Independent.ie: Sex in the pandemic

Sex in the pandemic: ‘A lot of people are feeling pressurised to meet with people, get on with it and have sex in a car. They’re told by others on apps not to be such a goody-two-shoes...’

Mention to anyone that you are writing about Irish people’s sex lives during the Covid-19 pandemic, and the jokes aren’t far behind. “That’ll be a short piece!” notes one colleague. “What’s that again?” asks a friend.

They might have a point. Historically, people’s sex and dating lives have often been changed beyond recognition by a pandemic, especially when measures to curb human interaction have been implemented. Kissing Is Barred While Influenza Is Lurking About, reads one headline from a US paper in 1918. Yet according to historian Dr Kate Lister, during the Black Death, people “rushed headlong into lust”. During the Great Plague of London in 1665, she notes that “it was also widely believed that you couldn’t contract the plague if you already had the pox (syphilis). The basic idea here was that the body couldn’t host two infections at once. Rather than staying away from sexual sin, the Great Plague of London saw people clambering to contract STIs.”

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