Should hooking up be put on hold during pandemic?
Some say it’s better to share harm reduction strategies than to give black and white assessments of risk
Most of us still have a few unanswered questions regarding the transmission of SARS-CoV-2, the novel coronavirus that causes COVID-19.
For example, do we know how long people are infectious after transmission? And just how long do microdroplets hang in the air? How careful should be when unpacking our groceries?
And then, of course, there’s the sex toy question. Can we catch the virus by using someone else’s sex toys? Should we be covering them with a condom?
Ever wonder about that? Yeah, me neither. But that didn’t stop the City of Toronto’s public health department from answering those questions with its “Safer Sex During COVID-19” fact sheet. In case you don’t have time to read it, the document advises against sharing sex toys. You should also clean that rabbit and, if you’re in doubt, put a condom on it. Now you know.
The guidelines for safer pandemic sex also discourage people from hooking up, despite the fact that it’s pretty pro-sex, overall. Monogamous couples living in the same household, for example, may discover that sex may be a “way of dealing with anxiety” and/or fulfil the need for intimacy.” More questions answered.
If you aren’t lucky enough to have a partner in your house to help you out with that, the guidelines suggest it’s time to start consensual sexting, hanging out in chat rooms and having virtual sex.
Of all the surprises 2020 has delighted us with so far, state-sanctioned cybersex and masturbation is the one we didn’t see coming.
State-sanctioned sex acts aren’t new in Canada — it’s just that heterosexual monogamous sex has historically been the only one to get the thumbs up.
That changed a little in Canada in the late 1960s, after Pierre Elliott Trudeau famously declared the state would get out of the nation’s bedrooms. It didn’t change completely, though. As Toronto researcher Tom Hooper discovered, even though the Criminal Law Amendment Act of 1968-69 has been credited with decriminalizing homosexuality, arrests for “gross indecency” actually went up in Toronto for a complicated cluster of reasons, including the fact that group sex and bathhouse sex, which were pretty common, were still illegal.
The law was based on somebody’s idea of what queer sex might look like, as opposed to the reality.
I can’t help but wonder if there’s an echo of that in these guidelines. Is this a realistic path to safer sex during COVID-19?
“The statement from Toronto Public Health just says don’t have sex with anyone unless you live with them,” says Alexander McClelland, a postdoctoral fellow in the University of
Ottawa’s department of criminology whose previous work has focused on the criminalization of people with HIV-AIDS. “So, this isn’t very helpful because there are going to be people who are still going to be hooking up with people whether we think it’s irresponsible or not. This doesn’t really give people any realistic practical tactics.”
More useful, perhaps, would be some suggestions for harm reduction strategies rooted in a more realistic idea of what sex actually looks like.
In the Netherlands, for example, people were recently told to find a sex buddy and partner up. New York City’s sex fact sheet recommends not having sex with people outside of their residence but, if they do, to have sex “with as few people as possible,” since “having close contact — including sex — with only a small circle of consenting people helps prevent spreading COVID-19.”
Also, New Yorkers are advised it would be prudent to skip rimming till the pandemic is over.
As we move past the initial shock and lockdown stages of the pandemic, people with experience in assessing safety in relation to contagious diseases are urging people to adopt more nuanced ideas about risk.
There’s a lot of room in between total self-isolation and, say, sharing bottles with strangers at an underground party in someone’s basement.
That same thinking can be applied to sex, an idea that Toronto group Fagdemic is working to promote through social media (@fagdemic on Instagram and Twitter) by offering “harm reduction for a coronaworld.”
“People are having sex,” says Jonathan Valelly, one of the artists and activists behind the harm reduction project. “They are meeting on Tinder, Grinder and Scruff, so rather than thinking of things as being either inherently safe or unsafe, what if we think about that in-between space?
“Sure, there’s a higher risk when you meet someone versus when you don’t, but acknowledging and using a harmreduction framework like this can also reduce risks.”
One of the most important components of harm reduction in relation to sex under COVID-19 is communication.
People have to open up a dialogue about the number of partners they have, as well as other risk factors, such as their exposure at work.
For this to work, though, it’s important that we steer clear of stigmatizing or policing people, which might force people to hide the truth. We made that mistake when it came to dealing with HIV-AIDS. It’s important we avoid making it again, which is why the recent news that authorities in the United Kingdom have criminalized the act of having sex with anyone outside of your household is disturbing news.
To avoid it, clear language, frank discussions and moving away from black and white assessments of risk are key. The Toronto Public Health guidance fails on at least one front here.
“I think one wonders ‘Who is reading that one-sheeter and really taking it to heart,’ you know?” says Valelly. “We are all autonomous individuals who are making our decisions around COVID-19 similar to the way we make decisions around our sexual health in non-pandemic times, and
I think public health messaging from a number of different agencies are often written in the hope that it really hits somebody.
“But we actually have a pretty engaged public right now and people are listening to virologists with gusto and making their own informed decisions, so I think saying something like ‘physical contact is high risk for transmitting the coronavirus’ is kind of like, well, duh,” he says.