Owen Jones, Monkey Pox, and the problem of sexual morality

Despite his tendency to find himself arguing contradictory positions, I find myself rather fond of Owen Jones. For those in the US unfamiliar with him, Owen’s a boyish-looking socialist journalist and media figure in the UK, a leftist “star” like Russel Brand and other, whose opinions generally represent the sort of working-class politics that leftism was once known for.

Already I guess I’ve confused my American readers, since such a thing doesn’t really exist there. The closest equivalent would be Joe Rogan, but very few on the American left would ever admit that Rogan’s political outlook is more in line with working-class socialism than that of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez or of any BreadTube media influencer.

What I like about Owen Jones is that I feel for the poor kid. No, he’s not actually a kid, and only seven years my younger, but his youthful looks and diminutive stature are part of the reason he’s even able to draw people’s attention. He looks cute, and innocent, and both of those qualities together disarm his audience enough to give his words some thought.

I say I “feel for the poor kid,” and by that I mean that, despite his insistence thus far to stay on their good side and even champion their identity crusades, Owen seems soon likely to find himself on the wrong side of an identitarian crusade.

It happens to every leftist, or every leftist that insists on actually being a leftist rather than being popular. See, eventually you find that you’ve been building arguments in defense of certain beliefs and opinions that lead to deep contradictions within your stated political stances. Then, others start to notice and extract clarifications from you, and it becomes harder and harder to give them what they demand without revealing your own doubts.

A sign of the beginning of the end for him is a recent video he made regarding the matter of monkey pox, in which he makes a perfectly reasoned and I think true argument about the issue of its transmission:

For those who don’t have the time to watch it or to read his column expanding upon the idea, Owen Jones argues the following:

• The primary and overwhelming vectors of monkey pox have been shown to be ‘men who have sex with men’ (the medical policy term for homosexual and bisexual men).

• It is neither homophobic nor discriminatory to state this, nor to argue for targeted prevention measures towards that population of people.

You would think that neither of these opinions are controversial in the slightest, but there is a much larger context and longer history overshadowing these statements. It’s a rather complex knot, but unraveling it reveals several profound problems within identity discourse, public health, and the way we see personal and community responsibility.

First of all, the monkey pox outbreak comes directly on the heels of the global panic about COVID-19 and the incredibly harsh and often ridiculous governmental policies to mitigate it. Any reader even slightly critical of the official narrative on Covid, or anyone old enough to remember how each new terror alert in the early noughts seemed to follow immediately after the last one, might be forgiven for having some doubts about what the World Health Organization just called this new “global health emergency.” Are we at war with Eastasia or Eurasia? It’s so hard to remember when the posters keep changing.

That being said, monkey pox is actually a thing. Is it really a global problem? No, or not yet, and that’s the difficulty here. As Owen Jones notes, the primary vectors or nodes of transmission are men who have sex with men. More specifically, it’s men who have sex with lots of men. The US Center For Disease Control (the CDC) issued a recommendation that vaccines against the virus be made available to men who have had sex with five or more different men within the space of 14 days:

…The CDC has recommended the Jynneos vaccine for men who report more than four male sexual partners within the past 14 days.

According to the first peer-reviewed study of transmission, we also learn the following:

The new paper supports these characterizations of the outbreak. This includes its finding that of the nearly three-quarters of men who provided a sexual history, the median number of sexual partners they reported during the previous three months was five, with one quarter of the men reporting 15 or more. (emphasis mine). 1

Now, I suspect the vast majority of my readers are not gay men and are maybe a little confused about how it’s even possible to have sex with “15 or more” men within 14 days. I’m a gay man, and though the total count of men with whom I’ve had sex during the last 25 years is certainly rather high (probably more than 500, certainly less than a thousand), “15 or more” within 2 weeks was never something within the realm of desire or practicality for me.

The reason for that is contained in the next paragraph of that article:

During the previous month, 1 in 5 of the men reported they had taken drugs during sex, and one-third had sex at a sex-on-site venue

In other words, in order to have so much sex in such a short time, you have to go to a gay “sauna” (bathhouse or sex club) or a sex party, and you very likely will need to take drugs in order to have the energy, stamina, and lack of self-awareness to not care who’s inside you nor who you’re inside.

