Musings of an Inappropriate Woman

Why I’m writing about STIs: an FYI (and a request for help)

Two recent exchanges.

The first, at my high school reunion over the weekend.

Me: [blah blah blah] Sydney Morning Herald, Vogue, Cleo…
Old friend: Doesn’t Cleo publish stories about sex?
Me: Yep, that’s what I write about. (Note: Well, that and other things - see my “Kanye West syndrome” story in Cleo’s latest issue.)

Second, the above tweet, which caused some amusement (and in one case horror) for a few of the guys on my Twitter list when I posted it last week. Fair enough - I guess it was pretty bluntly phrased, and an unusual question to throw out on Twitter. But it’s also an important one.

I feel like much of the time, when we talk about sex, we’re not really talking about the actual act of it at all. And as a writer, at least, that’s certainly not where my interest lies. What I’m interested in are the processes by which people make sense of their own and others’ experiences - and sex just happens to be a particularly symbolically- and emotionally-loaded arena in which to think about this.

Some of you may remember that this time last year I was working on a story about why so many people stop using condoms once they get into a relationship. Trust is a big part of the answer to that question (as is the ‘but it feels better’ argument), but I think that the sense that STIs only happen to ‘other people’ is too. People are very quick to assume that there’s no way someone they care about could have an STI - because, you know, that only happens to dirty, slutty, unloveable people. They might not say it outwardly, but that’s the underlying assumption.

Which is stupid, in case you didn’t know, and blatantly not true.

So I was really excited when I came across this book, by Adina Nack, in one of the journals I follow for thesis purposes - and knew immediately that I had to write about it.

Nack, a medical sociologist specialising in sexual health and social psychology, interviewed 43 women about how contracting a sexually transmitted infection impacted the way they thought about themselves and their sexualities. She focused on women with HPV and herpes, as these particular STIs are chronic and incurable, but (contrary to that first twitter post) I’m interested in speaking to people who’ve had any STI.

So if you’re between 18 and 35 (the magazine’s demographic) and are interested in participatng, you know what to do: email me. The interviews will focus on your beliefs about STIs before and after having one, and how you felt when you were first diagnosed.

And as always, I’d be keen to hear your thoughts on these issues more generally in the comments below.

First published in New Matilda.

If you grew up in Australia in the early 1990s, the rubber bracelets above probably look familiar.

Known as “pash bands” — or “fuck bands” if you wanted to be really naughty — the idea was that each coloured bracelet symbolised a different sex act. According to an article published in a UK paper last weekend: “Yellow represents a hug, while pink means a love bite and orange or purple for a kiss, before moving through different sex acts until black, which means full sex”. Some people would joke that purple actually stood for marriage, being the colour of sexual frustration.

If somebody broke your bracelet, you were supposed to perform the corresponding act on them.

Nobody ever actually did it, of course. Even the most sexually precocious kids I went to primary school with didn’t do more than attempt an unsatisfying first kiss in the playground after school. (To my knowledge, no pash bands were involved in these incidents.) When I was in high school, they made a brief retro resurgence, and my best friend and I at the time bought the black ones — known as “fuck bands” — which we vowed to wear until we lost our virginity.

We lost the rubber bands long before that happened.

Pash bands — or “shag bands” as they’re apparently now known — have always been about shits and giggles, about kids playing at being grown-ups. The humour comes from the fact that most primary school kids think sex is icky. Accordingly, it’s fun for them to talk about it, and gross their friends out by teasing them that they might partake in it someday.

If you read the Courier-Mail over the weekend, however, they represent a rather more sinister — and “new”, which usually seems to correlate with dangerous — trend; “a parent’s worst nightmare”. According to conservative “feminist” commentator Melinda Tankard-Reist, they “[set] up girls as service stations for boys” and “invite sexual assault”. Because nothing invites sexual assault like wearing a coloured bracelet — and nothing says “feminist” like suggesting kids “invite” sexual assault.

Given that most people aged between 25 and 55 having either worn one or parented someone who has, it amazes me that any journalist could find these innocuous pieces of plastic worthy of such fear mongering.

But our readiness to jump on the moral panic train says a lot about our tendency to assume the worst of people younger than us. Even in my own research, which aims to unpack media myths about young adults’ sexual behaviours, the 20-somethings I speak to bemoan how much more “out there” today’s teens are than they were 10 years ago — conveniently forgetting that the same complaints were made about them less than a decade ago. Talk to some actual teenagers, and you’ll get a far more nuanced story.

Tankard-Reist has a new book to promote, about the sexualisation of girls, and if the recent extract on New Matilda is any indication, she has some interesting and relevant arguments to make on the subject. It’s hard to muster up the enthusiasm to listen to them though when she, and others like her, persist in discrediting themselves by participating in this kind of shrill — and factually incorrect — hysteria.

The sexualisation of children is a real issue, but as UQ academic Karen Brooks showed in her 2008 book Consuming Innocence, it’s about a lot more than sex. It’s certainly about a lot more than kids having sex — which, by the way, most of them aren’t. And I’ll tell you one thing: it’s got very little to do with the humble pash band.