Web Plays 2 Roles in Casual Sex
The search for casual sex is no longer confined to nightclubs, coffee shops, boardwalks and Sunset Boulevard.
It has moved online, with people making actual dates through chat rooms and “swingers” sites, and the action is so brisk that public health officials are taking notice.
In a pair of articles in last week’s Journal of the American Medical Assn., researchers describe online pickup sites as vortexes of high-risk sexual behavior, virtual meat markets capable of generating outbreaks of disease. But one of the reports demonstrates how sites also present a golden opportunity to contain sexually transmitted diseases, or STDs.
“People who were once using bathhouses and bars are now finding partners online,” says Dr. Kathleen Toomey, director of public health for the state of Georgia, who wrote an editorial accompanying the journal articles. “It’s a logical extension of what was happening previously, and the public health establishment should have anticipated it.”
In one study, researchers asked 856 visitors to a Denver HIV testing clinic whether they’d ever gone online in search of a real-life sex partner. The 135 who answered yes ran a higher risk of catching diseases such as herpes, chlamydia, hepatitis and HIV than those who said no, the evidence suggested.
“As a group, they had more sexual partners, and more previous STDs, than those who hadn’t looked for sex online,” says Mary McFarlane, a research psychologist in the STD division at the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta, and one of the study’s authors.
In the other paper, Dr. Jeffrey Klausner, director of STD preventive services at San Francisco’s Department of Health, describes how he tracked two cases of syphilis to a chat room hosted by Internet provider AOL. The two patients said they knew only the screen names of their partners, so Klausner e-mailed those names through the chat room, finding five other cases--all of whom got treatment.
“Clearly,” Klausner says, “the Internet can be a powerful public health tool.”
All of the patients Klausner located, and most of the online cruisers in the Denver survey, were gay men, a group already at higher-than-average risk of contracting HIV and hepatitis B, among other STDs, due to anal sex.
But it would be a mistake, researchers say, to assume that arranging sexual trysts online is only a gay male phenomenon. Klausner recently surveyed 1,000 sexually active adults visiting STD clinics in San Francisco and found that although about a third of gay men said they’d sought sex on the Internet, so had about 10% of straight men and 3% of straight women.
Those rates are almost certainly higher among people in their late teens and 20s, McFarlane says. “They’ve grown up connected to the Internet, they take their Internet identities with them wherever they go, and meeting people online is much more natural for them” than for older adults.
One pickup site, for example, boasts 5.5 million members, of all tastes and preferences. A prompt on the Web page asks visitors to choose “Women Seeking Men,” “Men Seeking Women,” “Couples Seeking Couples,” “Group Stuff” . . . or other options. A search brings up photos of available members that you wouldn’t leave on your computer screen at work.
Another site trumpets personal ads from “horny housewives and husbands, naughty neighbors and girlfriends,” and many other “people who want sex with you now.” And there are also quick-turnaround sites where people can arrange sex with strangers that very day.
“These are not people searching for soul mates,” says Sheana Bull, a co-author of the Denver study. “They’re sexually adventurous people who, instead of going out to a bar and meeting 10 or 20 people, now have access to a virtual bar with millions of customers.”
Making these virtual street corners safe-sex environment won’t be easy, Klausner says. Because of privacy agreements, Internet service providers are reluctant to provide personal details about their customers. In addition, sex chat rooms come and go, there are thousands of them, and health departments don’t have the staff to “hang out” and monitor activity.
For the time being, he says, doctors can reach out to sites that Internet users consult about sex. The San Francisco Health Department is working with drDrew.com and 17.com, for instance, to provide links to information about STDs. The CDC is conducting its own survey of the general public’s online sex habits at https://www.sexquiz.org.
