Pardon me while go on a rant here.
Assuming that you aren’t avoiding the Internet for fear of finding out what happened last night on Game of Thrones1 then you may have seen the latest Hollywood gossip headline du jour spreading like herpes around a frat house: “Michael Douglas Claims Oral Sex Caused His Throat Cancer“.
Now I get that this is a sexy2 headline ; after all, it sounds completely bat-shit insane, which makes it perfect click-bait. It corresponds with the popular stereotype of the woo-woo newage3 health bullshit that many Hollywood types believe in, right up there with holograms and “ionized magnets” improving your sports performance and regular high colonic enemas “cleansing the toxins” from your system. Plus, it’s totally a chance to poke fun at Douglas for taking this time to humble-brag about all of his marathon muff-diving sessions.
But while it’s HIGH-larious to think of Douglas blaming getting sick on all the times he showed up to the set of Wall Street with his face glistening like a glazed donut… he’s not fucking wrong. And the fact that so much of the media is missing the goddamn point is driving me up the goddamn wall.
So here’s the skinny: Douglas’ throat cancer wasn’t caused by smoking or alcohol abuse. It was a type of cancer caused by – wait for it – the human papiloma virus. HPV is one of the most common sexually-transmitted infections out there. In fact, it’s estimated that more than 40% of sexually active women and possibly 50% 0f men have HPV exposure. It’s the sex-negative right-wing’s favorite STI – it’s “incurable”, it’s easily spread (condoms don’t necessarily protect against exposure) and it has all sorts of nasty and very visible symptoms including sterility, genital warts and cervical cancer. Small wonder that the Abstinence Only crowd loves it.
But! For all that the sex-is-dirty-wrong-and-should-only-be-shared-with-your-husband-or-wife crowd loves to crow about the perils of HPV and why it’s going to destroy you and you should never ever ever have sex except within the bonds of sacred matrimony, there’s a lot that the public at large doesn’t realize.
To start with: HPV doesn’t just cause cervical cancer. It also can cause head, throat and anal cancers, because the virus isn’t just spread through penetrative sex; it’s also spread through giving head. Such as in the case of Michael Douglas.
While uncommon, this is hardly rare. In fact, there’s been a spike of throat cancer among gay men that’s due to oral sex with individuals infected with HPV. Part of the reason why the exposure rate for HPV is so high is because the two most common strains of HPV are completely asymptomatic. Not only that, but the body frequently clears the infection within a year or two, meaning that the individual can be completely unaware that he or she was ever infected in the first place. And while anyone who is even vaguely responsible about having safe sex4 may use condoms religiously for penetrative sex, the vast majority of men and women don’t think twice about going down on someone without any protection whatsoever.
So the fact that Michael Douglas got throat cancer from going down on his girlfriends? Doesn’t surprise me in the slightest.
However.
Just as Angelina Jolie’s coming forward with her choosing to have a preventative double-mastectomy (and planning on having her ovaries removed as well) helped start a conversation about breast cancer, ovarian cancer and the fucked-up nature of the American medical system5, Michael Douglas’ fight with throat cancer could be the start of a national conversation about HPV infection, the risks it presents to sexually active men and women and – critically – the fact that HPV can be prevented via vaccination.
But nobody’s talking about that right now. Because talking about a celebrity’s pussy-eating habits makes for a better headline. Even Jezebel – a site that, love it or hate it, is normally sex-positive – decided to go with a muff-diving joke rather than talk how this could be a chance to change the public’s perception of sexual health.
And God knows we need it, because there are plenty of people out there who have a vested interest in keeping us in the dark.
Almost as soon as the HPV vaccine was announced a couple years ago, the hordes of anti-sex fundamentalists went ape-shit and vowed to make it as difficult to get a hold of as possible and spread as much disinformation as they possibly could.
Young women – so the abstinence-only crowd claimed – who got the HPV vaccine would take this as license to whore around instead of keeping their legs demurely crossed until Jesus gave them the big thumbs up on their wedding night. Rick Perry was excoriated by his fellow conservatives for mandating that sixth-grade girls in Texas get vaccinated6 ; in fact, the Texas Legislature voted to override his executive order and Rick Perry apologized for making it in the first place. Michelle Bachman hit new lows in public stupidity when she claimed on national television that the HPV vaccine causes mental retardation. Where did she get this vital information? Not from the CDC, the American Pediatrics Association or any licensed medical or scientific professional. She got it from a random woman at a Republican debate and passed it on as the gospel truth.
This is what we’re working against: people who are so anti-sex that they see boys and girls getting cancer as preferable to helping prevent an STI because it means they might be having sex consequence free.
Michael Douglas’ surprisingly frank admission is the very definition of a teachable moment. The media could not only remind the American public that HPV is common, asymptomatic and that it poses health risks to our potential sex partners beyond unsightly speed-bumps on our junk… and, that there’s a goddamn vaccine. They could help spread the word that women and men should get vaccinated as early as age 12, help prompt a movement to make HPV vaccination as commonplace as MMR and chicken pox jabs. They could help people prevent their children from getting cancer.
But not when everybody’s hitting up Urban Dictionary to find alternatives for “dining at the Y” so that the Huffington Post can milk a few more pageviews out of it.
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