By Briony Smith, The Kit
“I’m a 27-year-old woman living with genital herpes, and I’ve mostly been single since contracting it five years ago. I find navigating the dating scene to be humiliating and exhausting: Each time I get rejected because of it, it makes me less likely to try again. How can I feel less discouraged about trying to date with herpes? And how do I tell someone I want to be intimate with?” —Wendy, North Vancouver
How did we become so insensitive about sexually transmitted infections? (Like, stop it with the herpes jokes, guys.) Well, for one thing, sex education fails to give enough weight to A) how common chronic STIs are, and B) how not to be an asshole about them. (My main memory of STI education, BTW, was the teacher wheeling out the TV and playing a graphic slideshow of weeping chancres.) No wonder STIs became the boogeyman for so many—we fear what we do not understand.
You’re not unclean—you’re just one of millions who picked up a l’il ol’ bug in the course of living your life. “We don’t judge or blame people for getting a cold. It’s bad luck if you get an STI, but it doesn’t mean you are a bad person,” says Barbara Lamb, a sexual health educator at Toronto’s Birth Control and Sexual Health Centre.
Right now, one in seven people in Canada has herpes. “Herpes, both oral and genital, is extremely common,” says Shelley Taylor, a health educator with CATIE, an organization that provides HIV and hepatitis C information. “The Canadian Health Measures Survey indicated that about 19 per cent of people aged 35 to 59 years had HSV-2 infection and it was present in 6 per cent of people aged 14 to 34 years.”
The overall rate of STI infections is on the rise; possible explanations include easier access to casual sex partners via apps; condom use going down because of the (false) perception that all STIs are easily curable; and a lack of education, accessibility for testing, and treatment.