I’ve quite a few friends of this sort, friends I warmly regard as “my slutty friends.” Sometimes I think of them as sexual athletes, guys who seem to competitively train for sex like it’s a sport. The rest of their life is certainly regimented like an athlete’s might be, including how much fiber they consume and how often they go to the gym in order to make sure they’re in top (or bottom) shape for their weekend Olympics.

Personally, I was never so committed to the cause. I’ve never actually been inside a bathhouse, despite a dear friend who’s tried multiple times to convince me to come with him. I once did go to a massive sex club in Berlin, and got so overwhelmed and frankly scared that I just drank myself into complete drunkenness and got myself kicked out with that night’s chastity intact.

The vast majority of “my slutty friends” are reasonably stable people, mostly in open relationships with long-term partners with whom they don’t have much sex with anymore. Their partners all know about this and are doing the same. Granted, I tend to filter out friends who aren’t open with their partners about their other activities, since anyone who’d lie to their partner is likely also going to lie to you, too, and liars don’t make very good friends.

I don’t feel any judgments about their weekly (and sometimes daily) hookups, though if I’m honest I’d admit that there’s often a kind of reverse judgment that occurs. That is, sometimes I’ll find myself feeling a bit inadequate or undersexed or lazy when they talk about the parties or saunas they’ve gone to, like there’s something actually wrong with me for not arranging my life around new and ever-changing sex partners.

That feeling isn’t just imagined. Within gay circles, there’s absolutely a pressure not to conform to “hetero-monogamous” cultural norms, and that pressure takes many forms. I recall especially after the introduction of PrEP (an HIV suppression drug that is taken as a kind of vaccine against HIV infection) that the early adopters of the treatment tended to become quite righteous against those who didn’t adopt it. Being on PrEP means your risk of contracting HIV from condomless sex is pretty much 0%; thus, if you’d like to have lots of bareback sex with multiple partners then it’s a wonder drug. Who wouldn’t want to experience gay sex without fear?

The thing is, there are plenty of reasons not to do so. First of all, it doesn’t actually protect you from anything else, and there are studies that have shown the rise of infections from—and theoretically some antibiotic resistance of—other STI’s has increased on its account. As with all other technological “advances” in the modern age created to overcome some natural limit or natural consequences of human behavior, it led to new consequences.

I hope you’ll note that I’ve thus far avoided speaking of sexual behavior as an issue of morality. The reason for that is because morality decades ago became the province of certain kinds of political frameworks that I find quite terrifying. The largest shadow over the issue of monkey pox is the right-wing moralizing over homosexual behavior during the AIDS crisis in the 80’s and 90’s. AIDS was God’s judgment against sodomy and sexual depravity, we were told, and this moral framing is responsible for government failure to educate people on its transmission or to develop effective treatments until many, many, many people died.

The problem, however, is that sexual activity is absolutely within the realm of human moral, ethical, and pragmatic reasoning. Social groups create frameworks around sexual practices and behaviors for very good reasons, reasons that do not have anything to do with Michel Foucault’s theories about biopower. We should also here remember that Foucault, who was well-known for his own sexual athleticism, died of AIDS.

To bring this to the matter of general human sexuality rather than just homosexuality, we can see why social forms and structures such as marriage and monogamy might have arisen. The idea of just one man and just one woman might seem suffocating or primitive to many now, but it should be obvious that there’s some practical logic behind it. Confining sex within a demarcated relationship limits the hyper-active sexual behavior of males and attaches some responsibility to it: if you are going to have sex with a woman, and if that woman has a child from that union, you need to support both her and the child. A man who sires multiple children by multiple women cannot actually support those women and offspring unless he’s exceedingly rich, and thus the social group itself (the village, the nation, etc) is compelled to do so instead. In other words, the moral structure of monogamy is born from a practical concern of the social group.

In homosexual sex, there are no children conceived, so that practical concern is irrelevant. That’s why monogamy is seen so foreign or even inimical to queer theories of liberation. It’s considered a “heterosexual” institution from which homosexuals need to decolonize themselves.

