I don’t recall when I first heard about AIDS.I was 11 when the first cases were documented by the CDC in 1981, but it took a while before the news percolated down to me. I remember being 12 or 13 and the panic that hit everywhere. Suddenly, there was a sexually transmitted disease (as they were called then) that was killing people and nobody really knew how it spread. The complacency around STIs that penicillin gave us for a few decades suddenly evaporated and freaked out doesn’t even begin to cover it.

There were people who refused to shake hands or even be in the same room as people with AIDS. There were people who were worried about sharing food or kissing, just in case. Of course, the fact that AIDS was linked to homosexuality (at first, it was called Gay Related Immune Deficiency since the early reported cases were gay men), and then drug users, was part of that. And making it even harder was the fact that President Reagan didn’t even say the word “AIDS” until 1987. Surgeon-General C. Everett Koop’s article The Early Days of AIDS, as I Remember Them is really worth reading.

In many ways, AIDS is part of why I became a sexuality educator. I came out as queer in college and joined the campus peer outreach group. Naturally, I got a lot of questions about HIV and safer sex. When I learned about those topics, I discovered that I needed to find out about sexual communication and negotiation, which got me into relationships and sexual practices. The next thing I knew, I was a sex educator!

It’s hard to explain how scared people were back then. The stigma people with HIV face is still really strong, but this was before any celebrities like Magic Johnson, Freddie Mercury, or Rock Hudson came out as HIV-positive. Living in the suburbs of New Jersey, I didn’t know anyone with HIV and as far as I knew, nobody I knew did, either. And politicians like Jesse Helms blocked funding for research because they were convinced that AIDS was God’s punishment for homosexuality.

I was in San Francisco for a couple of weeks during the summer of 1990 and even in the face of the decimation of the gay community and the deep grief that went along with it, there was still a certain sense of excitement. Groups like ACT UP and Queer Nation had come together to develop strategies for political action. Although to be fair, a lot of folks got involved because it was a great way to develop some horizontal networks. The slogan “An Army of Lovers Cannot Fail” was definitely put into practice.

Safer sex parties like Carol Queen’s & Robert Morgan’s “Queen of Heaven” gatherings became another form of community activism. They weren’t just places to get laid. By creating rules and expectations around safer sex, they helped people see that condoms, gloves, and dental dams didn’t have to get in the way of having a hot time. Participation also became a badge of defiance in the face of lackluster or absent information about safer sex from medical or governmental sources. Communities formed with the intention of helping people stay alive, despite the official silence that was costing lives. Groups like the Safer Sex Sluts created live demos of safer sex techniques to show how hot safer sex could be.

Eventually, of course, some medical treatments were developed. AZT and then protease inhibitors became available, at least for people with the money and/or insurance to cover them. And the government finally got behind safer sex messages, schools created curricula (though we’re still fighting to make them accurate, non-judgmental, and inclusive), and more people came out as HIV-positive. Attitudes are slowly changing.

But there’s still work to do. There are still plenty of people who think that HIV and other SITs are a punishment for sex. (It makes me wonder if they think that the flu is a punishment for riding public transit.) Funding for research is still scarce. And lots of folks are willing to keep their heads in the sand as long as it’s “those people over there,” even though we’re all just a few degrees of separation away from each other. For that matter, we’re still struggling to get safer sex education to young people, despite the fact that it decreases the rates of STI transmission (not to mention, it’s much more cost-effective to prevent disease than it is to treat it). And this school rejected an application from a 13-year old because he’s HIV-positive. So we have a long road ahead of us.

Safer sex is still a really important topic. Even if you’re in a monogamous relationship and choose to not use condoms or other barriers, the more you know about safer sex, the more you can help the folks around you protect themselves, especially teens and young people. It’s only a hindrance or an interruption to your hot fun if you let it be! Check out our how-to articles, with lots of info about choosing condoms, tips for making them more effective, ways to use gloves and dental dams, and more. Remember, safe sex is hot sex. If you’re doing it right.

