Denial is a Disease

Editor’s Note: Every Saturday, we run a column by Maria Padhila on a relationship-based theme, usually focused on polyamory or what some call responsible nonmonogamy. — efc

By Maria Padhila

“Don’t talk to anyone. Don’t touch anyone.”

I’ve been getting promos for the movie Contagion, which uses this line in its advertising, in my official mailboxes for a while because of a project I’ve been working on. I’m not a scientist or a microbiologist, but one of my real-life jobs is writing for them, so I get to talk to some very smart, advanced people about things that scare most people.

But the message in the movie tagline has extra resonance, as the filmmakers’ intended, because this is the message of fear we’ve been being force-fed for a while. It applies to all parts of life — don’t talk to strangers, don’t travel, don’t have fun, don’t have sex.

Whenever there’s a discussion online or otherwise about any form of open relationships, one of the first questions is always about ‘diseases’. When someone, especially a woman, writes about having several partners or even simply enjoying sex in any kind of online media, about half the comments will be warnings that she will get a disease, die of a disease, or give diseases to others.

As a study of epidemics in the past hundred years or so will show, people seem to be doing a very good job of getting diseases, dying of diseases, and giving diseases to others whether they have multiple partners or not.

One of the oddest yet most common of these types of comments is usually along the lines of: ‘I hope you enjoy having all those diseases’. A variation: ‘I hope your partners like getting all those diseases’. It’s as if the Internets are rife with sadistic Sunday school teachers. It’s right up there with ‘Stop crying, or I’ll give you something to cry about’. It’s just the most bizarre thing I could imagine anyone saying, and it’s all over the place.

Some people are honestly curious about how polyamorous people handle this issue, however. If you ask, they’ll most likely tell you, because it’s something we get asked a lot. I’d really like to say, “None of your damn business, unless I’m asking to get close to you,” but one likes to make an effort to be open and helpful.

Risk and numbers being what they are, most polyamorous people have sets of rules and boundaries for keeping themselves and the people they come into contact with healthy. Some people are ‘fluid bonded’ with the ones they’re closest to, meaning they forgo protection against exchanging body fluids. Others have different rules for different types of activity and different people. But there are always rules that entail a conversation about the subject, even if it’s only a conversation of a few sentences.

I recently had to have an awkward conversation myself — several of them — when I realized I had unknowingly exposed not only my boyfriend but about a half-dozen friends to a big, yucky health problem.

When I was in the hospital, a friend who happens to live in a ritzy neighborhood took care of my daughter. The kids all went to a ritzy day camp, which was great. And all the kids got some very ritzy head lice. (I don’t know why, but it seems like kids in private schools and rich neighborhoods get lice a lot more than they do in our home public school.) No one knows how these things get started, and it’s ridiculous to assign blame. My friend thought she’d gotten them all, but my girl has some very long, thick hair, and you have to fine-comb religiously and dump a couple bottles of olive oil over her head for about a week before you get the last bit of evidence.

So I had to tell a couple of people that they might have been exposed. In the early days of our romance, I didn’t think that when I went to visit my boyfriend I’d be wondering if I should pack a lice comb to check his hair. Chris doesn’t have children or encounter them much, so he’s not used to the constant barrage of flu germs and rashes and tummy viruses and now, parasites, that could be headed his way with me as a vector. Luckily, he’s not faint of heart. Luckily, we adults seem to be immune to a lot of these problems. At this moment, none of us has lice and none of us is vomiting, but after 10 years as a mother, I am certain of nothing so much as that this peaceful interlude could be disturbed at any moment.

But when people warn about ‘all those diseases’ you can get in open relationships, I don’t think they’re talking about influenza.

I try to keep a realistic understanding of the risks in life. But the constant association of polyamory and sexually transmitted disease bothers me, because it’s not realistic. And it feeds into the constant, manufactured fear of sex, closeness and rejection by the tribe — and as we see each day now, if you can make people afraid, you can make them do almost anything.

