Halfway through a bedroom love tryst, it would certainly put anyone off to find the face of their amour transfigured into the looming, leering visage of Saddam Hussein, before morphing into those of other notable dictators. The subtle hint, if you can work it out, in a recent German anti-Aids advert warning against the dangers of unprotected sex is that Aids sufferers are committing mass murder if they have sex without a condom.
It is certainly true that sex without a barrier method of protection is callous, since it enables the transmission of any and all infections and diseases, not just Aids. But, as Elizabeth Pisani asked this week, how exactly does the advert's bizarre and lurid sequence of images engender enlightenment in sufferers, the medical profession and sexual health activists? How does it strengthen calls for increased funding for anti-Aids initiatives globally? How does it enable the sexually active and the at-risk to understand the spread, the symptoms, the risks and the reality of the disease? What does it do but pander to the most vicious and judgemental interpretation of risky sexual behaviour – that it is fatal and base, on a par with the greatest crimes against humanity?
The brouhaha does bring up an interesting issue, however. Adverts, public announcements and social campaigns about health-related matters always occupy tricky territory, whether they're trying to tackle alcoholism in the young, the glamorous but cancer-tastic lure of smoking, or the dangers of drug use. There are two pretty trite alternatives: the jokey, matey, inclusive chattiness that speaks to its audience from a position of parity, such as the Talk to Frank drugs advice helpline and the Condom Essential Wear campaign, both of which are laudable for their light touch. Second, there's the heavy-handed fear tactic that crashed most notably into public consciousness in the 1980s with the now-infamous grey tombstone inscribed with the words: Aids – Don't Die of Ignorance. It was a brutish and uncaring sequence, delivering no information, only fear and pain. Oddly enough, the post-war public-health film in which a nice lady who'd caught syphilis during a mid-war bunk-up had to break the news to her returning husband achieved greater open-mindedness three decades before.
Generally – and obviously – speaking, the only way to make a change in people's self-sabotaging behaviour is to unpick, with sympathy and calmness, the destructiveness which underlies it. That involves defusing people's natural defensiveness and providing fully supported reasons, through concrete information and evidence, why smoking, boozing and caning it aren't quite the route to fruitful self-actualisation. And a little bit of brute grossness – such as the anti-smoking advert in which cigarettes oozed yellow fat – does help.
I make one exception to the softly-softly rule, and it involves condoms. Condoms have been around for thousands of years. They are cheap, incredibly effective and stopping for 15 seconds to put one on is sexy. When it comes to promoting their use, I've always been in favour of close-up shots of genital warts and crabs to get the nation's young to change their latex-less ways. Desultory smoking and Martini-sipping may look stylish, which corrupts the effectiveness of the messages against them. But when you get right down to it, it's difficult to carry off herpes with panache.
