often choose images of worst-case ‘what if?’s.
One of the most famous sex-risk images in the UK was what’s known as the AIDS monolith advertisement in 1987. As the smoke clears, we see something like a tombstone carved in rock blasted from the mountainside. The chilling, brilliant voiceover is by the actor John Hurt:
There is now a danger that has become a threat to us all.
It is a deadly disease and there is no known cure.
The virus can be passed during sexual intercourse with an infected
person. Anyone can get it, man or woman.
So far it’s been confined to small groups, but it’s spreading … If
you ignore AIDS, it could be the death of you.
Other public information films about danger from a time when governments still made them include one about road safety with an image of a hammer swinging into a peach:
It can happen anywhere, to anyone.
An ordinary street.
A moment’s thoughtlessness.
Then splat, the hammer hits the peach.
Another, on the risk of crime, has hyenas prowling around a parked car. All very vivid and scary – and all consequential, not probabilistic. * But then, how do you do an image of one in a thousand, or any other odds? Not easily, not vividly. Numbers don’t splat like the flesh of a peach or a human being; they don’t bite like hyenas. In contrast, images of the worst-case ‘what if?’ are easy, especially for one victim. And then comes the extrapolation to everyone else, as we’re told that this tombstone/hyena/splatted peach could be you. Think again of Norm’s paralysis as he imagines the teeth and glassy eye of the pike in the reservoir. The consequential image dominates the odds for him too.
Better than public information films and their selective images – don’t you think? – is private information. ‘I know from personal experience …’ are the kind of words we use with all the plumped-up authority we’ve got, certainly more authority than we grant governments. But personal experience and sex? Authoritative and rigorously unbiased? Not selective? Yeah, sure.
Let’s say you have unprotected sex, like Kelvin and Kath. If nothing goes wrong, you feel relieved. But you might also feel the risk probably wasn’t that high after all. Exposure to danger can have that effect – of making people feel safer. ‘See, it was OK!’ One formal explanation for this is that small samples of rare events are skewed. This means that when bad results are not typical – say only one time in every 20 – you might get away with the first few so you expect to be fine next time too. Your chance of being all right is 19 out of 20, or 95 per cent.
In truth, you shouldn’t deduce anything about the true odds from one experience. But deduce you will. Based on your own massively selective sample of the past, you might learn to underestimate probabilities in the future. ‘Had shag, no kid’, as Kelvin might say. Do this a few times and he will – probably – still be OK, encouraging him to think – as if he needs encouragement – that this is the sort of risk he can take.
On the other hand, if it all goes wrong, people tend to overestimate the risk that it will go wrong again. Suppose unsafe sex leads to an STIabout one time in 50. It doesn’t, but bear with us. People might not know the figure, even roughly. After 100 people have five encounters each, roughly ten have an STI.
These ten might say, ‘Crikey, we did it only five times and look what happened.’ So they take away an exaggerated sense of the odds. The other 90 might imagine that the probability of danger is not much above zero: ‘Well, it never happened to me.’ There are lab experiments – not involving sex – that seem to confirm this pattern of belief and behaviour.
So personal experience can lead us astray. Again, we need bigger data than just our own notches on the bedpost.
Sex, like so many other fun activities, clearly carries dangers. These range from pregnancy (if you are a woman having sex with a
One of the most famous sex-risk images in the UK was what’s known as the AIDS monolith advertisement in 1987. As the smoke clears, we see something like a tombstone carved in rock blasted from the mountainside. The chilling, brilliant voiceover is by the actor John Hurt:
There is now a danger that has become a threat to us all.
It is a deadly disease and there is no known cure.
The virus can be passed during sexual intercourse with an infected
person. Anyone can get it, man or woman.
So far it’s been confined to small groups, but it’s spreading … If
you ignore AIDS, it could be the death of you.
Other public information films about danger from a time when governments still made them include one about road safety with an image of a hammer swinging into a peach:
It can happen anywhere, to anyone.
An ordinary street.
A moment’s thoughtlessness.
Then splat, the hammer hits the peach.
Another, on the risk of crime, has hyenas prowling around a parked car. All very vivid and scary – and all consequential, not probabilistic. * But then, how do you do an image of one in a thousand, or any other odds? Not easily, not vividly. Numbers don’t splat like the flesh of a peach or a human being; they don’t bite like hyenas. In contrast, images of the worst-case ‘what if?’ are easy, especially for one victim. And then comes the extrapolation to everyone else, as we’re told that this tombstone/hyena/splatted peach could be you. Think again of Norm’s paralysis as he imagines the teeth and glassy eye of the pike in the reservoir. The consequential image dominates the odds for him too.
Better than public information films and their selective images – don’t you think? – is private information. ‘I know from personal experience …’ are the kind of words we use with all the plumped-up authority we’ve got, certainly more authority than we grant governments. But personal experience and sex? Authoritative and rigorously unbiased? Not selective? Yeah, sure.
Let’s say you have unprotected sex, like Kelvin and Kath. If nothing goes wrong, you feel relieved. But you might also feel the risk probably wasn’t that high after all. Exposure to danger can have that effect – of making people feel safer. ‘See, it was OK!’ One formal explanation for this is that small samples of rare events are skewed. This means that when bad results are not typical – say only one time in every 20 – you might get away with the first few so you expect to be fine next time too. Your chance of being all right is 19 out of 20, or 95 per cent.
In truth, you shouldn’t deduce anything about the true odds from one experience. But deduce you will. Based on your own massively selective sample of the past, you might learn to underestimate probabilities in the future. ‘Had shag, no kid’, as Kelvin might say. Do this a few times and he will – probably – still be OK, encouraging him to think – as if he needs encouragement – that this is the sort of risk he can take.
On the other hand, if it all goes wrong, people tend to overestimate the risk that it will go wrong again. Suppose unsafe sex leads to an STIabout one time in 50. It doesn’t, but bear with us. People might not know the figure, even roughly. After 100 people have five encounters each, roughly ten have an STI.
These ten might say, ‘Crikey, we did it only five times and look what happened.’ So they take away an exaggerated sense of the odds. The other 90 might imagine that the probability of danger is not much above zero: ‘Well, it never happened to me.’ There are lab experiments – not involving sex – that seem to confirm this pattern of belief and behaviour.
So personal experience can lead us astray. Again, we need bigger data than just our own notches on the bedpost.
Sex, like so many other fun activities, clearly carries dangers. These range from pregnancy (if you are a woman having sex with a
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