"Are dating apps to blame for the rise in STDs?moms sloppy seconds sex videos"
It's a line that seems tailor-made for morning news shows, designed to be read in that formal, faux-inquisitive tone newscasters use before cutting to commercial break.
It's true that STD rates have risenin the U.S. over the last 10 years, with an especially steep rise in the last four years. Alongside straight coverage of this rise, reports drawing the line between STDs and dating apps have also proliferated on local news, digital outlets, and cable networks around the country.
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And like all sound bites, the way these pieces are framed doesn't reflect the whole story — they just capitalize on the easiest part of it.
SEE ALSO: Pornhub wants to teach old people how to have safe sexThe simplistic sound bite reared its ugly head again when, in May, the California Department of Public Health released its own study on the rise of STDs in the state. In 2017, there were 300,000 cases of chlamydia, gonorrhea, and early syphilis, a 45 percent increase from five years prior and a record high for the third year in a row.
A slew of recent headlines from news organizations have picked up on the story, drawing the line between STDs and social media.
There is a tendency, in cultural conversation and in the media, to attribute promiscuity to whatever technological innovation is empowering people who want to have sex. Dating apps are the latest sex-panic bogeyman, following in the footsteps of birth control and sex-ed in decades past.
Although social media may indeed play a role in the spread of STDs, pointing the finger at apps that facilitate sex misses two larger points. First, that people who want to have sex are going to find a way to have sex; the drive to have sex is not the apps' "fault." And that watered down media coverage of complicated health issues compromises a holistic understanding of sex and public health.
Still, tracking down the actual reason behind the increase isn't exactly easy.
STDs on the rise
Public health officials and advocates are worried.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) reported in September 2017 that rates of syphilis, chlamydia, and gonorrhea infections have increased for the third straight year.
Dr. Heidi Bauer, the California Department of Public Health's (CDPH) chief, STD control branch, explained that the causes for the increase are difficult to pin down.
"I think there are lots of different, simultaneous influences," Bauer said. "There's multiple data sources showing that many things are happening simultaneously and it's obviously from our perspective very difficult or impossible to pinpoint one cause."
Fred Wyand, the director of communications for the American Sexual Health Association, agreed — but to a point.
"This is a discussion with much nuance and not a single, simple answer," Wyand said. "But the public health experts who advise us consistently report to an eroding STD prevention infrastructure as a key element in driving STD rates."
Bauer and others point to additional factors that could contribute, including a decrease in condom use, and an increased rate in screenings. And, according to Julia Bennett, director of learning strategy at the Planned Parenthood Federation of America, a decrease in sexual education.
"Coupled with the fact that there are 20 million new cases of STDs every year, the fact that schools are teaching less about STDs now than they were a decade ago is frankly alarming," Bennett said.
But Dr. Bauer does maintain that dating apps and social media may play a role.
According to Dr. Bauer's reports on California, there's been a 40 percent increase among syphilis cases in men who have sex with men who report meeting their partners on the internet; for heterosexual syphilis cases, that increase is 10 percent.
Original image has been replaced. Credit: Mashable 
Original image has been replaced. Credit: Mashable 
Original image has been replaced. Credit: Mashable However, a 2014 study published in PLoS Oneactually refutes the claim. It compared gay and bisexual men who use dating apps with those who do not. And while app-users were more likely to have STDs than those who didn't use apps, they were also having more sex overall — even absent the use of dating apps. As the study's author, Justin J. Lehmiller, writes in Tonic:
What this suggests is that those who use the apps would probably still be having more sex even if apps weren't around. In other words, there's a selection effect at play here, which means that app users' higher rates of STDs don't seem to be a pure function of the technology they're using.
While a lot of coverage of rising STD rates does mention multiple causes, many stories place a disproportionate emphasis on the dating app narrative — minimizing the complex cultural and political issues driving the burgeoning crisis, in favor of something flashy.
Equating STDs with individual promiscuity, rather than gaps in health infrastructure, downplays the need for systematic change. It catalyzes the perception of STDs as something that comes about when you're having more sex — a false assumption, as long as you have the right health resources.
Same story, different tune
The curious but somewhat alarmist tone of stories that link STDs with dating apps sounds startlingly similar to past accusations about how sexual education, the pill, and, most recently, subsidized birth control, enable more (and less safe) sex.
Along with the claim that STD increases have potentially been caused by dating apps, all of these arguments turn heads because they play into the somewhat titillating hysteria of sex panic: the idea that a morally corrupting force is threatening society.
"I think there's a lot of people in our society who probably don't use those technologies, that are fearful [of dating apps]," Bauer said. "I think the stories kind of fuel that fear, and fuel that concern. I hope that public health is not sensationalizing the role of all of these different factors."
In the past, moral panic has ensued when a technological or health innovation got involved in people's sex lives. As far back as 1969, a study set about debunking the claim that birth control and sex education would lead women and teens to having more sex.
"The assumption that giving birth control information to adolescents would lead to sexual immorality and promiscuity is unproven," the study's authors wrote in their abstract 50 years ago.
Despite what has become scientifically-backed conventional wisdom about how sex-ed does notincrease rates of teen sex, and that birth control decreases teen (or otherwise unwanted) pregnancy, opponents of these health measures have persisted in their opposition over the last half of a century. In the last decade alone, Obamacare opponents argued against free birth control on the basis that they thought it would lead women to having more sex (an idea that a 2014 study also debunked).
The sensationalism driving the narrative around dating apps and STDs plays into the same underlying morality argument behind sex-ed and birth control opposers. It's as if stories that focus on a possible STD-dating app link serve to bolster the argument for those who think casual sex can lead to terrible consequences. They provide fodder for those who seek to say, "See! Look what happens when you give people easy access to sex!"
But this association is flawed in a couple ways. Sure, more sex leads to a higher risk of infection. But this does not have to be the case for individuals, as long as they use condoms and get regularly tested. Practicing safe sex is the key to staying healthy, not having less sex.
"As a sex educator, it’s less important to me how people meet a potential partner than it is what they do once they meet them," Planned Parenthood's Bennett said. "Most important is ensuring that everyone has the information and skills they need to stay healthy and safe."
Dating apps may be playing a role in the way people have sex, and, more importantly, increase the network size of those who are having sex — which Bauer said could contribute to the increased spread of STDs. But it's not enabling a behavior that humans wouldn't be doing otherwise.
"I don't think it should be spun as 'oh this is scary new technology,' because every time there's new technology, everybody says 'oh this is scary new technology.'" Bauer said. "We just need to adapt, and consider how those changes are affecting our health."
Drawing a connection between dating apps and the rise of STDs is still under debate in the scientific community. However, we shouldn't avoid connecting the two out of fear of anti-sex condemnation. From a public health perspective, it's important to understand how people are meeting their sexual partners in order to enable safer sex.
However, when headlines that scream "More sex! Dating apps! STDs!" pop out at us, that alarmism underpins a current very much still active in society, that associates more sex with dire consequences. It is an attitude that puritanically denies the fact of human sexuality, assigning a corrupting blame on technology for simply playing a part in our sex lives.
So don't pearl clutch at the tech. Don't even blame the sex robots or the VR porn, when the inevitable panic about thatspreads. All of it — birth control, sex ed, dating apps, and the next sexual digital frontier — is on us, we libidinous, human beings. Whether we allow health and tech innovation to help us have better, freer, safer sex, or enable the exploitative or dangerous, is on us, too.