A friend of mine – it really was a friend, I'm not being coy – went for a full sexual health MOT, testing for chlamydia, gonorrhoea, thrush, syphilis and HIV. She came back with a clean bill of health, but a nasty stain on her character. They asked her to go back to the clinic, not to take more blood, or swab any more lady parts, but to talk. About her attitude towards sex…

You see, Charlotte had elected to have an HIV test. She was advised that HIV can have an incubation period of three months, so if she'd had unprotected sex in the last three months, she would have to retake the test. And she had had unprotected sex in the last three months… with three different men. I assumed they were passing judgement on her lifestyle, and I was outraged!

Charlotte had been single for two years, not for want of offers, but in the determination to wait for a 'real chemistry' with a member of the opposite sex that had failed to materialise. After the most arid of dry patches, she succumbed to the Christmas media silly season and accepted offers that she would soberly have declined. Unfortunately, she was three festive wrapping-paper sheets to the wind for Advent. Drunkenly she didn't use protection. This can be explained easily enough: when you haven't fired up your loins for over a year, and they are suddenly sparked into life, you don't want it to stop! Or maybe it was the fact that recklessness in an otherwise tightly controlled life is the best bit about being drunk.

Whatever the reason, she had unprotected sex with at least one of these men, and possibly all three, and so the clinic called her back. Not just to retake the test, but to swallow a hearty dose of slut counselling.

My outrage was directed squarely at the draconian attitude of the clinic. This is the modern female experience, I yelled! Sometimes you get lots of sex. Sometimes you go through dry spells. Sometimes you are drunk, sometimes you are not. We might not be married, but we still have needs! And we also have busy lives that don't offer up a huge amount of time for meeting new men and going on dates and getting to know ten of them before one of them seems nice enough to have sex with. Most of us have been in a long-term relationship by the age of 30. At some point in our lives we have grown accustomed to regular sex, and when it's gone, we miss it. If we get the urge, and choose to drunkenly purge, who are they to come crashing in on our personal lives and brand them with their disapproving stamp?

Except, it transpires, they weren't. The anticipated slut counselling was just a good healthy dose of personal responsibility. There are a lot of sexual diseases out there. Some of them will stop you having babies, if you want one. Some of them will kill you. And while I can just about forgive an 18-year-old in the throes of first passions for not knowing all the risks, I can't forgive myself, or my friends, 30-year-old women who know better.

They weren't telling my friend off for having crazy, passion-fuelled sex. They were saying, 'Please, please, please use a condom!' I don't know how many times they will have to say it until it sinks in with all of us, but it has with me, at least. I have passed my sexual health MOT. Nobody is going to tamper with my engine now without the right protective clothing.

Read more from Louise Kean
Her book Material Girl is out now.

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