It’s still a bad idea to sleep with someone new, even if both of you have been social distancing.
The reality of our current apocalyptic scenario — the coronavirus pandemic — is a lot less sexy than the sweaty, bare-skin-pressing-on-bare-skin circumstances.
People have been told to stay home, following the leads of countries like Italy and Spain that have gone on full lockdowns. Government officials have begged people to not just remain indoors but also to cut off any physical contact with others.
The aim of this restrictive measure is to reduce the spread of the virus, not letting it jump from person to person. And sacrificing physical contact for the global good means that interactions with people you don’t share a home with now exist primarily online over texts, calls, and social media.
Through social distancing, we’re cut off from most physical contact with our friends and family. We’re also meant to keep away from people we were having sex with or want to have sex with, unless we already live with those people. And all the people who were having or were interested in having sex with us can’t pursue those aims, either.
In the expert’s view, everyone you want to dance with ’til the world ends’ is now off-limits. But that has neither stopped people from irresponsibly hooking up (or claiming to be), nor kept some from pursuing and being pursued.
While there are directives from health officials about how horny residents should refrain from hooking up and send nudes or video chat instead — I wanted to ask experts about why some people’s sex drives are even more stimulated than normal during a time where we can’t tap into those desires with other people. I also wanted to know: How risky is it to act on those sexual desires with someone, even if they’re also self-quarantining?
Being hornier than usual right now is perfectly normal. So is not wanting to have sex at all.
In the first week of social distancing, I noticed a few more green circles popping up on my Instagram feed than usual. Green circles are the platform’s way of indicating that you’re on someone’s “Close Friends” list, seeing a post made for a specific set of eyes decided on by the user. On my Instagram feed, these Close Friends posts usually come from gay men sharing thirst traps, a particularly randy brand of photo or video — usually shirtless, sometimes featuring underwear — that’s designed to get attention. The goal is to get the viewer to slide into your DMs, usually sending a reply involving the fire or eyeballs emoji.
The question became clear: Was the lockdown on physical intimacy driving up the frequency, and thirstiness, of these private posts?
Instagram told me on March 23 that although there have been upticks in use of the platform’s “live” feature since March 16 (when the first US quarantine measures went into effect), it didn’t have specific data on whether there has been a dramatic change in frequency of “Close Friends” posts on the platform during the past month or so of worldwide quarantine measures.
Our social etiquette and norms have also changed.
Many people may now have much more privacy to send a sext or DM at any time of day. Nights and weekends — times when Sex researcher says we’re most likely to engage in sex-seeking behavior — are now almost indistinguishable from afternoons and weekdays, blurring the lines of when it’s appropriate for us to start flirting and thirst-trapping. And there are now a lot of people home during the day to receive and reciprocate these messages.
These different factors can really do a number on the way our sex drives respond.
I asked sex researcher why my circle of gay friends and several gay men I spoke to in particular seemed to notice more thirst traps on Instagram and DMs than they did before. The research that she is doing, which surveys more than 1,000 participants, found that gender or sexual orientation wasn’t a determining factor in whether someone was expressing themselves more during the pandemic.
“The people that are most likely to experience that increased in sexual desire are people who already are very comfortable with their bodies and have a positive body image,” she told me. “If you’re somebody who was embedded in a network of people that had a level of interest in sex to begin with, you’re probably seeing even higher levels of sexual interest coming out right now.”
Why it’s so risky to sleep with someone right now, even if they’re social distancing
I spoke to a number of people for this article, and found that, although the sex researcher said gender and sexual orientation wasn’t really a factor in sexual behavior, the prostitutes I interviewed seemed to be the frankest, candid, and innovative when it comes to their online sex lives. A 31-year-old sex worker whom we’ll call Jane told me about a 32-person Instagram group DM she participates in where nudes are exchanged.
“It started as a, ‘Can I send you nudes during these trying times?’” she told me, explaining how the massive DM chain began as a poll. “And a ‘yes’ vote was basically consent for receipt and I got a lot of yeses, so I thought, wouldn’t it be fun?”
The group is so popular, she said, that there’s apparently a waitlist to get into the DM chain.
Queen (whose name has been changed to protect her privacy), a 24-year-old from Kampala, explained that she too has been sending out more nudes and posting flirty Close Friends Instagram stories because physical intimacy is off the table.
“I started doing it naturally just because of the circumstances, but it’s reinforced by seeing so many of my peers doing the same thing,” she said. “I think we’d all rather spend our time flirting and complimenting each other instead of thinking about sickness and death.”
Sleeping with someone who doesn’t live in your home is still a risk, because at this point, anyone outside your own home could stand as a health risk to you right now.
“Social distancing reduces your risk greatly, and it reduces the risk that you pose to others greatly, but it’s no guarantee that you didn’t get it when you went to the grocery store three days ago,”
#StayHome #StaySafeUg
