Sexual Health with Veronica: HSV (+Epilogue?)
Doing something a little different with this one! Much of my content is sex-focused and I've built up a pretty cool following of people who support my work, so I think I'd like to occasionally use my platform to spread valuable information about sexual health sometimes!
While I was checking out the Idea Submission Pool, I came across a submission that really stood out to me. For the sake of anonymity, I'll tweak the exact wording in their submission a bit:"I've been reading your comics for a year now, but I just found your patreon and I didn't realize you also drew nudity! Super excited to take a look through all the bonus panels in your old comics (love those big pale chest cannons). Anyway, I liked the UTI sex ed comic you made a long time ago and I was wondering if you would ever consider making one for HSV2? I know STDs probably don't exist in the happy carefree-sex world of loops, but as much as I'd like to live there, things in this world are a lot meaner and difficult. If you don't feel comfortable talking about STDs, then that's alright, don't worry about it. I still love your comics either way! Keep up the great stuff, and I want to see more smiling veronica!"
For the sake of personal safety, I DO try to keep most about my personal life secret; but in real life, one of my best friends has both HSV1 and HSV2, and he was VERY distraught when he got the diagnosis. He fell into a deep depression and I didn't hear from him for a very long time :( Back then, he didn't know anything about herpes (and neither did I, to be honest), but just the word "herpes" was enough to make him terrified of his future. "I thought I was doing the responsible thing by going to the doctor, but now I feel ruined because I'm one of the one's who KNOW. Apparently, tons of people everywhere have herpes, but they get to keep living their lives normally because they don't know they've got it. It's not fair..."
...but WHY is this the case? What's up with this pervasive stigma around herpes that seems to frighten everyone, even when we don't actually know what it is?? Like most things in life, the answer stems from "Corporate Greed", when a pharmaceutical company in the 1970's did everything they could to create mass-fear around a common virus that was considered fairly benign at the time. By aggressively pushing words like "incurable" and "plague" into medical journals, magazines, and television, they successfully changed public opinion into believing that herpes was a dire medical emergency that NEEDED immediate treatment - but of course, THEY were the ones selling the treatment! Today, our society still hasn't recovered from all the damage they did, so people who have HSV1/2 are viewed under a harsh lens.
After a lot of research and talking to close friends, he gradually came to the realization that his fears were unwarranted: his herpes actually wasn't DOING much of anything - He had one initial breakout, but after it healed, he never had another breakout since then. To this day, I don't believe he's ever had a second one - our immune systems are crazy good at keeping these things locked down! That said, he's a very "clubbing" kind of person and stays very sexually active out there, so he opted to take the daily pills (suppressive therapy) to go the extra mile on making sure he's keeping things as safe as possible.
So, to YOU, my humble patron: if you're one of the billions of people who have HSV, just know you're not alone! It's truly not as bad as big pharma wants you to believe it is, and with a little management, it barely has to affect your life at all. Just be mindful of how your body feels, take measures to lower risk, and don't worry if you have a breakout - you'll be back to clapping cheeks in as low as two weeks (suppressive therapy also speeds up healing!)
Hopefully, we can ALL someday live in a happy sex-positive world like my comics, but we're scooting closer the more we learn about sexual health 💚 That's all for now, but as always, thank you so much for supporting my silly lewd art :)