Thursday, November 20, 2008
In a society that has become obsessed with sex — selling it, having it, labeling it — the consequences of our sexual escapades have come to fruition with the increasing number of sexually transmitted infections every year.
This brings up the tedious job of trying to remember all of the people you’ve had sex with so you can call and let them know they may have an STI. With 15 million new cases of STIs in the U.S. every year, this could take awhile.
However, I discovered a Web site that will send STI e-cards to ease the embarrassment of revealing you’ve got something less than appealing going on down there.
The Web site, called inSPOT, was created by “Internet Sexuality Information Services Inc.,” supposedly as a public health response to the increasing rates of STIs. It was originally geared toward a gay-male audience, but it features cards that can be sent to any gender or sexual orientation.
Guidelines urge users to send these cards only if they feel they could have actually given someone an STI, but there is no way to regulate how many legitimate ones are actually sent and how many are sent as a joke or out of spite.
I sent five e-cards after warning my friends, but you can enter up to six e-mail addresses to bulk send a card to different partners, especially convenient to people who have been getting around.
To enter the site, you click on a city or state. Kansas isn’t an option yet, so I chose California.
Then you are prompted to click “Tell Them” or “Get Checked.”
The “Tell Them” link then takes you to the “pick a card” portion of the Web site. The e-cards feature various slogans, such as “I got screwed while screwing. You might have too” with pictures of screws in the background. Another card reads, “Got laid. Was happy. Got tested. Wasn’t healthy,” with pictures of smiley and sad faces. My personal favorite has a man with no shirt and a towel wrapped around him saying, “You’re too hot to be out of action.”
Because we were born in the age of the computer, we’ve forgotten how to communicate face-to-face or even through phone calls.
Facebook, texting and dating sites depersonalize communication. Technology has eliminated the necessity of conversation, and as a result what should be personal was instead sent to your inbox.
What happened to owning up to the responsibility of having sex? A simple phone call saying, “I may have given you chlamydia” would be appreciated as opposed to getting an anonymous e-card.
The idea behind the site is valid, but the main focus should be on preventing these diseases instead of coming up with cheesy cards to give cowards a way out of facing the consequences of sex.
If you are mature enough to have sex, you should be mature enough to make the phone call.
— — Thornbrugh is a Lenexa junior in creative writing.
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Comments
Thornbrugh: How to tell someone you have an STI
Caitlin, Thanks for the blog about inSPOT. I wanted to clarify a few things. inSPOT is indeed a prevention tool. In public health, partner notification (telling sex partners they may have been exposed to an STD and referring for screening) is a scientifically proven method of preventing new disease transmission. inSPOT is simply a new way -- an easy and convenient way - to notify partners of potential exposures. You also state that inSPOT was "supposedly" developed as a public health response to rising rates of STDs. I can verify that it indeed was developed in response to rising syphilis rates in San Francisco, as a partnership with San Francisco Dept. of Public Health. Feel free to contact me if you have any other questions or need clarification about our service. Best, Deb Levine, Executive Director, ISIS www.isis-inc.org info@isis-inc.org
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