So one method for spreading the word was posters. They’d show up in bars and community centers when non-profit organizations took the lead, wheat pasted to walls and bus stops when activists took over, and even on buses, trains and other public places when public health departments and other governmental agencies got involved. Many of these posters were funny, some were challenging, and a few were thought-provoking.

30 years into the AIDS epidemic, Dr. Edward Atwater (a retired doctor) is sharing his poster collection through an online catalog hosted by the University of Rochester. So far, only 1917 of his total collection of over 6200 posters from around the world have been uploaded, but they’re working on it. And this interview at The Atlantic is really worth checking out. Here’s a quote:

The reason it’s…important as social history is because, if you look at a whole lot of the posters, you will see how different countries approached the subject. Here you’re dealing with a new disease, dealing with the closeted subject of sex, and it was really amazing to see the variation from country to country and even from groups within a country. To me, that’s by far the most striking thing about the collection.

Generally speaking, in the United States, the posters were less interesting because they had to be neutral. They had to be careful not to offend some group or some sensibility so the best American posters were usually put up by private organizations. Abroad, that wasn’t quite as true.

Here are a few examples from the collection. Go check the rest of it out. It’s a really amazing project.

On January 26, 2012 in San Francisco, AIC is hosting a benefit and screening of XXXY, a documentary film that takes an “intimate look at the long-term emotional, psychological, and physiological effects of being born “intersex,” or with ambiguous genitalia.” The film focuses on two people who between them have undergone over two dozen surgeries to “correct” their ambiguous sex organs. They speak quite honestly about the ways in which their experiences, including “ a wide array emotional issues, including shame, secrecy, gender identity, depression, intimacy, and the feelings of disempowerment that come from having no role in the decisions made regarding their gender identity.”

Following the screening, there will be Q&A with the filmmakers Porter Gale and Laleh Soomekh, and Anne Tamar-Mattis, Executive Director of AIC. You can purchase tickets here. And here’s the Facebook event page- even if you can’t make it, please help get the word out.

For example, The Guardian has an article about Lynette Burrows, a “family values” campaigner who said:

I think parents have the absolute right to protect their children from this sort of education which is so unhelpfully obsessed with destroying childhood innocence, in a way that’s reminiscent of paedophilia. To me, anyone who wants to talk dirty to little children is a danger to them.

When I still worked in the Good Vibrations stores, I would sometimes find customers flirting with me. Granted, I enjoy flirting and if you see me at a party, there’s a chance that’ you’ll see me doing exactly that. But in the store, I’d have people flirting with me that I wouldn’t have expected to, especially since I didn’t initiate it. I used to wonder what that was about, until I realized that I was probably the first person that many of my customers had ever spoken with about their sexual fantasies, desires, and practices other than a partner or a potential partner.

From what I’ve seen, most people don’t have much experience in talking about sex with someone they’re not sexual with. As a result, customers would sometimes have sexual feelings, even when those feelings had nothing to do with me. And quite often, those feelings would come out as flirting. Actually, they’d sometimes come out in more direct ways, although that happened to me less often than it did for my female co-workers, especially the femme ones.

I think this sheds some light on the question of why some people think that talking about sex with kids sexualizes them. If you equate talking about sex with being sexual, then it’s only logical that talking with kids about sex is the same thing as having sex with them, right? And if that’s where your logic takes you, then not letting educators talk about sex would seem to protect kids from sexual intrusion.

Of course, this whole thing rests on the assumption that talking about sex is a sexual act. And while it certainly can be, it also doesn’t have to be. In fact, I think that talking with a partner about your wants and desires is better done when you’re not turned on since arousal often causes our boundaries to become a bit more porous. If you’ve ever gone grocery shopping when you’re hungry and come home with strange impulse purchases, you know how that can be. Learning to talk about sex without it becoming sexual is like making sure you’re not hungry at the grocery store. It’s a really useful skill because it helps you share your desires and boundaries without the influence of arousal. Reid Mihalko’s Safer Sex Elevator Pitch is an excellent tool for that, as is the Yes/No/Maybe list.

