STIs aren't a consequence. They're inevitable. | Ella Dawson | TEDxConnecticutCollege

hi everyone can you hear me okay sweet so I'm going to start today by asking you guys to do me a small favor I would love it if you could raise your hand if you have allergies okay I can relate I have a tiny nose so I'm always congested hey thank you second question I would love it if you could raise your hand if you have herpes I see no hands and a lot more confused faces and that's what I was expecting in the time that I have with you guys today I want to talk about why it is that it is so socially unacceptable to talk about herpes despite the fact that almost everyone in this room either already has herpes or will encounter it at some point in the next few years I'll let that sink in for a sec so hi my name is Ella I live in Brooklyn I'm 23 I work in social media and I have genital herpes I was diagnosed with herpes at the end of my junior year of college it was a really exciting 21st birthday present from the universe and I had a lot of feelings at the time but my overriding feeling was just total confusion because I had been told my entire life that I was not the type of person that herpes and other STDs happened to people with herpes in my mind were dishonest irresponsible promiscuous unfaithful and depending on who you asked I didn't consider myself any of those things and what I learned very quickly was that that really intense deeply ingrained stereotype was the result of a very powerful social stigma that surrounds STDs like herpes in our society so I'm going to talk a little bit about where that stereotype and that powerful social stigma comes from they talk about three sources there are more but these are the ones that at least convinced me I'm human trash now when I got diagnosed so the first source of herpes stigma and this will probably not come as a surprise is the abysmal state of sex education in the u.s. today I received yeah it's bad I saved abstinence only sex education which consisted of being told that I should just not have sex if I wanted to protect myself from STDs or pregnancy and as someone who is not planning to wait until marriage and will probably have sex later this weekend the message was never really gonna work for me um I remember being shown very graphic PowerPoint slides of what sti's would do to my body and in my teeth in my like teenage 17 year old Ella brain I thought to myself that is never gonna happen to me because my body and I like have an understanding like body has some respect for me so I don't have to worry and even if you were lucky enough to receive comprehensive sex education you're probably taught to things that are a problem first of all you were probably taught to just get tested just get tested just know your status but you were given no information about what to do when you test positive at which point you're largely on your own you have to figure that out yourself and even if you were lucky enough to learn how to put condoms on bananas spoiler alert condoms don't prevent the risk of transmission of herpes because herpes is transmitted through skin contact and not fluids which condoms are meant to prevent we'll talk more about that later the second source of her pee stigma is pop culture I'm a huge media junkie I love The Bachelor so I do not want to pile on about how the media is bad I love it but the way that we represent STI s in pop culture is really messed up for the most part when we hear about herpes on television or film it's some sort of insult or a punch line meant to put a character down or to just be edgy I think the best example of this for me is the line from The Hangover what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas except for herpes that will come back with you really great cinema i i was recently in vegas on vacation and i had a lot of fun telling bartenders that i had nothing to worry about in vegas because I already had herpes actually got a lot of free drinks with that joke but yeah even in the rare case that a character gets an STD on television it is almost always gonorrhea or chlamydia which are easily curable and they learn like a very special lesson about being promiscuous or getting tested more frequently and then they move on with their lives and as a result there's no real representation of people like me who live with very common incurable viruses like HPV or herpes and there's no real narrative script available to us in terms of how to live our lives now so the third source of herpes stigma and this is very specific to herpes especially is actually your doctor the person that you trust the most to help you take care of your sexual health herpes tests are somewhat unreliable and they are also expensive depending on your insurance so doctors will actually commonly not test you for herpes even if you go in and you're like I want to get tested for STDs chances are you're not being tested for herpes if you peed in a cup recently you don't know your herpes status and there actually I've heard many many stories from people who went into their doctor asked for a herpes test and were either discouraged or denied a herpes test because they weren't showing symptoms and there's this common thought in the medical industry that if you're not showing symptoms for herpes you're better off not knowing that you have it because the psychological impact of a diagnosis is that severe and yet at the same time even if you are asymptomatic for herpes you can still transmit to your partner so there are a lot of people