I get so pissed off when people rag on social media. You know that conversation, usually at a cocktail party (oh who am I kidding, I’m twenty-three and I go to cramped apartment parties or loud bars where I have to strain myself to reluctantly listen to sermons about modern technology), when someone you thought […]
Read MoreUPDATE 4/21/2016: Although I will always stand by the contents of the letter below, I no longer feel comfortable endorsing the work of Rafaella Gunz going forward. While I wish her well, we have professional differences as activists and as writers. The headline of this post has been changed to reflect that. No matter the circumstances, the sexual […]
Read MoreTomorrow I’m giving a short talk about the work I’ve done this year to combat herpes stigma. Here’s the catch: I’m doing it at my office. For my entire company. Including everyone who works remotely on an internal live-stream. That’s somewhere between 150 and 200 of my coworkers, give or take a bunch of interns. […]
Read MoreThis was a big day for herpes coverage. The World Health Organization released a study saying that 2 in 3 people in the entire world have HSV-1, and the Internet collectively freaked out. It was both glorious and terrible. Herpes trended on Facebook. I had a lot of feelings about it. So without further ado, […]
Read More
This world will tell you that you are worthless: because you are a girl, because you are sexually active, because you have a virus, because you have a voice. Don’t listen to it.
Read MoreYour Facebook comments have made me think. I’m not being facetious—whenever I read a comment from someone (usually a man) upset that rejecting someone who has an STI makes you a bad person, I wonder why you are so alarmed and defensive. When have I ever said that turning down someone herpes+ makes you a […]
Read More
He must have been nervous, too. When the night finally arrived, he pulled a Ziplock bag out of his backpack full of condoms from the student health center.
Read MoreI’ve been offline. Or as offline as someone who works in social media can be. Somewhere around my site hitting 14k hits in a single day, somewhere around seeing my face appear over and over again on my Twitter feed, somewhere around co-worker #8 coming up to me in the kitchen and saying, “I SAW YOU ON […]
Read MoreThe classic mantra of reading, writing and merely existing on the Internet is “Don’t read the comments.” Internet comments, and Facebook comments in particular, are widely discredited as a cesspool of nastiness and trolling. If the writer or subject of a given article is anyone other than a straight, white man, the comments are even worse. […]
Read MoreAs I write this, an article about me is the number two trending story on BuzzFeed. My friends have been texting me all day to say that their friends have been texting them about me popping up on their newsfeed. The daily traffic to this blog has spiked into the thousands. Two different TV producers […]
Read More
Ella Dawson 