Friday, January 01, 2021

[whqaliuw] Casual sex as social distanced fun

Create a joke public health poster listing prohibited and permitted social activities during the COVID-19 pandemic.  Prohibited is seemingly everything fun, everything involving physically interacting with or being around groups of people.  Permitted is a bunch of lonely stuff and also (this is the punchline) "casual sex (at home, max. 1 partner/night)".

How much will the pandemic spread if many people do the latter, following the rules?  I suspect it won't spread very much.  Realistically, very few people will be able to or choose to sustain anything close to the epidemiologically worst case rate of a new partner every night for many nights in a row.

Requiring the casual sex to be at one of the participants' homes avoids situations like many couples using the same hourly-rate motel room successively in one night (with one couple infecting a subsequent couples through virus left in the air or on surfaces), and also prohibits sex parties which, like all gatherings, are a pandemically bad idea.

(A rentable two-person casual sex venue rigorously sanitized after each use does seem feasible, e.g., Japanese love hotel.  Can the danger for the cleaning workers be mitigated?)

Unfortunately, there is the impossible task of people finding and selecting each other for casual sex, within the constraints of the pandemic.  We declare it "impossible" because, given how much (some) people like having sex, if such matchmaking were possible to do on a large scale, it would be happened already (and made the news).

Before the dark times, before COVID-19, people could rely on safety of crowds to ultimately achieve some safety in casual sex.  Meet first in a crowded public location for a first date, talk to each other and read body language to filter out serial killers.  Meet first at a party to do the same thing, and also observe how the other person interacts with other people.  Or perhaps have sex at a sex party: cries for help will be heard by other guests.  All of these methods of achieving safety fail at social distancing.

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