The problem is that children are not the only results of sexual union, nor is the conception of offspring the primary reason humans engage in sex. Ignoring the dead-end reductionism of “selfish gene” determinism, we don’t actually know why we have sex. We desire other people, become aroused by their bodily presence, and soon we’re re-arranging our entire lives and behavior so that we might get the chance to be naked with them. Sexual desire is both powerfully creative and powerfully destructive, and I suspect quite a bit of human social, political, religious, and cultural development arose through our efforts to channel it in stable and beneficial ways.

Structuring sexual desire through stable relationship forms such as monogamy is a very effective way of channeling its power in beneficial ways. By “monogamy” here I mean more the public form of monogamy, rather than necessarily the exclusive practice of it. While I find most of his political ideas quite odious, Dan Savage’s suggestion that gay men are primarily and happiest when “monogamish” (that is, mostly monogamous with some occasional sex with others) can be applied more generally. The most enduring relationships I’ve seen in my life, whether gay or straight, have followed that form, with “cheating” being rare and seen not as a relationship-ending event. Among those, the ones in which the occasional deviation is agreed upon and spoken about honestly have been the strongest and most inspiring.

The deeper truth here is that structures are literally how humans have survived. I mean literally, because a house is a structure. It is a demarcated space, bounded on sides by walls which shelter you from rain and cold. It’s where you sleep and dream, where you live and love, where you rest and heal from work and the tumult of the world. Sometimes you might visit other houses or have guests in yours, sometimes you might live alone and be happy that way, but no one can reasonably argue that homes are something humans should abolish for their own liberation.

I think any writer reading this already knows the sublime and profound wisdom of applying structure to their sexual drives: that’s how we write in the first place. The erotic urge to be with another body is also the creative urge to be with another mind, to express your thoughts and ideas the way we express our physical presence in sex. To put this more directly, a writer—or really any artist—is rutting themselves into our consciousness, and we keep returning to their work because we like how they made us feel and we crave more.

It’s on these levels that the pragmatic social concerns over monogamy become irrelevant. At no point need my husband fear that our relationship is endangered because thousands of people are reading my essays, nor that I might pass along a “social disease” picked up from reading a book. Were I to “booty bump” some crystal meth and spend the weekend at a bathhouse he might then instead have reason to worry.

The reference I made at the end of the last paragraph was probably quite obscure to most readers, and I apologize. It’s a crude way perhaps to lead to another point about homosexual sexual behavior and the problem Owen Jones may soon face. See, quite endemic within a certain subset of gay “culture” is the problem of drug use and addiction, especially drugs taken to enhance sexual performance or reduce inhibitions. A “booty bump” is the practice of inserting crystal methamphetamine directly into the anus before or during sex, one of those many ridiculous things you learn about from casual conversations at a gay bar or on a hook-up app.

Here’s where it gets very, very difficult to maintain a moral distance regarding sexual behavior. When I lived as a (very) sexually-active gay man in Seattle, it was impossible to escape discussion of crystal methamphetamine or its supposedly many virtues. Quite often it was called Tina, which led to a rather hilarious misunderstanding when I first started going to gay bars. So many people were talking about “partying with Tina” or having been “up all night with Tina” that I mistakenly believed Tina was a really cool and fascinating woman all the gays in Seattle—except me—were hanging out with.2

Crystal methamphetamine is a really horrible drug. Its effects are a bit like cocaine, though it will often leave you awake and paranoid for over 24 hours (sometimes as long as three days). It completely reduces inhibitions and gives you the sense that you are somewhat omnipotent, both of which are the primary reasons it is used by the sexual athlete crowd. Besides intense paranoia, obsessive compulsive behavior, and the sense that something is constantly crawling across your skin, one of the other downsides of longer-term use is often erectile dysfunction, which then leads to it being combined with other drugs like Viagra.

Quite a few friends of mine became addicted to meth, one of which died because of it. Those who had kicked the addiction never actually felt they had: one close friend talked often about how depressing and boring sex felt without meth, and he had needed to go to rehab repeatedly. I don’t know if he is still alive, and I really fear he is not.

