In her blog, You’ve Got Mail! You’ve Got Herpes!, Meredith Small, LiveScience’s Human Nature Columnist, alerted us to this heartless reality:
Internet Sexuality Information Service of Oakland, Calif., has introduced another kind of embarrassing email — notification of exposure to a sexually transmitted disease — that just might be showing up in your email soon, depending where you’ve been lately. The program will allow you, if you have an STD such as syphilis, gonorrhea or Chlamydia, or are HIV positive, to notify by email anyone you have had sex with, that is, if you have their email address.
Always a painful subject, even before the onset of incurable STDs, it’s hard to tell someone you’ve infected them or they’ve infected you. Is this depersonalization of bad news the next logical step in casual sex, or is technology more to blame? Either way, it doesn’t say much for the noble nature of the one we’ve chosen to bed or ourselves, if we’re the people who’ve decided to duck the responsibility of a personal touch.
Receiving notification by email is better than no notification at all, but shouldn’t we care enough about our sexual partners to tell them face-to-face and be prepared for the consequences? Sure, there might be yelling and recriminations. There might also be moments when a hug or simple caress could allay some of the pain. Isn’t this what personal responsibility entails?
Of course, that’s for the one who’s done the infecting. An innocent party who’s been infected by a roving partner might not feel up to the confrontation. Feelings of betrayal could be overwhelming. A partner who fears violence should choose to avoid a physical meeting. But are there any other legitimate reasons to act the cad?
Mariam carefully explains why our public health centers might choose technology, then adds:
I suppose we can blame evolution for making the human sex drive so compelling that in the heat of the action we all make stupid mistakes. The drive is there in the first place, or course, so that we are compelled to have sex and pass on genes. But didn’t evolution also bring us big brains and thought processes that are supposed to keep us out of trouble? Apparently not.
Unfortunately, we can’t blame it all on evolution. We, the people, have had a hand in producing the rationale of stupid. We teach our young to approach sex without forethought. Oh, yeah. Sure we do. We embed their thought process with dreams of being swept off their feet. Girls are told to save their virginity until marriage. In practical terms, that means they won’t be prepared when it happens out of wedlock. If she’s prepared, she didn’t get swept off her feet, and she deliberately didn’t wait until her wedding night. Those are two powerful taboos to buck. It’s so much easier to take a chance.
He’s not thinking either. Boys aren’t taught that condoms and birth control are their responsibility. Being a stud is. He’s feeling lucky, so he rushes before she changes her mind. As they get older, their sophistication improves but not their wide-eyed innocence about the harm they could be creating. Until…until something bad happens. Then one of them realizes the other didn’t care enough to protect them. The recriminations begin. I should have…you should have…but “we” is not there if the relationship is so broken that email can masquerade as the best solution.
We need a better way. We need to educate our children and loved ones how to treat each other better, how to treat themselves better and how to make better decisions. We can’t do that by pretending marriage is the perfect solution to all sexual ills or by allowing sexual disrespect to appear to be the desirable norm. It will take effort. We’ll need to challenge the media, speak out in private conversations and be diligent in our own behavior.
What we don’t need is to be callous and cowardly, sending a cold, impersonal email we know will hurt after hot, intimate times in bed.
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That would be an extremely cold way to find something like that out, especially if it was life threatening. I would hope that people you are sleeping with are still important enough to tell in person, at the least in a more sensitive manner. But email is better than no notification.
There really is no excuse for going the coward’s way out. If you know someone so intimately that you have their email address, then you are, presumably, not merely having casual, one-night-only sex with this person. Those are the people who should get the coward’s notice. Actually,texting seems more likely at this point. After all, one is still more likely to exchange numbers first, emails later, right?
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