Arousing suspicion and violating trust: The lived ideology of safe sex talk

There are two commonly perceived risks associated with safe sex talk between potential sexual partners: Arousing suspicion and violating trust. Utilizing a distinction between ‘lived’ and ‘intellectual’ ideologies, these issues are explored via an examination of the tensions that exist between young people’s understandings of what should, or ought to be put into practise, and what can be put into practise in a sexual relationship. Taking a Shotterian approach to meaning-construction, the present study focuses on 19 audience-group conversations about two AIDS-related teen-television programmes. These conversations are analysed through the foregrounding of audience action problems and accounts. It emerges that the initiation of safe sex talk raises questions about the talker‘s past, the answers to which can undermine trust between partners. This loss of trust, however, has different meanings when applied to men and women. For a man, it simply means that he can no longer to be trusted to be discreet, while for a woman it means that she is no longer considered a trustworthy, or low-risk, partner. It is concluded that effective safe sex advice needs to take into account such local, common sense understandings in order to bridge the gap between the ‘lived’ and the ‘intellectual’ ideologies of safe sex talk.