You would think with so many destructive effects, there would be a significant attempt by gay activists or community groups to try to reduce its use. The opposite was the case in Seattle during the time I lived there. In fact, addressing meth use at all was seen as moralistic and dangerous to the self-esteem of gay people. One example of this occurred during the sudden return of syphilis to King County (the county in which Seattle is located), a resurgence that had been traced back to one particular bathhouse called Club Z. Previous to that time, syphilis had been almost non-existent there, but it was re-introduced through a small handful of meth addicts who spent much of their waking hours at that bathhouse.

Before that bathhouse was closed down, the Seattle alternative journal The Stranger wrote about the connection between meth use and group sex events there, which was the very first time I’d read any direct explanation of the drug.

Crystal meth is not a sexual stimulant. It’s a central-nervous-system stimulant. It was developed by a Japanese scientist in 1919 and used by U.S. and British pilots in World War II to keep them alert, and, in larger doses, by Japanese kamikaze pilots. “It makes you feel incredibly good, like you’re some kind of god,” says D. L. Scott, clinical coordinator for Project NEON at Seattle Counseling Service, whose programs for gay men on meth have grown exponentially in recent years. Eighty-five percent of the users who come into the clinic use the drug to enhance their sex lives. “It’s a big social drug in that there are a lot of big group sex scenes. [Users] say it doesn’t matter who the person [they’re having sex with] is as long as they have a dick. There are group scenes where you have 10, 20, or more people engaged in sexual encounters.”

And it’s hugely addictive.

“It’s bad news,” Scott says. “Real bad news.”

Within 15 to 30 seconds of it being ingested into the body, methamphetamine floods the bloodstream with dopamine, serotonin, and norepinephrine, tons of it, raising blood pressure and body temperature, elevating sensory perception, obliterating inhibitions, and erasing pain. It makes getting someone’s fist into you, a psychotic idea to most people, possible. “Some of my patients talk about how they feel on crystal meth as being akin to being robots programmed with the sole purpose of doing more crystal and having more sex,” Dr. Steven Lee, a psychiatrist, told the New York Times, which has published lots of reporting about the rises in meth use and HIV transmission among gay people.

Around that time, there were several public health campaigns targeting gay men especially in the bars and on buses which ran through the gay neighborhood of Capitol Hill. Rather than addressing crystal methamphetamine, however, these campaigns instead seemed to almost glorify its use. They featured photos of well-known gay individuals appearing to celebrate, headlined with phrases like “We’re not staying up all night just to get syphilis.”

In other words, it was great to “stay up all night”—code for being high on meth—and there were many upstanding and attractive people doing so. And because they were upstanding, they were also making sure they didn’t get syphilis during their drug-fueled sex parties.

That logic is part of a much larger argument in which drug use is seen as culturally important for gays. I remember there being some pushback on such campaigns, but critics were quickly smeared as moralistic and prudish heteronormatives who didn’t understand the importance of liberated sex and the role of drugs in that liberation.

This larger argument is founded upon some untenable presumptions. The first is that sexual liberation must take the form of large sex parties or series of sexual relations with different partners, and that there is anything authentically liberating about them. While I’ve mostly avoided talking about my own experiences, I’ve definitely been part of (and hosted) some such events. Sure, they can be fun, but you can also go your entire life without ever being part of one and live a completely fulfilled and liberated life.

Secondly, there is a larger and baseless framework about “gay self esteem” that became quite popular at the beginning of this century. That framework basically states that the reason gays engage in so many destructive behaviors is because of societal oppression which has led them to have poor images of themselves. It’s a repurposed idea from black historical theory which linked black criminality and social dissolution to the psychological effects of societal racism. The problem with this framework as far as gays are concerned is that it leads to the assumption that any judgment—whether based on moral or practical analysis—only increases the core problem homosexuals face; that is, poor self-esteem.

