Condoms have been around for a while -- in fact, there's a 12,000-year-old cave painting in France that shows a man using one (or so says Planned Parenthood's Web site).
We can't imagine what that Frenchman's condom might have been made of, but we are pretty confident in saying that condoms have become a bit more advanced over the millennia. Today, we've got flavored, textured, glow-in-the-dark and even musical varieties.
But even with all those options, a lot of ASU students still refuse to follow the Frenchman's example and use one.
When the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released a report that basically said a lot of young people have sex, we weren't terribly surprised. All we have to do is walk into the bathroom near our newsroom and look at the condom machine on the wall to know that.
But the CDC report and an ASU survey from 2004 backed up our assumptions. According to the national CDC survey, 25 percent of 15-year-olds and 62 percent of 18-year-olds had vaginal intercourse in 2002. Since a lot of 2002's teenagers are today's undergraduate students, we figured the number of ASU students who have hit the sack would be a bit higher.
And sure enough, according to the ASU survey, 79 percent of students have had vaginal intercourse.
What did surprise us were the figures for condom usage. According to an ASU study, 63 percent of students used a condom the last time they had vaginal intercourse. That number drops when you look at other types of sexual contact -- 14 percent used a condom for anal sex and only 4 percent of students insisted on a rubber for oral sex.
The study didn't look at why there was such disparity in the numbers. But the Wellness and Health Promotion Program told us most students aren't taught that condoms help prevent diseases. Armed with that information and our own superb reasoning skills, we figured the most plausible explanation for the lack of condom use is that students don't think about condoms unless they're afraid of becoming -- or getting someone -- pregnant.
Forget whatever you learned in junior high sex-ed, because condoms do protect against diseases.
CDC studies have found that condoms are highly effective in preventing transmissions of HIV, gonorrhea and chlamydia, among other diseases. According to the ASU study, 1.9 percent of students reported having chlamydia in the past year.
That may not be many students. But it's impossible to know exactly who those students are unless you are in the habit of asking your partners about STD histories before engaging in any sort of sexual contact -- oral, vaginal or anal.
And since we've already established the majority of ASU students aren't abstinent, we hope condom usage increases, at least. Protect yourself now and you'll save yourself a probably embarrassing and painful disease later.
After all, if a French caveman can use a condom, you can, too.
