Social Disease
Owen Jones, Monkey Pox, and the problem of sexual morality
Despite his tendency to find himself arguing contradictory positions, I find myself rather fond of Owen Jones. For those in the US unfamiliar with him, Owen’s a boyish-looking socialist journalist and media figure in the UK, a leftist “star” like Russel Brand and other, whose opinions generally represent the sort of working-class politics that leftism was once known for.
Already I guess I’ve confused my American readers, since such a thing doesn’t really exist there. The closest equivalent would be Joe Rogan, but very few on the American left would ever admit that Rogan’s political outlook is more in line with working-class socialism than that of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez or of any BreadTube media influencer.
What I like about Owen Jones is that I feel for the poor kid. No, he’s not actually a kid, and only seven years my younger, but his youthful looks and diminutive stature are part of the reason he’s even able to draw people’s attention. He looks cute, and innocent, and both of those qualities together disarm his audience enough to give his words some thought.
I say I “feel for the poor kid,” and by that I mean that, despite his insistence thus far to stay on their good side and even champion their identity crusades, Owen seems soon likely to find himself on the wrong side of an identitarian crusade.
It happens to every leftist, or every leftist that insists on actually being a leftist rather than being popular. See, eventually you find that you’ve been building arguments in defense of certain beliefs and opinions that lead to deep contradictions within your stated political stances. Then, others start to notice and extract clarifications from you, and it becomes harder and harder to give them what they demand without revealing your own doubts.
A sign of the beginning of the end for him is a recent video he made regarding the matter of monkey pox, in which he makes a perfectly reasoned and I think true argument about the issue of its transmission:
For those who don’t have the time to watch it or to read his column expanding upon the idea, Owen Jones argues the following:
The primary and overwhelming vectors of monkey pox have been shown to be ‘men who have sex with men’ (the medical policy term for homosexual and bisexual men).
It is neither homophobic nor discriminatory to state this, nor to argue for targeted prevention measures towards that population of people.
You would think that neither of these opinions are controversial in the slightest, but there is a much larger context and longer history overshadowing these statements. It’s a rather complex knot, but unraveling it reveals several profound problems within identity discourse, public health, and the way we see personal and community responsibility.
First of all, the monkey pox outbreak comes directly on the heels of the global panic about COVID-19 and the incredibly harsh and often ridiculous governmental policies to mitigate it. Any reader even slightly critical of the official narrative on Covid, or anyone old enough to remember how each new terror alert in the early noughts seemed to follow immediately after the last one, might be forgiven for having some doubts about what the World Health Organization just called this new “global health emergency.” Are we at war with Eastasia or Eurasia? It’s so hard to remember when the posters keep changing.
That being said, monkey pox is actually a thing. Is it really a global problem? No, or not yet, and that’s the difficulty here. As Owen Jones notes, the primary vectors or nodes of transmission are men who have sex with men. More specifically, it’s men who have sex with lots of men. The US Center For Disease Control (the CDC) issued a recommendation that vaccines against the virus be made available to men who have had sex with five or more different men within the space of 14 days:
…The CDC has recommended the Jynneos vaccine for men who report more than four male sexual partners within the past 14 days.
According to the first peer-reviewed study of transmission, we also learn the following:
The new paper supports these characterizations of the outbreak. This includes its finding that of the nearly three-quarters of men who provided a sexual history, the median number of sexual partners they reported during the previous three months was five, with one quarter of the men reporting 15 or more. (emphasis mine). 1
Now, I suspect the vast majority of my readers are not gay men and are maybe a little confused about how it’s even possible to have sex with “15 or more” men within 14 days. I’m a gay man, and though the total count of men with whom I’ve had sex during the last 25 years is certainly rather high (probably more than 500, certainly less than a thousand), “15 or more” within 2 weeks was never something within the realm of desire or practicality for me.
The reason for that is contained in the next paragraph of that article:
During the previous month, 1 in 5 of the men reported they had taken drugs during sex, and one-third had sex at a sex-on-site venue
In other words, in order to have so much sex in such a short time, you have to go to a gay “sauna” (bathhouse or sex club) or a sex party, and you very likely will need to take drugs in order to have the energy, stamina, and lack of self-awareness to not care who’s inside you nor who you’re inside.
I've quite a few friends of this sort, friends I warmly regard as “my slutty friends.” Sometimes I think of them as sexual athletes, guys who seem to competitively train for sex like it’s a sport. The rest of their life is certainly regimented like an athlete’s might be, including how much fiber they consume and how often they go to the gym in order to make sure they’re in top (or bottom) shape for their weekend Olympics.
Personally, I was never so committed to the cause. I’ve never actually been inside a bathhouse, despite a dear friend who’s tried multiple times to convince me to come with him. I once did go to a massive sex club in Berlin, and got so overwhelmed and frankly scared that I just drank myself into complete drunkenness and got myself kicked out with that night’s chastity intact.
The vast majority of “my slutty friends” are reasonably stable people, mostly in open relationships with long-term partners with whom they don’t have much sex with anymore. Their partners all know about this and are doing the same. Granted, I tend to filter out friends who aren’t open with their partners about their other activities, since anyone who’d lie to their partner is likely also going to lie to you, too, and liars don’t make very good friends.
I don’t feel any judgments about their weekly (and sometimes daily) hookups, though if I’m honest I’d admit that there’s often a kind of reverse judgment that occurs. That is, sometimes I’ll find myself feeling a bit inadequate or undersexed or lazy when they talk about the parties or saunas they’ve gone to, like there’s something actually wrong with me for not arranging my life around new and ever-changing sex partners.
That feeling isn’t just imagined. Within gay circles, there’s absolutely a pressure not to conform to “hetero-monogamous” cultural norms, and that pressure takes many forms. I recall especially after the introduction of PrEP (an HIV suppression drug that is taken as a kind of vaccine against HIV infection) that the early adopters of the treatment tended to become quite righteous against those who didn’t adopt it. Being on PrEP means your risk of contracting HIV from condomless sex is pretty much 0%; thus, if you’d like to have lots of bareback sex with multiple partners then it’s a wonder drug. Who wouldn’t want to experience gay sex without fear?
The thing is, there are plenty of reasons not to do so. First of all, it doesn’t actually protect you from anything else, and there are studies that have shown the rise of infections from—and theoretically some antibiotic resistance of—other STI’s has increased on its account. As with all other technological “advances” in the modern age created to overcome some natural limit or natural consequences of human behavior, it led to new consequences.
I hope you’ll note that I’ve thus far avoided speaking of sexual behavior as an issue of morality. The reason for that is because morality decades ago became the province of certain kinds of political frameworks that I find quite terrifying. The largest shadow over the issue of monkey pox is the right-wing moralizing over homosexual behavior during the AIDS crisis in the 80’s and 90’s. AIDS was God’s judgment against sodomy and sexual depravity, we were told, and this moral framing is responsible for government failure to educate people on its transmission or to develop effective treatments until many, many, many people died.