One could say we’ve been fed this for centuries, but let’s stick to post-9/11 for now. And when it comes to fear of love, sex and opening up relationships, AIDS and the 1980s were the equivalent of the 9/11 turning point.

In nearly any discussion of polyamory, this canard or a variation will come up: “In the 1960s and 1970s, people experimented with ‘free love,’ but AIDS put an end to that.” In other contexts, the blame is placed on other sexually transmitted diseases, or on bad drug trips (somebody blinded himself staring at the sun and then jumped out of a window), or on what it did to the children (that poor little girl was raised by crazy hippies who never made her put matching socks on, and now instead of growing up and getting on with it, she’s writing books about how much she hates everyone).

But what if it wasn’t AIDS that killed free love? What if it was people who killed it? Or what if it didn’t really die?

What if free love was just really hard? What if it took too much time, especially for men and women who were being urged throughout the 1980s to work more and more, so they could earn the designer cars, clothing and drugs that would make them complete? What if there was no way (Internet) for people who had open relationships to find each other and learn from each other? And what if it was just hard to have the disease conversation, and a lot of other conversations, first — just too much trouble to actually talk?

The myth is just that. Free love didn’t die. Some people still practiced it all along. And the ones who stopped didn’t all stop because they were cowering in the corner with latex gloves and a bottle of bleach. They had dozens of other reasons.

The myth of open relationships=disease must pay off for someone, somewhere. I’d like to bust a few of these myths here.

Polyamory doesn’t equal increased risk. A polyamorous group may be having the kind of physical and sexual contact that doesn’t put them at risk for STDs. They may be more careful and circumspect than single people or monogamous couples. A monogamous person can find out after entering a monogamous relationship that they have had an STD for years, and pass it to their partner. A monogamous person can be at risk of assault or at risk of acquiring a blood-borne disease through their work or volunteer activity or because they’re in a dangerous area.

STDs are not certain death. I know AIDS is real. I’ve lost people to it, people I cared about very much. I saw how it changed everyone’s lives, starting with the ones first affected and their lovers and friends. It changed my life. But if you come to work with a virulent meningitis, you could kill me off much faster than AIDS could. No one wants to get AIDS or meningitis, but the fact is the quality of life for people with controlled HIV can be better than that of people with many other conditions. It is the forced shame and guilt that comes with STDs that can make them intolerable. The shame of the 1980s goes to Ronald Reagan, not to the people who had HIV.

There’s a lot more to be ashamed of, if that’s what you want. This focus on sex=disease is a first-world problem, a white whine. It discounts the significance of the other big killers worldwide, such as diarrheal diseases, pneumonia, malaria — the leading causes of death for children worldwide — oh, the list goes on. But those things happen to people who look different and live in other places.

Besides, when people get STDs, it’s their own fault for keeping up with their risky behavior. Change your behavior, and no more STDs. But there’s nothing my behavior could do that could help stop those other diseases, right?

Actually, wrong. I could change behaviors that affect everything from the economy to the politics to the climate of areas suffering strongly from malaria. But the people shaking their fingers at those in open relationships don’t condemn people driving SUVs and using conflict-mineral phones for their selfish and risky behavior. Obesity and type II diabetes are major U.S. health problems, yet few people change their behavior in an attempt to avoid these.

It’s easier to protect yourself in a monogamous relationship. Condoms are great protection, even if the jury’s still out on just how much they protect against HPV. They’re affordable — sometimes you can get them for free — not destructive (unless you have an allergy), noninvasive; they don’t change your hormones or your blood. But condoms only work when women have power over their own bodies. A woman has to be in a position, politically, physically, mentally, emotionally, financially, to be able to say “no glove, no love.” It’s like the feminist riddle: “Q: How can I prevent rape?” “A: Don’t rape anyone.” Responsibility has to be assigned to the right parties. Anyone can be assaulted, and anyone can be lied to. Monogamy is no guarantee of safety from STDs.