walking around who think that their STI negative who aren't and who are still transmitting and that then feeds into that stereotype of people with STI s as being dishonest in irresponsible so all of that stigma considered all of that misinformation how common do you guys think herpes actually is 5% of the population 10% of the population so what do you do when you get diagnosed with something you google it which is sometimes dangerous but in my case worked out really well because what I learned very quickly was that according to the World Health Organization two and three people in the world have the same strain Herbies that I do herpes simplex virus strain one it typically causes cold sores or oral herpes but it can also cause genital outbreaks as it does in my case two and three people two and three people in the world have hsv-1 and many are asymptomatic but they can still transmit it doesn't change the fact there's also HSV 2 which commonly causes genital outbreaks that is I believe one in six people one in five women and one in four New Yorkers which I love telling my friends to scare them but yeah it's super common and then there's also herpes glad at or 'im i think i'm pronouncing that right most by far the most badass name strain of any STI it's actually not sexually transmitted it commonly impacts wrestlers high school and college wrestlers who get it from each other during wrestling matches or from the mats themselves which is gross because no offense teenage boys are disgusting and we should probably washing our wrestling mats anyway when you take herpes out of the equation there's also and this is really weird chicken pox and shingles are in the herpes family of viruses so obviously they're not stigmatized and they're not sexually transmitted unless you're just really inventive but as a result so herpes is everywhere it's all around us and it's not necessarily sexually transmitted but even if it is it can carry this really out of whack out of sync social stigma so rewind I'm 20 years old I'm at the end of my junior year of college I'm so looking forward to being a senior I've just gotten this earth-shattering diagnosis and I learned two and three people in the world have herpes have at least the strain that I do even more than that have other strains it's like being inducted into the secret society but I don't know the password and there's no directory and the only thing that I wanted was somebody to talk to who could tell me it was going to be okay who could give me advice who could tell me what home remedies were total and I didn't know how to find those people so I did what any self-respecting millennial would do I started to talk about my herpes all of the time with anyone who would listen to me and I I told my parents right away I told my partners I told my roommates I told my roommates friends who were like how did I get in this conversation I had a lot of fun telling the guys waiting behind me in line to pee at frat parties those were like my favorite conversations but I just talked about it as much as possible and I got one of two reactions most of the time the first reaction a person is obviously startled to find themselves talking about my vagina but they responded with curiosity they usually said what's that like because when when you find yourself in a conversation about something you have never had a conversation about before you want to know you want to know what it's like you want to know how you can protect yourself so for the most part I'm greeted with genuine curiosity and respect especially if it's somebody who already knows me a classmate a co-worker a friend and then the second reaction that I got was me to somebody's face lights up because they've never had a conversation before with somebody else who has herpes and suddenly it's like I've given them permission to talk about their own weird experiences and there's two of us now there's two of us against the world sharing this and I've had those conversations with hair stylists with uber drivers like all the time my favorite conversation that I have ever had with the stranger about herpes went something like this I was at a party my senior year of college I was like the hot senior at this party and this really adorable guy was flirting with me and he offered me the rest of his drink and I said you know you don't have norovirus do you because this like really gross flu strain was going around campus and like people were throwing up in the trash cans the Student Center was revolting and he goes no no I don't have norovirus and I don't have herpes either just so you know ouch it was actually the first time anyone had made a herpes joke to my face since I'd been diagnosed and I was really shocked and taken aback and I knew in that moment that I had a choice to make I could either laugh at myself and lose some respect for myself in the process or I could say something so I gathered up my courage most of which was liquid and I said you know that's not really funny because I have herpes and it's actually really common and you shouldn't joke about it and he looked at me horrified not because he'd been trying to get in the pants of a girl who had an STI but because he had just insulted me to my face and he also realized in that moment that he had harbored this prejudice inside of himself against an entire group of the population and just never known much like I had done until I got diagnosed myself and he apologized profusely and then we dated for 10 months which is a different story but that conversation