This is one reason why learning to talk about sex in non-sexual settings is useful. I know that a lot of people will hear that and think that I’m trying to sexualize life, but I’m actually suggesting something quite different- when we can take the arousal out of some of our discussions of sex, we gain much more clarity. When we practice that, it becomes much easier to share information, provide education, and foster sexual well-being. And of course, when we know how to do that, we can engage in conversations and sex education with children without it even coming close to sexualizing them or pedophilia.

The irony is that Lynette Burrows is the one who’s sexualizing the interactions between educators and children. For a trained, qualified, and experienced sex educator, it’s simply talking about sex. We understand that that’s not sexual. So why doesn’t she?

It’s pretty common for people to tighten different muscles during arousal. I’ve heard some experts suggest that it’s because it can heighten the level of sensation and excitement. Some folks will hold their breathe or squeeze their legs or hips, or grab and pull on the sheets, or arch their backs. And if you do that consistently, over time, you might develop some habits around that. A few people have told me that they’d been doing that for so long that it was difficult or even impossible for them to orgasm without it.

But what happens when you can’t do that anymore? I know one person who had a neck injury and had to learn how to not tense her neck during sex because it would cause migraines. And I know another person who developed arthritis in his shoulder and found that he had a habit of tensing his shoulder muscles during sex that he couldn’t do anymore without causing pain.

I have a suspicion that one reason that many people stop having sex as they get older is that they get stuck in a pattern that doesn’t work for them, but they don’t know how to get out of it. Of course, it’s easy to say “just try something different,” but as anyone who has actually tried to do that can tell you, it’s not as simple as that. So I did what any good sex educator would do- I asked some experts.

The first person asked was Feldenkrais practitioner Brandee Selck. Feldenkrais is a method of education and movement practices that help people develop more awareness of how they move. As self-awareness expands, pain can diminish and movement becomes more fluid. Plus, it’s a great way to learn how to shift old physical habits that don’t work anymore.

Brandee points out that perturbing a pattern creates an opportunity to interrupt it, which gives you a chance to change it. And sometimes, it’s more effective to magnify or exaggerate the habit than to fight it because that gives you useful information about how it works.

To get started, set the intention to not try to orgasm. Instead, your goal is to get a better understanding of how you work. If that seems too hard, then spend a while exploring the pattern before you try to reach orgasm. When you do, here are some suggestions for shaking it up and seeing what happens. They may seem simple, but that’s what makes them effective. You don’t have to do all of these in one session- mix it up and see what happens.

1) Notice what muscles you are contracting and how you’re doing that. Then do the same thing, but increase it by 10%. Then, decrease it by 10%. Repeat, but at 20% or even 30% By turning the volume knob up and down, you get better at seeing the distinctions and learn more control over your body. That gives you more choices than always being at one level of contraction.

2) Slowly contract your muscles, then gently let them go. Make sure you let go all the way so the next time, you’re starting fresh. Take a few deep breaths and repeat, but change it up a bit. Do it on an inhale v. an exhale. Or shift your position slightly. Pay attention to a different part of your body and see how it feels. When you give your nervous system some variety, you’ll find more options. Over time, you might be able to find a way to contract your muscles that’s a bit more comfortable or easier.

3) When you contract your muscles, pay attention to whatever else is going on. Are you holding your breath? Breathing faster? Are you clenching your toes or your fingers? Do you hold your head in the same position? What about your eyes or face? Are they squeezing? Can you let them soften? As you focus on these  other parts of your body, see if you can notice changes in where or how you’re tensing or how your overall sensations feel.

4) Another possibility is to see how you breathe when you tighten muscles, and then play with that. Try coordinating your breath with the contraction, holding your breath, and breathing into your abdomen vs your chest. Then, see if you can let your breathing be continuous and undisturbed as you contract your muscles.

