Feministing links to the story that San Antonio scientists are working on a vaccine to prevent chlamydia. Ann writes:
Not only is chlamydia one of the most common STDs, it’s one that primarily affects women — men can transmit it but don’t experience symptoms. (Though it may lower men’s chances of conceiving. Check out this article with the best/worst punny headline ever.) So this is great news. One more step toward a world where there will be NO medical reason to abstain from sex as long as all your shots are in order! And this is one less scary-STD slide for the high-school wrestling coach to show during sex-ed week… Isn’t that what conservatives fear about the HPV vaccine? Muhahaha.
So I guess we can assume that should the research be successful, we can all look forward to another round of HPV vaccine-style “culture wars”, where one side thinks it’s great that science has found another way to help prevent disease, and the other side is upset that there’s one less thing to scare us away from things that are fun.
I was meaning to post on this column by William Saletan a while back, and I think it’s an interesting question to raise in relation to this news.
If only we could manage food the way we’ve managed sex. Sex, like eating, is fun, and for good reason. Food nurtures us to maturity and keeps us alive so we can procreate and raise children. Sex passes on our genes. If food and sex weren’t fun, you wouldn’t be here. But in the age of abundance, these appetites are out of sync. Infant and juvenile mortality have plummeted. You don’t need to get pregnant all the time to raise enough kids. You’ll end up with too many if you let nature take its course. So we invented birth control.
The point of birth control is fun without consequences. You still want sex, and you still get it, but we tinker with the process so you don’t get pregnant. Last week, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops complained that separating sex from procreation violates nature. Of course it does. Nature put the fun and the consequences together, but for reasons that no longer apply. Nature has produced a creature clever enough to take nature apart. We get the orgasms without the organisms.
Why not try the same with food? Keep the fun and lose the consequences. We invented birth control; why not girth control?
This really does seem to be the fundamental problem: morality and health/safety are often linked. Back in the day, it was genuinely good advice for women not to risk pregnancy without a guarantee that she and her children would be looked after. The problem wasn’t sex, it was unwanted pregnancy. But until recently, they were intrinsically linked. Now they don’t have to be.
There is great confusion about the idea of “consequences”. There are many ideas wrapped up in that word: logical consequences, avoidable consequences, punishment, natural law… Often they get confused, and we get debates about whether it’s a good or bad thing to protect women against something that could kill them.
The idea of sex without physical consequences is often too closely linked with the idea of sex without emotional consequences, and further muddied with confusion about what kind of consequences are avoidable, whether it’s right to avoid them and so on. It’s often linked with the idea of punishment: don’t have sex because you might get pregnant/ get a disease. In this narrative, pregnancy or disease are punishments, and in the morality tale we all share to some degree, avoiding punishment is a bad thing.
Another column on Slate discusses the debate about the emotional consequences of sex. If you’re a woman, you’ll be taught that sex can have devastating emotional consequences if you aren’t in a committed, monogamous (married) relationship. This is such a truism that even the existence of women who don’t suffer those consequences is proof of the damage: “Look! They’re so damaged they don’t even feel it anymore!” Again, negative consequences are put forward as a reason not to do something, then when that reason no longer exists, rather than meaning you’re free to do that thing, it means that you’ve escaped your consequence (punishment), and that is wrong. The action, rather than the consequence, has become the thing that must be avoided.
“Not only is chlamydia one of the most common STDs, it’s one that primarily affects women — men can transmit it but don’t experience symptoms.”
Sorry I have to differ on this point about the absence of symptoms in men.
There was discharge , there was burning and hey when I got around to telling the person who passed it on to me there was denial. I am talking about a pre-Aids time but I would guess these tricky bugs haven’t altered that much.
Apart from fertility problems which often pop up much later after the infection was acquired many females have very mild symptoms .
So mild they aren’t perceived as a problem at all and the time lag to treatment renders the risk of fertilty consequences much greater.
In fact it’s much more common for women to be asymptomatic than it is for men. Men can experience discharge, pain on urinating, epidydemitis and orchitis and of course PID develops in a significant proportion of infected women if left untreated.
There’s no doubt that STI’s are showing up in a much broader tranche of developed world humanity than was once the case and there’s equally no doubt that more people having more sex with more partners is driving this – at least in part. However, most STI’s are also eminently responsive to antibiotic treatment and the key, I guess, is in equipping sexually active people with the appropriate information – and the need to test – rather than investing in Canute-like moral sanctions.
Fair enough – I will take your word for that
It will be interesting to see, then, if that makes the debate different from the HPV vaccine uproar.
Texas Governor Rick Perry, George Bush’s successor and a conservative Republican, has recently been copping enormous flak from the religious right and indeed his own GOP legislature (a committee has just passed a bill to overturn his executive order) for mandating the use of the HPV vaccine in schools. Apparently, so strong are the signals that being vaccinated against cancer will send to young girls that sex is ok, it’s a moral issue that should be one of parental choice.
Very interesting reflections on sex and morality, Anna.
I’d never thought of it that way, but you’re absolutely right about the progression. How absolutely fascinating.
Funny, I saw it somewhat differently. Don’t get me wrong, but “…there’s one less thing to scare us away from things that are fun” will also end up as more pressure being put on young or impressionable women not to use condoms.
People still need them. I’m trying to impress upon my young un as part of her sex education, “Barrier methods, barrier methods and barrier methods!” The chlamydia example is good though – given that most males of her circle won’t be so vaccinated in the coming decades, given the level of apathy out there, I can get her to retail yucky descriptions as per above to convince potential future partner that if it’s not on, it’s not on.
You old party pooper Helen. Tell her to spread her legs for every guy she fancies the natural way because there’s the morning after pill and subsidised abortions aplenty if that don’t work. Besides they’ll come up with cures for any unpleasant diseases. You’re such a worrywort prude dude.
I didn’t realise you drank, observa.
Dude, weird you’re obs.
lwys rmmbr th brtnsts’ mtt- Y rp m nd w’ll scrp m! r dd t rhym wth sck m? Whtvr, y knw t mks sns.
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Turn it up, wbb. Any given individual can drink and have their own opinions. Any teetotaller can abstain and retain theirs.
Drink and drug use through free will is a human right and a public good; thus I’ve nothing but contempt for people who blame legitimate beliefs they don’t like on ‘external’ factors: mental illness, immorality, deviance, drunkenness. I’d have thought better of you, shame.
As for the progression of sin that Helen and Tigtog are discussing: the problem’s really a mediaeval one. Which came first, the thought, or the deed? Does the sin lie in the hurtful act against other sons and daughters of God, or in the freely chosen act of evil against God himself? Two hundred lines, if you please, twenty Hail Marys and I’ll see you in
Churchthe beer-fridge on Sunday, all of you.Oh, and Helen, what you describe as:
Is the very articulation of the scepticism I have about male contraceptives, whenever they emerge from science and the Murdoch press. I mean, would you trust him to remember his tablet before bedtime? Does he have a mature idea of consequences?
Cmon wbb, you gotta loosen up a bit and get into liberal progressive mode here meboy.
Obby’s just doing what rightwingwers have always done. I would expect nothing more or less from him this being the case.
Swt Jss th nxt thng thy’ll b wntng s fr vsln
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Cld swtch th lbls nd gv m Vcks h?
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Observa, you’re offensive, dude.
You’re right, Pav. Welcome to the disemvoweler, Obby.
Actually, shorn of the offensive remarks, Obs’ link was on-topic: [link]
DD, I’m not talking about “sin” at all, merely harm reduction.