Safer heterosex: perspectives from young men in Ireland
Abbey Hyde A D , Jonathan Drennan A , Etaoine Howlett B and Dympna Brady CA UCD School of Nursing, Midwifery and Health Systems, University College Dublin, Health Sciences Centre, Belfield Campus, Dublin 4, Ireland.
B UCD School of Sociology, University College Dublin, Belfield Campus, Dublin 4, Ireland.
C St Angela’s College, Lough Gill, Sligo, Ireland.
D Corresponding author. Email: abbey.hyde@ucd.ie
Sexual Health 5(1) 25-30 https://doi.org/10.1071/SH07062
Submitted: 11 August 2007 Accepted: 7 November 2007 Published: 22 February 2008
Abstract
Background: Existing research indicates that large numbers of people do not consistently use condoms when embarking on sexual relationships and instead use unreliable social cues to determine whether a potential partner is likely to have a sexually transmissible infection. This article reports on an aspect of the first major piece of qualitative research that explored young people’s perspectives on sexuality in Ireland, and focuses on how young men made sense of risk when it came to sexual behaviour. Methods: Seventeen focus group interviews (collectively comprising 124 young men) were conducted with male secondary school pupils in Ireland, whose ages ranged from 14 to 19 years. Results: The data are structured around three themes that capture how study participants made sense of sexual safety. These themes are: (i) rumour, local hearsay and ‘knowing’ a potential partner; (ii) the social construction of the ‘slut’ category; and (iii) women as ‘bearers of disease’. Young women in the young men’s social group tended to acquire a specific sexual identity, not necessarily through any definitive evidence of their sexual history, but rather through their normative behaviours – dress, presentation, appearance and so forth. It was on this basis that the sexual status of a young woman was judged. Conclusions: Based on participants’ accounts, we conclude that notions of safer sex are not merely established in individual discussions between a couple embarking on a sexual relationship, but rather are produced discursively in the wider social setting beyond the sexual encounter.
Acknowledgements
The authors would like to thank the Crisis Pregnancy Agency for funding this research. The opinions expressed in this publication are of the researchers and are not necessarily those of the sponsor.
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* *P denotes that a participant is speaking, and where the identity of the participant was recognised in the course of transcribing, the participant is identified by a number. However, at times during the interviews, particularly in the heat of an interaction among group members, it was impossible to identify who the speaker was. This problem was compounded by virtue of the fact that the young people within specific groups tended to speak with the same accents and the same level of maturity in their voices.