5) Visualizing changes in your body can sometimes make them happen more easily that trying harder. First, take a few moments to feel the length of your spine from the tailbone all the way through to the top of the head. Each time you inhale, imagine that your spine lengthens a little. Do the same when you exhale. You don’t have to try to make anything happen- just think about the idea of lengthening. After a few breaths, slowly begin to contract your muscles and notice where you shorten in your spine. Experiment with maintaining length and ease in your spine as you contract your muscles.

These are all really useful tools for tuning into your patterns and learning to play with them, but they aren’t the only ones. I also sat down with Ada Lusardi, a really amazing yoga teacher, to get her input.

One of the things Ada pointed out is that the first step is letting go of expecting a particular destination when you have sex. A lot of people assume that it’ll always lead to orgasm or to orgasm in a particular way, and sometimes, the more we strive for the goal, the more we get in the way. When we stop engaging in that habit, we can start paying attention to the sensations we’re actually experiencing, which can make it easier to learn new ways to enjoy sex. So start by agreeing that there is no outcome and instead, enjoy the experience.

Pelvic floor pain and dysfunction is quite common, especially as we get older. Sometimes, we have injuries that affect the pelvic floor. Or muscles spasm from too much sitting and stress. Or they lose tone, especially from childbirth or aging. And although a lot of people are familiar with Kegel exercises to tone the PC muscle, not as many are aware that you also need to learn how to relax the muscle to avoid spasms. This is useful because a lot of people clench the pelvic muscles during sex, which can cause imbalances and pain.

Another way that yoga can help is by making it easier to be able to relax your muscles. Contrary to common belief, relaxing takes practice, especially in this overstimulating, always-on world. Through yoga and other practices, you can learn how to mindfully relax your body, and not only can that help during sex, it can make those long days at your desk less painful, too. Plus, they can teach you different ways to move your body, which is useful when you’re experiencing pain with a particular motion.

I was fortunate to review an advance copy of Healing Painful Sex, an amazing book for female-bodied folks who experience pelvic pain. Although it’s more focused on intercourse than I think it really needs to be, it’s a fantastic resource and one of the best on the topic. And while it doesn’t address the issue of painful patterns of holding in other parts of the body, if you do experience pelvic pain, it’s a good resource.

Unfortunately, most medical doctors don’t really understand how pain works or offer pointless suggestions like “try a glass of wine before sex.” But at least there are some folks out there offering more useful tips.

I’m sure you’ve seen the magazines that offer articles with headlines like “Am I Normal Down There?” I’ve lost track of how many sex advice columns and books I’ve read that talk about sex as if there’s one way to do it or experience it. And of course, many of the ongoing debates arguments about homosexuality, polyamory, BDSM, and gender diversity are fueled by the difficulty some folks have with people who are “abnormal.”

Ever since Kinsey published his groundbreaking research, we’ve been obsessed with worrying about whether we’re normal or not. Actually, it started earlier, but that was the first time we had any data we could compare ourselves to. And while I’m glad that we have more information about what sorts of sexual practices people get up to, I also know that it fuels a lot of anxiety.

The reason I call it the Myth of the Normal is that, when it comes down to it, it’s nothing more than a story we tell ourselves. From a statistical perspective, we can certainly measure many of the facets of sexuality: how often people have sex, how they do it, how long they do it, whether they orgasm or not, who they do it with, and so forth. Other aspects of it can be described, although measuring them in empirically valid and reliable ways gets tricky: how people feel about they do, what their preferences and desires are, what meanings they make of their experiences, etc. For each of these dimensions, there’s an incredible range of diversity. I’ve been learning about sex for over 20 years and I still learn about out things that some people do that I’ve never heard of before, simply because there are so many possibilities.

Not only that, but our positions on any of those continua usually change over time. How much we each want to have sex, what kinds of people we find attractive, what pleasures bring us to orgasm, how we feel about all of it, and any other variable can shift for a number of reasons. Sooner or later, almost everyone is going to find themselves outside the statistically defined norm, at least in some way. If someone never diverged from that middle portion of any of the distribution curves, they’d be so uncommon that they would, in fact, be abnormal. The only thing that’s normal about sex is that nobody is actually normal.