completely changed everything it changed my life not only because I met someone who's still one of my best friends but because that is how you break down herpe stigma it's in those one-on-one conversations when you say to someone I have herpes this is what it's like it's okay you can ask me questions and I love those moments and I loved learning that because suddenly this shitty inexplicable thing that had happened to me had some purpose and I could do something about it I could have power over the way people saw me by being loud basically so I started a blog because I'm in my 20s and that's what you do and I started to write about what it was like to date with herpes and just how to negotiate that and what I was learning and I started to write for websites like femme splain about how having herpes intersected with my feminism and with my identity and then I got my big break writing for Women's Health magazine's website I wrote an article for them called why I love telling people I have herpes because I work in social media and I know what people click on and what happened next was extremely weird which is that I became internet famous for having genital herpes which is a sentence no one has ever said before I began to hear from hundreds of thousands of people around the world who had herpes and were so stoked that someone had written about us in a way that was not insulting or apologetic or full of pain I wrote something kind of honest and funny and sexy and I suddenly had this global community of people who had herpes and excited to support my work but also to teach me things that I didn't know about our virus and it's experiences because everybody's experience with herpes is highly individual due to how their body works but I also started to hear something else something I liked a lot less and I hear it on a daily basis I hear it from my co-workers from my friends from really hot guys and bars which is that I am so brave I'm so brave Ella what you are doing is just so brave and the thing is when you tell someone that they're brave you are recognizing really hard work that they're doing you are giving them that validation and that respect for the risk that they are taking but you're also telling them something else which is that you think what they are doing is unthinkable that you yourself could never do that and it turns me into this weird superhero and the fact is that is not what I want because in the world that I want and in the world that I'm hoping all of you will help me build telling someone that you have an STI should not be brave or shocking it should be normal and kind of boring because yeah because I really I do not care how you got herpes I don't care if you got it because you had a ton of fun of your freshman year of college more power to you I don't care if you got herpes because you're on to always had cold sores kissed you on the mouth when you were a little kid which is actually how a lot of herpes has spread it's through like family moments like that and I really don't care if you lost your virginity to a woman who lived a life before she met you because an STI especially herpes is not a reflection of your character or a consequence of a bad decision it is an inevitability of being a human being on this planet who comes into skin contact with other human beings period end of discussion and telling someone that you have an STI we should not expect to be met with judgement because the fact is that is a tremendous display of character when you say to another person hey here's this thing that makes me vulnerable that I'm nervous about but you deserve to know it because I respect you and I want you to make the right decisions about your sexual health an STI can be a huge display of character in the way that you choose to handle it so my three year anniversary getting diagnosed is coming may 9th I'm really excited I'm throwing a party and I celebrate my anniversary every year not because I'm celebrating that I have herpes I'm not proud that I have herpes I just refused to be ashamed of it but I celebrate the fact that I am still here I am still here after three years of the universe telling me everyday that I'm a disgusting who got what was coming to her I have a voice and it has never been stronger I am happy I love my job I have amazing partners and friends and I'm good with myself and that is worth celebrating and I also celebrate what I've learned which is that there are a lot scarier things to tell another person in this world than I have an STI things like I deserve a raise or I'm sorry that I hurt you or I think I'm falling in love with you and in the year since I went viral online not the other thing I have learned that there are far more important things to say to the world and to yourself than I have an STI things like I have worth I am worthy I will not apologize for Who I am and I still deserve everything in this life that I need and maybe if I am lucky a few things that I just want thank you

Channel: TEDx Talks

Views: 547,439

Rating: 4.4584622 out of 5

Keywords: TEDxTalks, English, United States, Health, Activism, Body, Bullying, Connection, Consciousness, Discrimination, Ethics, Feminism, Global issues, Happiness, Hardship, Hope, Ideas, Illness, Life, Pain, Personal growth, Positive Thinking, Progress, Self-help, Sex, Sharing, Social Media, Society, Truth, Writing

Id: YcIl-hclrLI

Length: 16min 46sec (1006 seconds)

Published: Wed May 11 2016

Reddit Comments

[u/CB_I_Hate_Usernames]

Why so few upvotes? I don't understand. What a lovely young woman!