‘So. Much. Sex’: a beginner’s guide to the ‘hot vax summer’
“So. Much. Sex.” After nearly a year of being holed up inside due to Covid-19, this is what Margaret, a 23-year-old living in New York, will be doing when she’s fully vaccinated this summer. She wants to find a stranger and drive off into the sunset; to have a casual fling and then do it all over again a week later.
Before the pandemic, Margaret, a writer, used to go to bars to meet dating prospects. “I had my pickup lines so down, and would go home with someone every other week,” she says. When the pandemic began, all that stopped. She moved back in with her parents in Michigan in March last year, and of course, touching, kissing, even standing within six feet of strangers became off limits.
But two weeks ago she received her second vaccine , just like 86.2 million Americans so far – and after a year of bad news, restraint and boredom, Margaret is one of many ready for safe, consensual, CDC-approved sex.
What is the ‘hot vax summer’?
For folks who were dating before the pandemic, Covid presented a new reality. “Whether we were single, dating, committed, monogamous, ethically non-monogamous – doesn’t matter – our relationships were affected it,” says Rachel Wright, a relationship, sex and mental health therapist. “We couldn’t meet new people as easily, and even if we happened to meet them, we couldn’t have touched without a test and quarantining.”
After a year without much human touch – plus the feeling that it might be the last summer we have with an excuse to completely let loose – it’s no wonder people are craving unadulterated fun. Enter the hot vax summer.
The concept surfaced at the end of March, after Joe Biden made the commitment to having all Americans vaccinated by the Fourth of July. Coined by Insider Magazine a few weeks later, hot vax summer, much like the original phrase “hot girl summer”,encapsulated feeling confident in yourself and having fun. But with a a twist: in such a short time, people had already developed a nostalgia for some of the worst, messiest parts of going out.
The phrase became part of the online vernacular that summed up excitement for everything from the mundane to the ridiculous, post-vaccination, including alcoholic popsicles, making bad decisions, and screaming along to Taylor Swift. People were looking forward to “having a ho phase”, again, planning their hot vax summer outfits, and booking so many holiday rentals for the Fourth of July weekend that Airbnb had to put new limitations in place.
“Hot vax summer will be the collective rediscovery of the joys of human interaction and touch,” says Prishita Maheshwari-Aplin, a trustee at Voices4 London and the politics editor at Bricks magazine. “It’ll be the release of internalized anxieties, stress and frustration.”
For Dan, a clinical social worker