You guys, an “incurable” strain of gonorrhea has now been confirmed in North America and everything is the worst. This strain might as well be called slutsbane.
I mean, ugh. HIV is basically incurable and it’s awful, but HIV is not actually all that easy to transmit. Gonorrhea, on the other hand, can easily be transmitted orally. I do not, to my knowledge, know any guy who wears a condom while receiving oral sex or any guy or girl who insists that his or her partner wear a condom before performing the deed (we all learned as children on Halloween to never put anything in our mouth that’s in a wrapper).
So, this is awful. And for those of us who live in the real world and aren’t in the magical eternal long-lasting fairy-tale monogamous romances* of which Taylor Swift dreams each night, this is bad. Particularly in a world in which there are still schools that teach an abstinence-only curriculum. It’s ridiculous—it’s what I had in high school health class. I half expected Driver’s Ed to just be: “Never drive or ride in a car or be near cars or places where cars might be and you’ll be safe from vehicular collisions.”
I mean, people who get into car accidents are in traffic with a lot of other cars; it was just a matter of time before something bad happened. Those sluts.
Now, this strain is not truly incurable, but “nuking” someone with antibiotics is how we got into this quasi-supervirus** situation in the first place. It’s not a real solution.
This is not just a situation in which people who use Craigslist to hook up need to worry. Gonorrhea can, in some situations, be transmitted by kissing. I imagine that, like, church socials aren’t like this, but at most parties (other than, say, most LAN parties), everyone kisses everyone. The best of human behaviors are sometimes good for insidious and infectious microorganisms.
You guys, this is awful. Someone please cure all STIs forever. If I got an incurable STI I would just balloon up to 500 pounds because, well, why not? Let’s not do that.
*I know that I’m super negative about relationships, but they’re super ridiculous. A television character said: “He’s the first thing I think about in the morning and the last thing I think about before I go to sleep.” I was like: “Really? Last night, as I went to sleep, I thought about what it would be like to have Rumpelstiltskin-from-Once-Upon-A-Time‘s powers during a zombie apocalypse. Your thoughts sound lame.”
**Oh man, the word supervirus, which isn’t really accurate here (gonorrhea is caused by bacteria), totally makes me want to rewatch ReBoot. Remember ReBoot? It’s way better than you think. Like, the first season is goofy and what you’d expect from a kid’s show. The second season gets super intense towards the end. The third season is one of the darkest seasons of any show that I have ever seen. The first primary antagonist in the fourth and final season is a supervirus named Daemon who is symbolic, in some ways, of Christianity.
