Condoms are a wonderful invention. They allow us to have sex as often as we like with as many partners as we like, without contracting disease or spending many months changing nappies. And please drop the ‘they’re not 100 per cent safe’ line. Nothing is.

Syphilis, gonorrhoea, chlamydia, HIV, and such nasty critters have for thousands of years plagued humankind where the sun dosen’t shine. In the past, quacks and mountebanks made pots of gold selling protective potions and other useless stuff.

Then modern condoms came along. They’re made of rubber, they’re affordable, and they work.

One might reasonably expect humanity to celebrate, erect a nice monument to the inventor (the iconography is well-known in the Luqa region), and get down to business. But no. What we get instead is a bunch of sermons urging us to stick to the standards of the pre-rubber days. Two in particular.

The first is abstinence. This is the sort of thing recommended by Catholic bishops and Hindu renouncers and such. With respect to sexually transmitted diseases (STDs), it’s certainly true that abstinence is the best way to avoid them. Just as starvation is the best way to avoid food poisoning, or spending summer in a dark room the best way to avoid sunburn.

Abstinence comes in various flavours. It can be a case of abysmal lack of success with the attractive sex, or maybe just a general asexuality (there are people who seem to prefer to keep their bodily fluids to themselves). That sort of passive abstinence doesn’t concern us here. It’s abstinence by choice we’re interested in.

That of Mahatma Gandhi is probably the best known example of active abstinence. At some point in his 30s, Gandhi became deeply involved in the philosophy of brahmacharya, a type of spiritual and physical asceticism.

He later devised “very dangerous experiments indeed”, as he rather convincingly put it, such as sharing his bed with nubile – and naked – women. (Gandhi was an old man by then so it can’t have been much of an experiment for the women.)

Catholic clergy are not known to follow such research design, and the notion of brahmacharya is alien to them, but they share with Gandhi a sense of active and productive abstinence. It’s an ideological-religious choice one can understand and respect.

In Gandhi’s case, his self-disciplined body was a powerful symbol of national stamina, self-control, and non-violence. Catholicism has its own reasons for asceticism.

But this brand of active abstinence hardly lends itself to mass movements. There was only one India to liberate and that’s now been done, so there’s little point in trying to repeat Gandhi’s experiments. (I might add though that male abstinence, and especially the retention of semen is an important notion among certain Hindu groups.)

As for the Catholic brand, abstinence as a lifestyle choice is for the inner circle.

Where does that leave the rest of us sinners and non-brahmacharyas? Well, the thing with sex is, it can be rather nice. Quite why one should renounce the nice things in life is beyond me. It may be that my shameful standards of morality make me imagine good things to be good and desirable, rather than bad and wicked.

I’m even inclined to think, in my madder moments, that sexual frustration accounts for a good chunk of the Gross National Nastiness, and that the world would be sanerif all those who wanted sex got it.

If the British Medical Journal is anything to go by, I may not be alone in my moral depravity. In 2007, a team of researchers looked at the effectiveness of abstinence-only HIV-prevention programmes. They found that “no programme affected incidence of unprotected vaginal sex, number of partners, condom use, or sexual initiation”.

In plain English, abstinence is no solution to the prevention of STDs. I’m sure more research is needed, but my tentative hypothesis is that people quite enjoy sex and will not easily give it up. Unless there are countries to be freed or eternal bliss to be gained.

Abstinence out of the way, there’s a second notion that’s much-beloved by the pundits. It’s been called ‘caution’, and many other things which we might group under the heading ‘Be careful who you sleep with’. Surely this is a more sensible approach and likely to work?

Not really. Caution is just about as sensible as cooking a sublime meal and throwing it away, or playing the lottery and binning the winning ticket.

The reason the pundits won’t understand this is that they tend to be middle-aged men and women who are in stable relationships or celibate by vocation. They’ve a million reasons to be careful who they sleep with, and STDs are at the bottom end of the list.

The same cannot be said of single individuals who are not priests of brahmacharya. For this ample category (which in any case seems to be the one the pundits preach to), getting laid as often as possible and with as many partners as possible is one of life’s more desirable outcomes.

So real is the phenomenon that whole industries have mushroomed around it. I don’t necessarily mean pornography and prostitution, but fluffy car seats, suggestive music and art, romantic dinners, and the rest.

Thus the sublime meal and lottery ticket. That anyone can even begin to imagine people going through all that trouble just to say boo to lady luck when she eventually smiles, beggars belief.

“Ah”, I hear the pundits say, “The word is not ‘No’, but ‘Caution’”. As in how exactly? How does one exercise caution in one’s choice of partners? Does one see it in their eyes, or count the notches on their dashboards? STDs tend to work rather covertly – unless they’re at an advanced stage, at which point the sufferer is likely to be too weak to bother anyway.

Save for having weekly check-ups and carrying around stamped and updated medical files, I honestly can’t see how ‘caution’ might work. Unless it’s draconian, which brings us back to abstinence.

There’s one and only one message that makes sense. Brutally put, it goes as follows: Sleep around if you will with whoever you will, but use a condom.

mafalzon@hotmail.com