Putting moral judgement aside

“Sex is full of lies. The body tries to tell the truth. But, it’s usually too battered with rules to be heard and bound with pretences so it can hardly move. We cripple ourselves with lies.”  – Jim Morrison (1943 – 1971)

THE decision by Fine Gael TD Michelle Mulherin to criticise the youth information website Spunout.ie for providing advice on threesomes raises some interesting questions.

The website is an all-Ireland service and is aimed at 16 to 25-year-olds, so there is not an issue around age of consent. It seems that the deputy is merely on some kind of moral crusade. She seems to be suggesting that the State should be dictating to young people what kind of sexual activity they should be engaging in.

This suggestion is a throwback to a time when homosexuals were prevented by law from expressing their love sexually. Mulherin’s outburst should serve as a timely reminder that the State should have no place in the bedroom. The Mayo TD has suggested in a radio interview that she is in favour of dialogue with young people and that she supports young people developing healthy attitudes to sex and their bodies. She added that these topics are not taboo to her. But clearly threesomes are taboo to her.

To state that taxpayer’s money should not be used to offer young people advice on sexual matters is not just ludicrous, it is irresponsible. It is not all that long ago that the Irish government would have stated that offering advice about the use of condoms was prohibited. Now, condom use is rightly encouraged and helps prevent not only unwanted pregnancy but also sexually transmitted infections. There is a real danger in a government aiming to adopt a moral position on issues around people’s sexual practice. A TD’s personal beliefs around what is sexually acceptable are their own and should remain so. They are entitled to hold them of course and no one should stop them but attempting to impose them on the population at large is where a danger lies.

The response of Spunout.ie has been interesting and laudable. It has been measured and reasoned and seems to recognise that what this represents is a TD aiming to generate cheap publicity and support in their constituency. In a statement, Spunout.ie points out, “Research shows the average age at which teens start to engage in sexual activity is getting younger, particularly in urban areas. HSE data from 2006 (which is now seven years old) shows the average age at which a young person has sex for the first time is 17 (both male and female). Education needs to begin earlier than the age of first sex and it is widely accepted that sexual education in Irish schools is both of poor quality and inconsistent.”

To fail to arm young people with the information they desperately need because of a prudish fear of openly discussing sex is to let those young people down and leave them vulnerable. There is a strange disconnect between what people experienced in their youth and how they view the youth of their children. We were all young once and experienced the confusion and exhilaration that comes with that time of life. Yet when we reach adulthood and have children of our own, we seem to forget what that time was like or fool ourselves into believing that somehow things have changed and ignoring the issue will make it go away.

Spunout.ie recognises the issue here. “All too often, older generations avoid having conversations with their young people about difficult subjects. This is particularly true in relation to sex. Parents feel uncomfortable talking to their children about it and teachers are afraid to raise the subject in the classroom. An adult’s discomfort does not negate a young person’s right to information. Silence does not breed confidence, instead it creates fear and confusion. We should arm our young people with the facts and trust them to make responsible decisions.”

Deputy Michelle Mulherin has made something of a career out of moral outrage. It is almost a year since she stated, during the X Case Dáil debate, that “fornication” was the “single most likely cause of unwanted pregnancy in this country”.  Clearly she feels that the time is right to once again try and whip up the conservative vote within her constituency. Perhaps this is a canny political move on her part but it is a selfish one, which could have potentially affected the information made available to the nation’s young people.

The provision of information is a form of healthcare and should be made available to all young people. Armed with information, they can better protect themselves physically and mentally. New media and the internet are often cited as sources of exposure where young people are bombarded with images of a sexual nature but, of course, that trend had started before the internet became ubiquitous. Media of all kinds now saturate our waking hours and cannot be switched off, so it must be counterbalanced by genuine information for young people and educating them to not feel pressurised into engaging in any activity they are not comfortable with.

Pretending that certain things do not exist will not make it so. Young people’s realities must be experienced and coped with whether or not the adult population wishes to acknowledge them or not. For this reason, information must be offered, through reasonable reliable sources that arm young people with facts, rather than conjecture or lies, and encourage them to make informed decisions on the basis of knowledge rather than pressure.

We owe it to young people to put our moral judgements to one side and support them in every way we can and this involves recognising that their realities might be very different from how we imagine them to be. Empathy for what they are going through should not be so difficult given that we have all gone through it.