Whore’s Mouth: A Scarleteen Tale
This is a guest post for Scarleteen’s blog carnival. You can see all of the posts in handy condensed form over at AAG’s blog. And, if you got ‘em, please send a few bucks their way to support “sex-ed for the real world”. No one deserves to be as confused as I was!
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The first time I had an outbreak, I thought I’d burned the roof of my mouth. A few days later, when the pain had built to an impacted tooth level of agony, I started to panic. My mouth is blistered, I texted to the boy. Do you have something?
“You have oral herpes,” my doctor said after taking one look at the inside of my mouth. Immediately I was back in high school health class, looking at larger-than-life size drawings of mouths and cocks covered in sores (a bit like the horrifyingly squelchy zombies in Planet Terror.) My sex life is over, I thought.
“My wife has the same thing,” said my doctor as he peeled off his gloves, “just take these pills, and wait until the sores are gone before you kiss anyone.”
I blinked. You mean people with STDs can still have relationships?
Even though I’d already had varied sexual experiences, having my first outbreak was the catalyst that first got me interested in how sex ed is taught in schools. How could it be that after four years of high school sex ed, I could still remember all those illustrations of poor untreated cocks and pussies, but nothing about a disease that could be spread though such a chaste act as kissing? I was pissed off, especially because biggest thing I seemed to have gotten from it was the fear that I was now unfuckable. (Happily disproved when, despite having sent him the text no one ever wants to get, me and the boy went on to happily bonk for the next eight months.)
When I started to learn more about my new disease, I was fascinated by its contradictions. It’s incurable, but most STD testing centers don’t test for it. It’s incredibly common, but most people don’t even know they have it. Outbreaks range from no symptoms at all, to zit-sized sores, to outbreaks as serious as my first one (which had me drinking smoothies for days because it hurt too much to chew.) When I read that some studies showed that herpes could be spread without there being any visible outbreaks at all, I resolved never to kiss anyone again (and you can hear my stories about how well that went here.)
Despite my vow, as I negotiated the various interactions I have in my life—which include everything from my family members kissing me goodbye to sexual partners wanting me to suck their cock without a condom—I found out that living with an STD wasn’t nearly that simple. Even in sex-positive spaces, there were unbelievably varied responses to the fact that I had it. There were people who told me they didn’t care whether their partner had herpes or not, and people who told me they’d only make out with me at certain times. I read posts written by people who’d been rejected by their partners at the first sign of illness, and had others tell me that the thought of a diseased partner made their dick want to retract into their bodies. There was the odd disconnect I had with partners who reached automatically for a condom during intercourse, and yet never for a blow-job. And, most worrying of all, sex parties where I found myself showing people who had been in the scene for far longer than I have how to use a dental dam.
None of this made it any easier for me to decide how to make my way in the world of sex. I was fretting over the various opinions and which one I could live with when I came upon Scarleteen’s essay on “Why Safer Sex Isn’t Always Safe Enough”:
“What’s the answer? There isn’t an easy one. In most cases, if you simply chose to abstain from all sexual activities, forever, you could likely avoid HPV and HSV-2. But very few people are going to do that, and we do have to consider in making sexual choices how they will impact our quality of life. Cutting off sexual or affectionate contact with all people, or with sexual partners within reasonable limits (those of their and our own physical, emotional safety and health, in general) for all of our lives would, for many of us, greatly impact and reduce our quality of life, potentially more than an infection would. But to make informed choices, we should consider that even with safer sex practices in play — even with only one sexual partner — we may still be taking a substantial risk at contracting or transmitting skin-to-skin STDs and STIs.”
This paragraph summed up all of my difficulties in a way that was realistic and nonjudgmental. Though I don’t always feel like I have an answer that satisfies me, reading this article finally allowed me to let go of some of the shame. In one way, we’re almost all “diseased”—with rates as high as one in two, the people who freak out at the thought of their partner having anything might have it themselves!
It took the reality of getting herpes to show me a new way of looking at the information given me by high school health classes, but my first year with it would have been much easier if I’d known that ‘getting something’ didn’t mean you wouldn’t have a life, or partners, or never be able to make out with anyone again. Even after a varied experiences in BDSM, I understood for the first time how much knowledge is hidden even from people who are trying to be sex-positive. Scarleteen, with their detailed information and their independent funding, helps spread that message even when the powers that be dictate that we be given incomplete information. Donate now, so that the next generation can have sex education not only for the real world, but for a better world.