Who’s in charge here?

By Max McLean

Telling obese people to just stop sticking food in their mouth isn’t really helping.

People with unhealthy dietary habits need to come to grips with what’s making them eat more food than is good for them before they can do something about it. For example, as all Oprah-watchers know, many people -œeat their feelings -” i.e. eat to quench emotional rather than physical hunger.

More fundamentally, as Jamie Oliver has been pointing out recently, many people simply don’t know enough about nutrition to be able to make good choices and change the poor dietary practices they have grown up with.

So what do people whose eyes are bigger than their stomachs have to do with sexual health? Well, I once had a flatmate who’d come limping home from the saunas complaining that his eyes were bigger than his arse, but that’s another story.

Like diet, there can be obstacles in life that need to be dealt with in order to develop and sustain good sexual health. Telling men who put themselves (and/or others) at risk of getting or passing on HIV to just use condoms is often no more helpful than telling someone to just stop eating.

That’s why we produce the Staying Negative website. Reading the more than forty stories on www.stayingnegative.net.au you’ll read about all sorts of life issues getting in the way of good sexual health -” and how men have dealt with them. As with diet, sometimes it’s just a problem of wrong or insufficient information: men thinking they’re not at risk during unprotected sex if they only top, for example.

But as with food, other obstacles can be more emotional and complex to solve. For example, in a new story on the Staying Negative site, Joe, an Australian of Lebanese descent, talks about the struggle he had with himself and his family in order to make his life his own and feel in control of it. That’s because being gay was so unacceptable in his family’s culture and so far from their expectations for his life.

Now a counsellor, Joe says he knows many ethnic men who, for similar reasons, lack that sense of control and confidence they need to be able to make and stick to decisions about how they do and don’t want to have sex. He wonders therefore how well they handle another unexpected complication of their Mediterranean background -” the high number of sex partners he meets who assume and fantasise that he’ll bareback because he’s big, hairy and Lebanese.

There are over forty stories on Staying Negative: this is only part of one of them.