Unfortunately, most people use the word in a moral sense rather than a statistical sense, which builds the Myth of the Normal upon a foundation of shame. That usually leads people to hide or deny their divergence from the expectations they think they need to meet. When I hear someone say “I shouldn’t want to do this…”, I know that there’s some shame. There are few people who police the boundaries as rigidly as those who are afraid that their non-compliance will be noticed. It seems to me as if the story in their heads is “if I can act like I’m normal, maybe nobody will notice that I’m not.” And so the Myth of the Normal and sexual shame are reinforced and the cycle accelerates. I think it’s time to step off that ride.

There are a few different ways we can do that. First, we can learn some tools to change our habits and stop letting ourselves get caught in the hamster wheel. I’m a big fan of Pema Chödron’s audio lecture Getting Unstuck, which is full of useful insights and suggestions. Therapy can also be a really helpful process for uncovering our internalized sexual shames and moving through them.

Another possibility is learning how to listen to the experiences and stories of people who do things differently than you. In The Trouble With Normal, Michael Warner writes that through that process,

You learn that everyone deviates from the norm in some context or another, and that the statistical norm has no moral value. You begin to recognize how stultifying the faith in the norm can be. You learn that people who look most different from you can be, by virtue of that fact, the very people from whom you have the most to learn. Your lot is cast with them, and you begin to recognize that there are other worlds of interaction that the mass media cannot comprehend, worlds that they can only deform when they project images of ghettos and other deviant scenes. (p. 70)

It takes a lot of practice to learn to do that because it can challenge some of our most deeply held and unexamined attitudes and beliefs. It can also inspire difficult emotions and trigger deep shame, fear, and anger. And just when we think that we have it figured out, we might discover something new that challenges our complacency. Cultivating a sense of curiosity, setting aside defensiveness, and finding ways to hear people’s stories takes a lot more work than judging and shaming them. And my experience is that it’s much more rewarding.

My last suggestion (although I don’t think this is a complete list) is that we can let go of striving to be normal and striving to appear normal. There’s a certain amount of privilege inherent in “normal,” but that rests on pluralistic ignorance rather than any real difference between folks who are supposedly normal and folks who aren’t. After all, if nobody’s actually normal, then it’s really a question of how many people are out of the closet about it.

In a lot of ways, it reminds me of the story of the Emperor’s New Clothes. The difference is that in the story, the emperor was naked and nobody would say anything about it because that would supposedly show that they were unfit for their position. In the real world, we’re all walking around naked, and most of us pretend otherwise since acknowledging it means stepping outside of “normal,” with all of the shaming that can result.

But there’s a lot of freedom in coming to terms with the fact that there isn’t any real normal/abnormal distinction other than whatever we make up in our heads. Once we see that, we can stop letting that story rule us and instead, we can discover our authentic sexualities. We can learn to celebrate (and not just tolerate) our diversity. We can explore new ways to craft our relationships. We can try out different pleasures and experiences to see if we like them, and we can learn how to do them more safely because we don’t have to feel embarrassment, guilt, or shame. We can stop working so hard to put up false fronts, and we can stop worrying about what will happen if people find out what we really like to do.

Unfortunately, the benefit that comes from being perceived as normal makes that difficult for a lot of people. There can be a certain amount of privilege that accrues when you’re in the closest, which is easier for some folks than others. That’s why, in my world, nobody is normal. Not me, not you, not your parents, not your children, not your friends, or your lovers, teachers, or co-workers.  From where I sit, nobody gets to be normal. I find a lot of freedom grows out of that. After all, if nobody gets to be normal, then I can do the things that I enjoy (within the bounds of the consent, pleasure, and well-being of the folks involved), you can do the things you want to do, and maybe we’ll find some things we have in common. Or not, and that’s fine, too. Either way, we don’t need to judge each other or fall into the trap of believing that either of us is normal.

