White students in particular are STD superspreaders. Brilliant tip: bring condoms!

DThis month the European Center for Disease Control published a report on the occurrence of STDs, sexually transmitted diseases. ‘Troubling surge in cases of syphilis, gonorrhea, and chlamydia‘, they write. There has been an increase in particular among young, highly educated people of Dutch origin, the RIVM writes dryly. Let me translate: students, and especially white students, are STD superspreaders. This ties in with my experience as a general practitioner in the center of Utrecht.

Our general practice is two streets away from the Utrechtsch Studenten Corps, the association of the ‘banga list’ that became public last month: a list of names of first-year students with their address details and sexual assessments. In my opinion, such a banga list is the result of insecurity and machismo, where the status of the male fraternity student increases if he has fucked more girls. And preferably without a condom, a student once told me.

This probably best fits the primitive image of the man-as-conqueror. Rolling a condom over the stiff member in a controlled manner is a slave to the penis. That results in negative points: it is scored, but sex is more like loving lovemaking than finishing a banga list. By the way, it is always a banga list, and never a bangus list: gay sex may even result in penalty points in the club ball book.

Well, how bad is it? Of course, primate behavior is not reserved for frat boys. Programs like Temptation Island even run on the raging hormones of young people and these are certainly not just male students. But the more closed, primitive and unruly a subculture, the greater the chance of excesses such as banga lists.

I also know it from my student days. In my then boyfriend’s student house there was a beer tasting list on which beer brands could be entered, along with odor, color, taste and foam head. Of course, the jokers had no beer brands but, rather, girls’ names written down. In their presence I wrote SUPERGOOR behind my name everywhere – a surname like mine should be proudly embraced and used.

The combination of sex and students is timeless. Put a group of young people together without parental supervision and physical contact automatically occurs. They are attracted to each other like atoms. I don’t have the impression that today’s young people have more sex than young people in the past. In any case, it will start later. Rutgers has researched that the first time sex happened on average at the age of 17 in 2012, and at 18.7 in 2023.

But condom use is declining. In 2023, 43 percent of young people indicated that they had not used a condom with their last partner, while in 2012 this was 31 percent. The condomless thing is new. In my student days, having sex without a condom with someone with whom you were not in a steady relationship was seen as a kind of Russian roulette light: you were playing with your life a bit, because yes, HIV. That fear is gone: fortunately, HIV is no longer the deadly disease it once was, but a treatable condition.

That image also exists for other STDs: annoying, but they can all be fixed with antibiotics, right? Well, not quite. Many young people do not realize that HIV needs to be treated for life. That you can also contract hepatitis B or C, which are much more difficult to treat and sometimes even fatal. That you can get genital warts, which in some people are so persistent that it takes years for the warts on their penis or vagina to disappear. And they may be completely harmless medically, but they are damaging to the sexual ego.

And you can also get herpes, with recurring painful and infectious blisters on the genitals. Or STDs with names like mycoplasma genitalium and trichomonas. Chlamydia, by far the most common STD, is usually easy to treat without sequelae, but due to increasing resistance to antibiotics and the more common occurrence of a vicious subtype, lymphogranuloma venereum, it is correspondingly less easy to treat.

Moreover, chlamydia is responsible for a silent drama: approximately 500 women become infertile every year due to chlamydia. Consolation for feminists: although women more often suffer miserable symptoms from STDs, men can also suffer long-term complaints from STDs, especially persistent prostate infections and persistent burning in the penis.

In short, STDs are not that harmless. And they are advancing, becoming more persistent and in the meantime condom use is decreasing. And unfortunately, condoms don’t even protect one hundred percent against all STDs. But against a lot. So, dear people with raging hormones, brilliant tip: bring condoms! And oh yes, when the time comes: use them too. And have fun, by the way.