Syphilis? That won't put us off sex

When I was 13, our biology teacher arrived in class armed with an "average-sized" dildo, a box of out-of-date condoms and a limerick about Aids.

Over the next few years, the "safe sex" message was forced unremittingly on us until we could reel off a list of sexually transmitted diseases in our sleep, but no one ever mentioned that sex was meant to be fun or meaningful. It was just biology, taught by the same woman who taught us about photosynthesis and genetically modified sheep.

It doesn't surprise me that the number of teenagers contracting sexually transmitted diseases has more than doubled in the past seven years. Although my generation grew up in the age of Aids, we still have a cavalier "I-am-immortal-until-proven-otherwise" attitude towards the whole thing. Pop quizzes about gonorrhoea and the chance to put a condom on a test-tube twice a year aren't going to change the fact that we are a sexually arrogant generation.

If the Government is going to change our attitude to sex education, it should put more emotional emphasis into it and perhaps then teenagers will equate the information they are given with how they actually react in sexual situations.

I was born in 1983 - I'm 20 now - and because my generation didn't understand the impact of the hard-hitting Aids media campaign in the Eighties, I don't think we're as scared of it as older generations. Recently, my friend told me that she'd asked her boyfriend to have an HIV test if he wasn't going to use a condom, and I was quite shocked. Aids and HIV are not things I give much thought to. Getting pregnant is something I'm concerned about. Aids isn't.

The pressure group Right to Life suggests that encouraging "safe sex" causes young people to have a casual approach to sex, yet teenage pregnancy has actually decreased since 1998. From my experience, the problem isn't a matter of too much information. We were bombarded with information, and as a result I only know one person who had an abortion while at school and nobody who actually had a baby.

Many of my friends went on the Pill before they even started having sex, which perhaps explains why teenage pregnancy is decreasing while diseases are increasing.

Once you're on the Pill, it's slightly embarrassing to make a boy wear a condom, because the words "wear a condom because I don't want to get a venereal disease from you" would probably ruin the moment. One of my best friends picked up chlamydia when she was 15 and reacted with a bored "c'est la vie" attitude, not even bothering to go to the doctor. By the time we were 16, chlamydia and gonorrhoea were open topics of conversation. People got them, went to the doctor, took the pills and moved on.

Did the girls realise the infections could render them infertile? Yes, but again, this isn't a pressing factor. The possibility of not being able to become a mother seems too far away, in a future that might never happen.

Sex is no longer a secret subject, to be blushed over as it was in my grandparents' generation, nor is it an act of "free love" rebellion, as it was supposed to be in the Sixties. We turn on the TV and see the stars of Sex and the City casually making their way through the beds of New York and feel slightly pathetic if we're just sitting at home with a cup of tea and some Hob-Nobs. Carpe diem; you're only young once. Sex is just wallpaper to most teenagers: it's all over the TV, in magazines, in general conversation and, as a result, we perhaps don't equate the boring GCSE-style information we've been given about sex with the actual act.

The idea that if men can sleep around, then so can women, doesn't help. It was certainly the "cool kids" at my school who started having sex first and talking about it in a blasé way. The nature of teenagers is that they tend to have short relationships, packed close together, so, of course, if sex is part of the equation, then teenagers are likely to have more partners than adults.

I remember being shocked one evening when I went out to dinner with a group of fairly sexually " liberated" friends and learned that six out of eight of them had never had an orgasm, despite fairly extensive sexual track-records. They were so laid-back about sex, it didn't even matter whether they enjoyed it.

Teenage boys seem to know less about sexually transmitted diseases than the girls. Perhaps this is because, not being in danger of getting pregnant, they think they are sexually invincible and don't concentrate in sex-education classes, superciliously assuming that nothing so disgusting could happen to them.

Only recently, a teenage boy was boasting to me about how he had sex last weekend with a girl on the bonnet of a car. Afterwards, he said, they decided to go back to her place to watch a movie and perhaps have sex again. Then the girl paused, sadly, and apologetically admitted that she had chlamydia. He looked blank and said: "I haven't heard of that movie. Let's watch Braveheart instead."

Anna Stothard's first novel, Isabel and Rocco, is published by Arrow.