So say it with me. “I don’t get to be normal. You don’t get to be normal. We don’t get to be normal. They don’t get to be normal. Nobody gets to be normal.” And let’s see where we go from there.

When adolescent women show up at emergency rooms saying that they’re experiencing lower abdominal pain and/or urinary or genital symptoms, just over 26% of them test positive for gonorrhea, chlamydia, and/or trichomonas. And since many adolescents don’t have primary care doctors, they end up at the ER, so it’s especially important that they get appropriate care. Of course, in a society that offered both accurate sex education and universal, affordable health care, we wouldn’t be asking ER staff (who are more used to dealing with actual emergencies) to deal with STIs, would we?

In any case, it turns out that when young women (13-21 years old) go to the ER, their perceived race has a lot to do with what care they get. If they’re white, they’re less likely to be asked about their sexual histories than black girls. And among the ones with symptoms that are consistent with STIs, they’re also less likely to receive testing and therefore appropriate treatment.

Of course, this is related to the stereotype of the Jezebel, the hypersexual, lewd, and lascivious black woman who is both promiscuous and predatory. (This article at the Ferris University Jim Crow Museum of Racist Memorabilia has some really good stuff on the subject.)  It makes it easier for ER staff to think of getting STI tests for black girls because there’s often already a belief that they need them more.

The thing is- all young people need to be getting tested for STIs, especially when they have abdominal pain or urinary/genital symptoms. If over a quarter of them are testing positive, clearly we need better education, testing, and treatment. While this is a rare instance of  a racist stereotype leading to a benefit for the target group, the real solution is to improve sex education for all young people and to stop assuming that someone’s race makes them less likely to be sexually active. And it’s certainly another example of how racism is still alive and well, unfortunately.

One of the main reasons is that the attempts to find a sex-enhancing medication for women are focusing on increasing arousal. But Viagra and other erection medications don’t enhance male arousal, just erection. Most people tend to equate men’s excitement with erection, but they’re not synonymous. One can be very turned on without erection and one can be rock-hard erect without being particularly excited. And some users find that having a med-enhanced erection without significant arousal can make sex feel really detached. While some people continue to believe that “it is undisputable [sic] that women’s sexual response is much more complex than men’s”, that idea really highlights the confusion that results from equating erection and arousal.

The equivalent of penile erection is clitoral engorgement and erection. The penis and the clitoris are made of pretty much the same types of tissues, but in different configurations. (Here’s a picture of how they develop from Gray’s Anatomy.) And there are some indications that Viagra increases clitoral engorgement,vaginal lubrication, and may increase clitoral and uterine blood flow in healthy postmenopausal women without any erotic stimulus. If these preliminary findings turn out to be accurate, it would suggest that there isn’t a “male Viagra” and a “female Viagra.” Instead, if would mean that we have medications that increase blood flow to whatever sexual organs someone has.

Sexual desire and pleasure, on the other hand, is much more complicated than how much blood your bits are getting. For that matter, our desire for food is a lot more complex than how much blood is flowing to your stomach or how much you salivate. Unfortunately, a lot of people think of male desire as an on/off switch and female desire as a dizzying array of complex factors. This is yet another version of gender essentialism, which ignores the incredible diversity of sexuality and gender and reinforces sex-negativity. I’m willing to bet that if the pharmaceutical companies started looking for a medication to enhance male arousal, they’d discover that it’s just as difficult to do as they’re finding a med for female arousal to be.

The phrase ”female Viagra” is definitely attention-grabbing. But as is often the case with catchphrases, when we look a little deeper, we can see that it doesn’t make any sense at all. And it certainly doesn’t do anything to address the many reasons why sexual response isn’t always what people want. After all, 30% of men with erectile dysfunction stop using Viagra within a year and 50% stop within three years. While I don’t think it’s the only reason, I suspect that part of the explanation is that they’ve discovered that there’s more to enjoying sex that getting it up, in, and off.

