said school, I did start young).
When those comically pussy-footed Aids ads appeared in the early 80s you'd have thought your death was imminent if you so much as clapped eyes on a penis. Looking back I guess that's exactly what they were after. But as with all unconvincingly delivered messages (are you listening, Bush, Blair?) none of my hetero contemporaries seemed to absorb the seriousness of the approaching tragedy. I'd be very interested to know if 20-year-old heterosexual men now are less - or more - aware of the risks of transmission than my generation.
The joy of youth, of course, is that you can't imagine being 30, never mind being ill. Yes, indeed, youth is wasted on the young.
When the attempt to educate us sexually activated types began, one of the major points of discussion, as I recall, was the genuine belief that any kind of physical relationship represented on TV and in movies would, perforce, have to acknowledge the new threat to your health. We honestly believed that every single time any couple so much as puckered up in a film the first thing on their lips would be 'condom', as it were.
But somehow that never happened. Notoriously timorous when it comes to thorny matters (particularly when it might involve some gay stuff) mainstream films and television avoided depicting That Condom Moment.
They just hoped we'd all do the work for them and assume the characters we watched were taking the right precautions. And that is wrong.
Given that the proportion of people in their teens and twenties with HIV has increased, maybe they (or do I mean we?) ought to have found a way to incorporate what is now a fact of life. After all, a way was eventually found to include ordinary gay men and lesbians into most forms of entertainment - admittedly after some hefty resistance.
We wouldn't be surprised to see a gay character now in Friends - the ultimate, squeaky clean, sanitised depiction of single life. But we'd still fall over ourselves with shock if they featured even a couple of lines referring to a character practising safe sex, simply acknowledging that it was now, or should be, part of everyone's life.
