There are NO Stupid Questions

I don’t know about you, but growing up, I was taught that there was no such thing as a ‘stupid question’. Then I started university, where one of my first-year professors informed the entire class that there could indeed be stupid questions. I don’t mind telling you that I found myself confused. But now, doing the job that I do, I can tell you that if someone has the courage to ask a question about sex or STIs or HIV, there is no way that question can be stupid. Bewildering perhaps, but not stupid.

As you may know, I spend a fair chunk of my time speaking to youth about safer sex, a topic that is rarely dull. My audiences are, in many ways, also my raw data. They let me know what’s going on in schools, at parties, at their jobs, in their homes etc., but they also give me a pretty good baseline of where our youth are with their understanding of sexual education. When I first started with AIDS New Brunswick, I thought for sure that knowledge about sex would increase with the age of my audience. For example, I felt that speaking to a university class about sex and prevention mechanisms would be worlds apart from speaking to a group of 10th graders. I was wrong; a person’s knowledge about HIV or STIs or sex in general does not seem to correlate very much with age.

A colleague of mine was speaking with a group of youth about condom use and safer sex, when one brave participant about 16 offered, “I don’t need to worry about condoms, my boyfriend has Spray-on Condoms”. Okay, first off, to the best of my knowledge, THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS SPRAY-ON CONDOMS. After a quick Google search I can say that there was an attempt at making them, but due to several problems, they were never put on the market. I can only imagine the conversation that would ensue pre-coitus: “Don’t worry about it, I have these new spray on condoms”. And what about the bottle? Perhaps a bottle of water with a really nice computer-generated label on it. Extra points if it’s a bottle of lube!

Seriously, lets think about this for a second. We do have spray-on latex (paint), spray-on Band-Aids, spray-on cheese, and spray-on butter. Why couldn’t there be spray-on condoms? And now this young person has to come to the realization that she has been having unprotected sex with her boyfriend (who has been deceiving her). Now all I can think of is the conversation that would happen post-AIDS New Brunswick Sex Education session.

About a month ago, I was invited to give a presentation to an Advanced Human Sexuality Class at my old alma mater (by old I mean I graduated in 2010). The course was actually taught by the same professor who had taught Human Sexuality to me some 3 years earlier. Yeah, her sitting in the back of the class while I did my Harm Reduction and Condom Show wasn’t intimidating at all (note sarcasm). The presentation was fantastic; the students were engaged and asked some great questions, mostly of an academic nature as I had expected, being a member of this audience only a few years previous. At the end of each session we have our participants fill out an evaluation form so that we know what things work and what things don’t. We did very well, and had lots of great feedback. One evaluation read, “I didn’t know that condoms reduced the risk of transmitting HIV. I was raised to think that if one person was HIV+ and they had sex with another person, that person would catch HIV, regardless of protection.” I can only imagine that this person has been terrified of sex for YEARS and now can finally relax a little.

Now let’s talk about the first time I did an Info Booth at a High School Health Fair. It was actually the first booth I worked after taking this job, and was pretty nervous about it. I went to the school, setup, put out my vast assortment of condoms, and waited for the rush of eager students to descend on my display. *Crickets* Okay, so turns out that students are a little shy when it comes to a booth that reads AIDS New Brunswick. After a while, word got around the crowded gym that I was giving out condoms, and just like that I was SWAMPED. After the students had calmed down a little, I was left with a steady stream of interested youth who wanted to ask me questions about HIV/AIDS and STIs.

One youth in particular I’ll never forget. He and his friends approached me with a tremendous amount of bravado, poking fun at the word “AIDS” and snatching up condoms in an exaggerated fashion. After much of the group had cleared, and this one fellow was left, he looked me square in the face, and with total dead-pan asked “Can I catch AIDS from poop” not even “shit”, “poop”. First, I corrected him and told him that one cannot “catch” AIDS, AIDS is a syndrome, one can catch HIV. Second, I explained to him that there are five body fluids that HIV lives in; Blood, Semen, Vaginal Fluid, Breast Milk, and Rectal Fluid, so not necessarily ”poop”, but rather the fluids that are happening in the anus. I did a brief HIV 101 with him, where I learned that he knew that HIV did not discriminate between sexual orientation or people, but he also knew that when HIV first broke in the 80′s it was among gay men. Gay men have anal sex, there is poop in the anus, ergo, [HIV] lives in poop. He explained to me that he thought that so long as he wasn’t having unprotected ANAL sex with his girlfriend then he would not be at risk of contracted HIV. I corrected him, and then we had a talk about STIs.

This post has been pretty youth centred, and that’s because it’s the group I work with the most. But I do get a lot of adults (by adults I mean north of 30) wandering into my office to ask me questions about safer sex. One walk-in had just gotten out of a long-term relationship and had never used condoms and needed me to break out the Ol’ wooden penis kit (remember, the ones from sex ed in school?) and demonstrate how to put a condom on. Another had only  just started having sex and needed a complete introduction to safer sex. In fact they felt that since they had “come late to the party” their partner(s) would be better versed in the ways of safer sex and therefore were entrusting their own safety to their partner(s). We talked about taking ownership of one's own sexual activities and we gave some information about safer sex. Both of these people had their preconceived notions about sex (and how and when to make it safer), and they were comparable to the ones mentioned here in this post.A person’s knowledge level about sex ed does not necessarily correlate with age. An older generation may have more life experience, but that also means that they may have more misguided information and/or assumptions.

It seems to be really easy for people to draw their own conclusions about sex (and safer sex) based on the assorted bits of information they have accumulated. These conclusions can sometimes be misguided and harmful. Talking about sex isn’t the problem so much as talking about one's own sex. If a person is unable to talk about the broad topic of sex, then talking about the sub-category of safer sex probably isn’t going to happen either. Drawing conclusions about sex is a great start, but please research the answers, ask questions, challenge answers.

In my first year of university, I took an English course taught by this amazing prof. He told us on the first day “I do not hold a monopoly on the truth.” This has been a motto of mine ever since. I may not always be right, and neither may you, so keep asking questions, keep looking for answers. Just because something makes sense doesn’t mean that it’s accurate. There are no stupid questions, so ask them.

This article was first published in the blog of AIDS New Brunswick, which you can find here.