So will there ever be a pill that increases arousal? Maybe, but until we have a better understanding of the many parts of the process, I’m guessing that it will continue to elude researchers. Unless they accidentally stumble upon it, like they did with Viagra.

Emotional Intelligence is the ability to identify, assess, and work with emotions. You could also think of it as the ability to control one’s emotions and influence other people’s feelings, although I prefer to think of it as “working with” rather than controlling them. In my experience, we don’t control our emotions as much as decide how we want to respond to them. EI is a really useful skill, although there are some criticisms of the tools used to measure it.

In any case, I think it’s pretty easy to see how EI can help us in our relationships. The more we can attune to our feelings and communicate about them with our friends, families, lovers, and partners and the more gracefully we can receive information from them and respond to it, the smoother things are. But I’d never thought to wonder what effects EI would have on sexuality, other than the obvious “if you can share your feelings, your relationships (and therefore sex) will be better.) Fortunately, somebody else came up with the idea.

They looked at 2035 cisgender women from the TwinsUK registry and had them fill out questionnaires about EI and sexual behaviors. And they found that EI correlated with frequency of orgasm during both intercourse and masturbation. (It’s not clear whether they looked at other sexual activities or whether they took sexual orientation into account.) In fact, women in the lowest 25% on the EI scale were about twice as likely to report infrequent orgasms. Further, there wasn’t a correlation between EI and some of the common factors that contribute to difficulty with orgasms for women, such as age, physical or sexual abuse, or menopause.

It’s worth mentioning that there isn’t anything here to show that EI leads to better orgasms, but it would be an interesting experiment to create classes to build EI skills and see if orgasm experiences change. It would also be good to know if there’s a relationship between EI and sex for cisgender men and transgender people, too. I should start keeping a list of ideas, in case any grad students are looking for dissertation projects.

This morning, I fielded an inquiry from a reporter who’s writing a piece about sexually transmitted infections. Among her questions, she asked “What’s the big deal about having an STD?” After I explained that the current term is STI, since you can have an infection without having a disease (like if you don’t have any symptoms), I explained that there are a few different reasons why many people consider an STI a big deal.

There’s a long history of seeing STIs as divine retribution for “sexual immorality,” especially in Europe, the US, and the countries that Europe colonized. I can understand the logic- if you see that someone can have sex and then get sores on your genitals, slowly go crazy, and die painfully, it’d be tempting to look for an explanation. Given that germ theory wasn’t validated until the mid-19th century, while plenty of people were making the divine punishment claims for centuries, I think it’s safe to say that this attitude is pretty firmly entrenched and it’s going to take a while to shake it off. After all, antibiotics have only been widely available for about 65 years and we still don’t have a cure for viruses.

Then, there’s the way in which sex has been and continues to be seen as something that makes you dirty/shameful/sinful. This notion has shaped many facets of sexual culture, including the fetishization of (female) virginity, the idea that marriage & reproduction redeem sex, and the demonization of people who don’t fit within a narrow portion of the sexual spectrum.

When you put these things together, it’s no wonder that so many people think of STIs as some sort of stain on someone’s character.

So it was quite fortuitous that about 10 minutes after email that reporter, I saw this tweet from Scarleteen:

If you say “clean” abt STI status pls consider a switch to “negative” or “clear.” Ppl w/illness, be it an STI, cold or cancer, aren’t dirty.

April 8, 2011 9:39 am via bitlyReplyRetweetFavorite

@Scarleteen

Scarleteen

It raises a good point- if you have measles or the flu, people don’t usually think of you as dirty. At least, not these days. Some diseases, such as leprosy, were once considered a sign of being unclean, but that’s changing with modern medicine.

So it seems like a disconnection to me- if you can have the flu and not be “dirty”, then what is it that makes someone with an STI “dirty” in so many people’s minds? Is it that it’s (usually) proof that they’ve had sex? Is it that we often think of sex as something dirty? As Scarleteen pointed out, if you test negative for an STI and you say that you’re “clean”, you’re implying something about folks who test positive and that sends a message that we’re well rid of.