It’s easy and tempting to look at the figures, released yesterday, showing 10,000 home STI kits being ordered in Ireland every month, and just write it off as another sign of civilisational decline. Your correspondent knows this because, in truth, that was my own initial reaction: What kind of society do we live in where there are tens of thousands of people every month living in the fear that they’ve caught something from a sexual partner?
The answer, sadly, is “modern society”. And while any conservative vision for the culture should, I’d argue, include as a priority making a strong and compelling case against so-called “hookup culture” and modern dating trends, letting STI’s run rampant in the meantime probably isn’t good for anybody.
It’s probably a certainty in life that each of us will, at some stage, have to make a visit to the doctor that we find highly embarrassing, whether that’s because of a urinary tract infection, prostate issues, piles, or something else. It’s not a certainty, but it’s true in many cases that we’ll put that visit to the doctor off for a while in the hope that whatever’s plaguing us will just go away on its own. That’s true for the men amongst us, anyway, and is reputedly a leading cause of male cancers like testicular cancer often being detected later – and with more severe consequences – than is necessary.
Giving people the opportunity to check their sexual health in the privacy – and relative anonymity – of their own homes therefore, I’d argue, amounts to that relatively rare thing: A progressive policy that both makes sense and likely achieves some good. It is likely to both reduce the incidence of sexually transmitted disease, and the cost to the state of treating those diseases both in terms of man hours and expenditure, especially if it cuts down on doctor visits. And it all comes in for the relatively low projected cost of just over four million euros in 2024, or about 0.01% of total health spending for the year.
Of course, the human brain – including my own – does not always react to things like this entirely logically. There were some yesterday whose reaction to the figures released by the Government was to associate the STI testing with the spread of STIs, and to therefore conclude without much thought that the STI testing as a policy is linked to the spread of STIs. Combine that with the fact that it is a policy enacted by a Government whose highest moral value often appears to be the enactment of progressive cultural supremacy on all matters, and there were more than one or two people whose immediate instinct was that such testing is a disgraceful and more than vaguely immoral waste of taxpayer money.
The reality, by contrast, is more complicated: STI tests are not causing the spread of sexually transmitted diseases. At the risk of sounding like the worst thing someone can sound in Ireland – someone with moral values that would have been considered sound in 1984 – promiscuity is. Sexually transmitted infections are transmitted through sexual contact, hence the dramatic increase in STIs is linked inextricably to the number of people in the country with multiple sexual partners over a short period of time.
We then get into the vexed question of whether that is a) a bad thing and b) any of the Government’s business even if it is a bad thing. I’d argue that the answers to those questions are a) yes and b) not really. Not every cultural ailment can be fixed by the wielding of political power.
That said, there are obvious differences between how the Government treats sex as a risky behaviour and how it treats almost everything else as a risky behaviour: If you’re a smoker, you’ll be reminded constantly by state agencies that smoking is bad for you, and there are active policy measures in place to discourage you from smoking for your own good. If, by contrast, you’re a sex addict – or even just somebody who sees obtaining a fresh sexual partner as the cherry on top of your Saturday night out – then the state has nothing to say to you beyond “here’s a free test, free contraception, and remember: Consent is paramount”.
Part of the explanation for this is ideological, and part of it is political. The political element is the easiest to explain, in that Irish cabinet ministers are fearful – above almost anything else – of appearing prudish or square. Thus all sexual health campaigns must as a matter of political necessity promote sex as a fun recreational activity which you should enjoy safely, wherein the only potential risks are physical or legal. There can never be any talk of emotional risks, or long term self worth, associated with licentious sexual behaviour.
The ideological element is, I’d argue, primarily capitalistic: Almost all marketing of consumer brands, aside from maybe those relating to children or homeware, have sexual appeal at the centre of them. Cars, perfumes, clothes, hair products: All of them are marketed in some way that makes enhancing one’s sexual appeal central to the reason for making a purchase. Our entire society is centered around the idea that self-worth and value in the sexual marketplace are deeply connected.
Only one of these issues can be tackled politically – and even then at more social risk than it’s probably worth. The bigger problem is the wider cultural shift in the west over the past half century which has linked sexual prowess to social standing, which often pressurises people to engage in encounters or relationships out of expectation more than commitment or enthusiasm.
What we lack is a cultural force telling young people (and indeed many not so young people) that they don’t have to live like that, if it’s not producing emotional satisfaction and contentment. That’s what the Christian Church used to, in an imperfect and too often censorious way, provide. STI testing isn’t the issue – it’s the cultural shift that’s made it so commonly necessary that we should worry about.