On September 29, 2024, we hosted our first Something Positive for Positive People Safe Sex Expo in New York City. The intention of this expo was to implement an intervention program to address the gaps in STI prevention that public health and sex educators alone are unable to fill. Messaging in public health prioritizes safety, and in sex education it prioritizes pleasure. These two spaces are very vocal about these priorities, and can take other aspects for granted, which really misses the mark.
As a nonprofit supporting people navigating herpes stigma, SPFPP has learned that while pleasure and safety are important, that doesn’t mean much of anything if you have no accessible practice identifying what your needs are and communicating them to someone. The very nature of relationships has everything to do with why we need to listen to people who struggle with herpes stigma. The largest part of this is that they now have to learn to speak about something they’ve often never had to speak about before their diagnosis: sexual health. In now having to deliver this information of potential exposure, there comes a more prominent need to assess not only HOW to disclose their status, but whether it is safe to do so.
When public health officials speak about safe sex, the conversation often centers around knowing you and your partner’s status, wearing condoms, being monogamous, and having the HPV vaccine. When sex educators talk about enjoyable sex, a lot of it is through a sex-positive lens of “If they can’t do it, someone else will.” It’s like people get the public health/safety messaging, and then they go on and are exposed to the extreme opposite, integrating a little of both into their sex lives. What we’re often left with is that if sex is going to be safe then it’s less pleasurable. If it’s going to be pleasurable, then it’s less safe.
Our intention with creating a Safe Sex Expo was to blend the pleasure and safety components of sex and give people practice identifying and communicating needs to their partner(s). 32 attendees took our survey. We asked specifically what “safe” sex is, and almost everyone mentioned consent—as in being able to stop at any time. We asked what “good” sex, they spoke to it being communicative, and “bad” sex being uncommunicative.
Only 12.5% of our attendees expressed that they use condoms 100% of the time. So if public health tells us to wear condoms to prevent STIs, we see 77.5% of people aren’t doing that. While our survey didn’t deep dive into reasoning for this, people have shared with us that communication is the most critical component of STI prevention and safety as well as sex education and pleasure. Again, the intersection of these two sectors is communication.
I believe the way we see those working in public health speak about STIs can very often seem sex-avoidant. Condom use is often the default to what safe sex is, but in sex positive spaces communication is where we see more of people’s conception of safety go up, despite condom use perhaps being down. In sex positivity, we talk about the importance of pleasure and boundaries—aspects that don’t exclusively align with “safe sex” but have everything to do with safe sex. We’re looking at not just safety from STIs but from abuse, assault, emotional harm—and yet our STI prevention doesn’t encompass that.
I hope this gives a solid framework for the importance of a space like the SPFPP Safe Sex Expo, which integrates sex education and sex positivity in a way that public health can connect with through giving people practice identifying safety and pleasure needs and communicating it to partners. Communication is the key contributor to good sex, bad sex, and safe sex, but people struggle to communicate their needs to a partner(s). That’s something unfortunately learned in real time through trial and error. SPFPP aims to teach these skills under the guidance of professionals in an intentional way that accommodates safety needs.
Integrating these communication skills that involve speaking to safety and pleasure needs is something that can be taught as an aspect of sexuality education but we are so far from that because of society’s limited understanding of sex education. I aim to change that because I believe that after a herpes diagnosis or wrong-doing, it is far too late for someone to develop and practice language around their own pleasure and safety needs. Our post-event survey showed us that 100% of participants felt MORE comfortable identifying and communicating BOTH their safety and pleasure needs as a result of having had this practice!
Communication in practice is at that intersection of safety and pleasure when it comes to sex. Good sex isn’t always sex that ends in an orgasm. Safe sex isn’t always sex where a condom has been worn. Bad sex however, is generally void and or absent of communication…but how exactly we do that is going to just take practice and in safe settings, to do so prior to being in high-risk scenarios like with a partner where we may feel a need to compromise safety for pleasure or pleasure for safety.
If we’re seeing that good sex is communicative and practice helps with that, then what is good sex to YOU? Do you agree?