Sex need not be a taboo subject

By Oyunga Pala

Imagine this. You are handed the miracle medicine for a recurring ailment but the bottle comes with explicit instructions: Do not think of a monkey or the medicine won’t work.

Every time you try to take your medicine, you recall the instructions and you end up thinking about the monkey.  Replace the monkey with sex and you start to appreciate why abstinence-only-until-marriage campaigns are fraught with disaster.

The frequency of reports on teenage pregnancies is approaching epidemic rates, spreading like the flu.

Apologists would be upset to note that Kenya made the top ten in a recent United Nations study as part of special envoy Gordon Brown’s global education agenda, at a respectable sixth position.

The country survey that involved 25 countries in Africa and Asia was released on the International Day of the Girl Child. It goes without saying. Sex is a national past time among the 14-19-year-old age bracket.

Parents blame the sexualised media. Yet media is in the business of making money and not setting moral parameters. Adverts come tagged with subliminally sex messages. Simple things like cooking oil are packaged as romantic brands. The fantasy of a pristine beach and intimate coupling is the promise cooking oil merchants sell.

The country is held hostage by a regular feed of Latino soaps casting women as innocent victims of manipulative men and wicked mothers-in-law. Gospel music videos have become so raunchy that it is the viewers exclaiming, “Jesus Christ!”

Newspapers are meanwhile filled with randy adults getting caught in the act.  Flip through the magazine profiles and one encounters a series of young mothers parading beautiful babies, scant mention of fathers, living life like it is the golden age of single parenthood.

Porn

 Radio stations have sex on the menu at breakfast, lunch and dinner. Porn can be discreetly delivered straight to a phone.

Thus, in every direction she turns, the young woman is bombarded by one message: Virginity is for prudes and losers. Have sex, add some drama to your life and acquire a sense of belonging in shared decadence.

Meanwhile, parents are too busy keeping pace with bills to have the ‘talk’.

Besides, parents are the last people children talk to about sex. Extended family network that was supposed to provide refuge has broken down. So the young girl is really stuck with one route to understanding the conflicting sexual signals:  Trial and error.

Contraceptive use is not as frequent as one would wish. Not because teenagers do not value protection. They are just encumbered by competing priorities. Between the first drink and a condom, the rubber loses out. They may be free condoms at government clinics, but no cool teenage is going to be caught dead stocking up at a dispensary.

It makes a strong case for going back to the basics. Schools have their challenges. Incidences of male teachers raiding the cradle are not uncommon. But proper education is the inevitable first step to a multi-prong approach to eliminating ignorance. 

Guidance has to come from the government for they are long term losers when teenagers fall pregnant. We teach ethics in school for good citizenship. But being a good citizen counts for nothing when you are dead because of a botched abortion.