So why does the myth continue? Because many people are afraid of sex and want to shame others. Because people are afraid to have that conversation — afraid of the potential for rejection or misunderstanding. And so they’re invested in kidding themselves that monogamy is safe, straight sex is safe, the occasional fling is safe, whatever kind of sex I’m having is safe — but the gays, the kinks, the polyamorists, well, everybody knows that kind of thing is dangerous. People are afraid that if they have an STD (or even head lice, for that matter), they will become the untouchable, the rejected, so they project that fear.

We’re seeing it now in the struggle over Gardasil, the vaccine against some HPV viruses that some research has shown play a role in cervical cancer. I’m not an anti-vaccine person. Several of my friends are, but even they select certain vaccines they believe are time-tested and make sense — a separate tetanus shot in one case, for instance. The discovery that some strains of the HPV virus — a form of which just about anyone sexually active today has — are linked to cervical cancer was to my mind a brilliant breakthrough and deserves all the fast-tracking and research dollars it can possibly get. But the risk/reward ratio of the vaccine isn’t right for me. Viruses and vaccines alike are tricky motherfuckers. Unintended consequences abound. Sometimes it’s worth the risk. This time, I don’t think it is. There is also talk about giving it to boys, and this is disturbing for two opposed reasons: that no one made the research a priority even though HPV strains are also responsible for cancers in men, and that testing has barely begun.

I really don’t like to dispute advanced science. The scientists and medical people I work with aren’t power-mad members of some conspiracy; they aren’t getting folding money for every shot they encourage; they aren’t profit-mad pawns of the drug companies. They’re smart and geeky people who want to help make things better and do it right. I respect them. I’m sure as fuck not going to get someone to do reiki on my burst appendix, you know?

But over and over, my trust in western medicine is torpedoed. It happens when my insurance company says I have to get a mammogram but won’t pay for appendix surgery without a big fight; when my doctor herself tells me that mammograms aren’t really helpful in detection and that she herself sees environmental patterns in breast cancer and that these avenues aren’t being pursued. I’m being made to pay for someone’s radiology business, and I’m not sure why.

It happens when I sit and listen to someone who used to be witty and brilliant who now, after years of mostly anti-anxiety drugs topped off with some antipsychotics, EVERY ONE LEGALLY PRESCRIBED AND TAKEN ACCORDING TO INSTRUCTIONS, struggles to get a coherent sentence out of his mouth. I’m starting to see a difference in a lot of people I know who have been taking antidepressants as well, and of course Xanax, which most people regard as a harmless anti-anxiety drug. If you’ve been taking these drugs long-term, I’m asking you now to please check yourself. Watch a video of how you talked, moved, gestured a few years ago; then make one today. If you see things that disturb you — hesitancy, stutters, clumsiness — will you please take these videos to your doctor and go ahead and risk being labeled a crazy hypochondriac? Will you just check it out for yourself, and be honest about what you do or don’t find?

Forgive me for the tangent here, but I’m starting to think that Xanax and Wellbutrin are a lot more dangerous than having more than one sexual partner.

The saddest part to me about the Gardasil issue is the argument for why it must be given to young girls. It’s a total admission of defeat. It accepts as unalterable reality that girls are at risk of being assaulted, that nobody is willing to protect them, that we won’t take the steps to protect them, that women will continue to take no responsibility for their own bodies and health, that men and boys will not use condoms, that men and boys will not take responsibility, that men and boys will always assault girls, that an STD is so horrifying that it is worth any risk to avoid, that girls will never have the information they need to protect themselves, that no one will be willing to have that awkward conversation.

I know that public health decisions can’t be based on instinct and dreams of a perfect world. But they can’t be based on mass projection and denial, either. Mandating the vaccine accepts that we would rather make a potentially disastrous public health decision than simply talk honestly about sex.