We can now talk about Owen Jones and his short discussion regarding monkey pox. Just as suggesting maybe doing meth and having sex with lots of random people might be unhealthy gets re-narrated as “gay-shaming,” even his mentioning the objective facts about monkey pox transmission is being re-narrated by others as homophobic. That is, to say that men who have sex with men—especially those who have sex with multiple men over short periods of time—are at risk of contracting an illness is something you just shouldn’t be allowed to say.

Of course the shadow of the AIDS epidemic looms over these discussions, but Owen Jones is correct in his analysis. It was the stigma of immorality around homosexuality itself that was the problem with so many of the early government responses to the crisis, rather that the objective reality that homosexuals were the primary victims and transmitters of HIV outside of Africa.

We see this same problem of framing in countless other areas, especially regarding the relationship between behavior and health. Consider the backlash against those who point out the relationship of the consumption of industrially-processed foods and sedentary lifestyles to destructive conditions such as diabetes, depression, and the comorbidities of obesity. Highlighting such connections becomes smeared as “fat shaming,” rather than the obvious practical and objective purpose of such information (actually helping people who are fat).

This occurs also in the many attempts to address what probably should be seen as an alarming rise in young women seeking gender transition at rates much higher than young men. As mentioned before, even psychologists who are trans and are renown for their work towards making trans identity more socially acceptable have expressed deep concern about this increase. Such analysis, which is actually an attempt to help trans people, becomes re-narrated as anti-trans and even fascist.

To put this another way, the problem is really one of conflating pragmatic concerns with a caricature of moral outrage. There are certainly people who hate gays and wish them annihilated from the face of the earth, just as there are those who hate fat people or trans people and think they should be likewise eradicated. The thing is, such people are not very numerous, nor can we say that their moral frameworks are particularly robust or even coherent. Nevertheless, they become the archetype through which any practical and objective critique is filtered.

Having sex with lots of random people in short periods of time is just a thing some people do. It has no moral content, but it does have practical consequences where moral and ethical systems do have relevance. While there are certainly some men who can have relentless sex without the use of drugs, the fact that drugs are such a crucial ingredient in that behavior can lead us to accurately conclude there is sometimes a degree of addiction or self-destruction involved. The altered psychological state of such drug users leads to very destructive behaviors with damaging consequences for family, friends, partners, children, and also for larger society. It’s perfectly reasonable to point this out, and also to formulate an ethics that encourages less destructive behavior.

That’s not what Owen Jones is doing, though. He’s much too mild-mannered to go that far, yet even his milquetoast suggestion that it’s not homophobic to suggest gay men be careful in their sexual practices seems to have gotten him in some trouble.

I do hope the poor kid survives this, but more so I hope that one day he’s got the courage to challenge the broader tendency to re-narrate practical concerns as moralistic “shaming.” There is some irony in his current situation, since he earlier criticized the UK LGB Alliance’s wrong-headed suggestion that the government temporarily shut down sex clubs and saunas to deal with the problem. Their proposed solution merely argued for an increase of government control over the lives of individuals, which is awful. However, his moral outrage and delight in their ban from social media for linking the transmission of the disease to gay sexual behavior now looks a bit contradictory: he’s now doing the same thing.

My own opinion is that an authentic left movement must be able to speak openly and bluntly about the practical effects and consequences of human behaviors without moralizing or becoming victim to those who accuse them of doing so. The greatest failure of the left during COVID-19 was exactly the opposite of this. Especially in the United States but also elsewhere, a moral stance was adopted against those who declined vaccines and protested restrictions. Such people became seen as morally reprobate “super-spreaders,” plague-bearers responsible for death and social destruction.

In other words, the left did to those who did not buy into the COVID regime’s moral order exactly what they fear hateful people will do towards gays because of monkey pox. They turned an entire category of people into pariahs who must be isolated, disciplined, punished, cut off from economic exchange, and even fired from their jobs until they finally adopted the correct moral behavior.

I don’t know if the left will ever recover from this legacy. If it does, it will be because people like Owen Jones finally understand the sources of these contradictions, insist on speaking plainly and practically about human behavior, and refuse to coddle those who cry “shame” whenever confronted with the consequences of living as an actually-existing body among other actually-existing bodies.