COVID, Sex, and Business: The Common Thread
by Amy Jo Goddard
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s the world experiences new health needs, boundaries, and ways of taking care of ourselves during COVID, we are being tasked to interact in ways that mirror how we show care in intimacy and sex. From how we obtain and respect consent and individual choice to establishing our agency over our own bodies and health, the skill sets needed in our human relationships right now are quite similar to how we create healthy intimacy and communication. Most of us have been in some kind of sheltering-in-place for over two months now, and people are antsy. We want to release some of our restraint. We want to ask for more in our relationships. We want touch. We can liken our negotiations around risk to a safer sex conversation. You may be a Level 3 (somewhat open) for COVID risk tolerance and you might have friends or family members who are a 1 (strict) or a 0 (very strict). If someone has strict
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boundaries about their safer sex protocols, it’s not your job to convince them latex barriers aren’t that important or that you are a risk worth taking. The person with the highest protocols gets to be respected in a safer sex negotiation, and you get to make it work for both parties. If it can’t work, then there is no shame for either person, it’s just not a match. What’s key is that you are able to talk openly about your needs, boundaries, and requests and respect the needs, boundaries, and requests of others. Shaming someone for having boundaries you don’t like won’t get you more sex. It will get you the boot. Making someone wrong for having less of a boundary isn’t your place—you can choose to say “No thank you” and move on, and they get to do what feels right for them. We don’t all share the same risk tolerance. Many factors go into our decisions about what risks we take—everything from
