Masks and Condoms
I have been thinking a lot about masks and condoms and consent, living through both a pandemic and a teenage daughter. Spring of 2021, before the CDC told us we could take our masks off, I flew to Denver with my unvaccinated son (the vaccine wasn’t yet being offered to children). While we were waiting for our connection some guy sat down next to us on the bench. He was middle aged, with short hair, a clean-shaven face, kaki’s and a button-down shirt, and he was the only one in the airport over the age of two without a mask. He was alone. I don’t think he had any luggage with him, and he sat with his legs wide. He seemed to say, with the scowl on his face, I fucking dare you to say anything about me not wearing a mask. And no one dared. We had all assumed an element of risk simply in deciding to travel. And maybe we all felt it was someone else’s job to tell him to put a mask on. In any case, during the hour we sat next to him, no one said a word. And yet we expect teen girls who are just discovering their sexuality to stop in the middle of a sexual encounter, some combination of exciting, awkward, pleasurable, scary (maybe even painful), and ask whomever they are with to put on a condom. And so not only does the condom sometimes not get put on, but there is then a wave of guilt and fear that the sixteen year old girl has to deal with after the encounter.
In my practice as a primary care physician, I have tried to change how I ask women about birth control. Despite making no judgment when I ask, there is judgment inherent in the question, what do you use for birth control, with the unsaid assumption that if you are not using birth control, and not actively trying to get pregnant, you are being irresponsible. I suppose it’s true, but it is one of the few areas in our lives where we presume healthy choices every time. It’s not like we expect that same level of self control with eating or drinking, and yet the biochemical reactions that make us want one more cookie, one more beer, that cigarette even though we promised to stop, make us want to have sex. And the biochemistry is amazing — for example, the oxytocin that is released with orgasm actually helps sperm travel down the fallopian tubes. I mean, how can we escape such detailed biology?
I am a grown woman, mother of two and a doctor. During the onslaught of menopause (do I separate my libido from a physical desire to have one more child) I’ve had to take the morning after pill three times. Only one of those times did I ask my doctor for a prescription. The other times I spent the forty dollars at CVS rather than face the shame of admitting to my PCP that I still hadn’t gotten my IUD replaced. I have waited for my period like a teenager, peeing on the stick when I was late, promising myself to actually use the condoms that are in my husband’s bottom drawer next time. And yes, it is as much my husband’s responsibility as mine — arguably more — but for the most part, he wants what I want, and so it is both easy and complicated. Is this any different from having a fourth glass of wine when I know I will only wake up with a hangover?
I am obsessed with the PodCast, You’re Wrong About. These two young journalists talk about controversial news stories from the eighties and nineties. They see it through a younger lens than my own and I find it fascinating. There is one episode about sexting and it approaches the topic with the assumption that pretty much all teens will sext (I’ve read the statistic that one in two adults have sent a nude photo of themselves), and that one needs to talk about sexting in terms of relative safety, not abstinence. To talk about simply not doing it puts you in a position of naivety. The teenagers will all just secretly roll their eyes and say to each other you don’t know what you’re talking about — you’ve never been asked to send a nude picture of yourself. This seems to be a tangent, but I think most of life can be seen in gradations of risk, and that gradation is the best way to talk about risky behavior. You can’t just say to your sixteen year old daughter don’t drink, don’t have sex. You have to give her tools to talk about doing all of those things from a place of some control. (Good. Fucking. Luck.)
There was that short story in the New Yorker a couple years ago, Catperson, about one of those awkward sexual encounters most of us have experienced where we go through with it but we’re not quite sure we enjoyed it. The story went viral, and what hit home about it is that it spoke to a truth that is difficult to talk about — not just awkward sex, but awkward sex you weren’t even sure you wanted, graying the idea of consent in the midst of the “me too” movement. There are so many thoughts between yes and no. We rarely read (or see on tv) a sex scene where the characters are ambivalent, just as we rarely read a sex scene where the guy stops to put on a condom. One of the most memorable scenes from I May Destroy You is actually the opposite, where the young man Arabella is having sex with takes off a condom without her consent. Condoms (or any form of birth control) aren’t part of our literary conversation about sex, and yet in my own experience, a large portion of the thoughts going through teenage girls’ heads while having sex are about accidental pregnancy or std exposure, and for young women now, perhaps the possibility of being unwittingly filmed. And so consent is not just about asking if you want to have sex, but how safely you want to have it. And is that the expectation we should have regarding consent between two young teens? Are they supposed to spell it all out beforehand? “I can’t have sex with you, but you can go down on me and I don’t mind a little ass play.” I’ve been married for sixteen years and I can’t imagine saying that to my husband. I am embarrassed just writing it.
I’ve strayed a long way from masks.
But it is the same idea.
During the height of the pandemic, being maskless required a certain form of consent, but giving consent is hard (or more specifically, telling someone they don’t have your consent is hard). The person taking the unwanted risk (the person wearing a mask sitting next to someone who isn’t wearing a mask, or the young woman in a sexual encounter with someone who doesn’t want to use a condom) is the one who is the most vulnerable, and yet is the one that must do the asking if they want to be in a safer environment. The person who is comfortable with risk, the guy sitting next to me not wearing a mask, has no reason to say anything. “Just say no,” the mantra I grew up with, assumes someone will ask the question.
Jessica Small is a primary care physician in Cambridge, MA, where she lives with her husband and two children. She has worked as a family doctor for over twenty years, seeing newborns, ninety year olds and up to three generations within families. She writes both fiction and non-fiction, and is currently working on a novel.