Best Sex Writing 2012: The State of Today's Sexual Culture by Susie Bright, Rachel Kramer Bussel Page A

With no warnings about the risks of cancer, or transmission, Carrillo says she “ just didn’t think about it” and told no one. And that’s what led, in part, to the third and perhaps biggest whammy of all: her husband’s reaction to the cause of her cancer. “He turned it into hell for me. He demanded to know how many people I’d slept with, accused me of cheating, and called me a slut,” she says. Even though Carrillo had never strayed—she believes she contracted HPV from a premarriage ex—her husband’s abusive words began to infect her, too. “I started to wonder if maybe it was my fault,” she says. Ashamed and embarrassed, she went through cancer treatment alone.
    Thankfully, Carrillo was eventually cured: of both her cancer and her self-blame. She ultimately divorced her husband, found support online, and learned, as she says, that she has “nothing to be ashamed about.” But even with its happy ending, her story reveals a troubling reality: While STIs have reached pandemic proportions, the stigma surrounding them remains ugly—perhaps especially for women.
    “You cannot get through a season of Jersey Shore or The Real World without an STI joke implying that the person accused of having one is skanky and slutty, and saying ‘Ooh, watch out, you might catch something,’” says Adina Nack PhD, a medical sociologist specializing in sexual health and author of Damaged Goods? Women Living with Incurable Sexually Transmitted Diseases . “And that person they’re talking about is almost always a woman. There’s a serious misconception that you have to be promiscuous in order to contract an STI, and while men in our culture are rewarded for being sexually active, women are judged.” (Nack cites one woman in her practice who’d never even had sex, but who contracted an STI while—successfully—fighting off a rapist. Even she said, “I feel like a slut.”)
    To be sure, STIs and their attendant stigmas are (as I’ve written elsewhere) no picnic for men, either. But their impact appears to be different, in certain ways, for women. Among the hundreds of people with STIs Nack has interviewed, she says, men tend to be more concerned about medical realities—the best treatment, the best protection for partners—while women focus on much broader, and harsher, implications that strike at the very core of their sexual selves: “Will I be rejected as ‘damaged goods’? ” “Are my dreams for sex, love and happiness over?”
    This is ironic, considering that STIs are now so strikingly common that, as Nack says, “you should go out into the dating world assuming that the person you’re with has already contracted something, even though they may not know it. Even if someone says, ‘I’m clean—I’ve been tested for everything,’ they’re either ignorant or lying, because we don’t even have definitive tests for everything.” STIs are often asymptomatic and frequently go undiagnosed. The CDC estimates that nearly 19 million new infections occur each year. At least half of the sexually active population will contract HPV at some point; 45 percent of women 20 to 24 have it already. It’s so prevalent, in fact, that the medical community considers HPV infection a virtual marker for having had sex at all. One in five adults, whether they know it or not, has herpes right now. In other words, statistically, your date is more likely to carry a sexually transmitted infection than to share your astrological sign.
    Though many STIs are easily and effectively treatable, those who have them still live with threats: of painful outbreaks, other medical complications and (in the case of certain HPV strains) cervical cancer; of straight-up slut-shaming and outright rejection. Given how common STIs are—and despite efforts by, for example, writers at the blog Jezebel to chip away at the stigma by indirectly or directly outing themselves—it’s pretty amazing how much dated stereotype and outright ignorance