by Samara Alpern
Daily Lobo columnist
A tyranny of silence is threatening your sexual health.
That was the concern voiced by Dr. Drew Pinsky this weekend in Austin, Texas, at the Trojan College Roundtable, a focus group discussion of sex on campus and in the media.
Pinsky - popularly known as Dr. Drew of MTV's "Loveline" - moderated the roundtable. Participants included college newspaper editors and writers from universities around the country, and I contributed as the representative from UNM.
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Pinsky said he has observed a recent trend of sexual conservatism and self-censorship in the media.
"There is a genuine paranoia," he said.
He described a recent incident that occurred with the producers of his new show, "Strictly Sex with Dr. Drew" on the Discovery Health Channel.
"They wouldn't let me say 'breast cancer' because of the word 'breast,'" he said.
He marveled, "I never thought I'd live in an age when a doctor couldn't express medical opinions."
Troubling First Amendment issues aside, this recent trend of censorship in the media and sex education also has disturbing implications for public health. Historically, societal failure to discuss sex in forthright, biological terms has correlated with a rise in sexually transmitted infections.
In the early 1980s, America was generally tight-lipped when it came to addressing healthy sexual activity, leading to a rise in sexually transmitted diseases.
"Overall, STDs were much worse in the 1980s when there was no discussion going on," Pinsky said.
The rise of HIV, the virus that causes AIDS, changed that attitude. It was during this era that the aphorism "Silence Equals Death" was coined. Suddenly, there was a consensus that sex was indeed a health issue, and it needed to be discussed openly. Honest information needed to be disseminated to contain the burgeoning epidemic of AIDS.
The coupling of mortal consequences with frank and manifest sex education produced an all-time low of sexually transmitted diseases in the early 1990s.
The 1990s progressed into a transition period toward more conservative attitudes and less responsible sexual behavior. The media was still willing to explore sexual topics - "Loveline" ran through the late 1990s - but in 1996, Congress began funding abstinence-only sex education. Many people also considered the risk of HIV had been overstated and reverted to less responsible behaviors. Incidents of sexually transmitted diseases began to creep up slightly, though the overall rates remained low.
Now, in the first decade of the millennium, we once again live in an era where conservatism and misinformation predominate.
Since George Bush took office in 2001, the government has spent $779 million on abstinence-only education. A report by Rep. Henry Waxman, a Democrat from California, found that the curricula used by more than two-thirds of government-funded abstinence-only programs contain misleading or inaccurate information about abortion, contraception, genetics and sexually transmitted infections.
People also have less information available through the media. The Federal Communications Commission has been running an aggressive "decency campaign." This crusade has instilled the atmosphere of paranoia perceived by Pinsky.
Overall, the decency campaign has had a chilling effect on frank media discourse about sexual health. Fortunately, the fearful ambience engulfing the national media has not entirely diffused to college media.
With one exception, all the panelists agreed that censorship of sexual topics in campus media was not a major obstacle. The roundtable included universities from Nebraska, Kansas, Texas, Oklahoma, New Mexico, Colorado, Georgia and Tennessee.
Then again, Pinsky said panelists from mostly Northeastern states in another recent roundtable had voiced deep concerns about censorship. Campus editors and writers from the Northeast generally feared "vehement response" from their own student body, as well as loss of revenue from offended sponsors when publishing stories with sexual content - even when related to health.
Based on historical data, the current atmosphere of censorship and our insistence on treating sex as a strictly moral issue - rather than a biological one - bodes ill for public health.
It took the AIDS epidemic to convince the public that open dialogue and comprehensive sex health education were warranted. Now that the AIDS crisis has been moderately contained, the public once again seems comfortable with censorship and silence.
What kind of health crisis will we have to suffer next before Americans once again realize that censorship of sexual health issues does not protect us, but in fact endangers us?
