Is it possible to spread Herpes through masturbation?
With Reid Mihalko from ReidAboutSex.com and Cathy Vartuli from TheIntimacyDojo.com.
Cathy: Can you get herpes just by masturbating?
Reid: I’m Reid Mihalko from ReidAboutSex.com.
Cathy: I’m Cathy Vartuli from TheIntimacyDojo.com.
Reid: The answer is technically no.
Cathy: No.
Reid: Yeah. Now, if you were touching somebody else’s genitals, or their face, or wherever they were having herpes outbreak, and then you took that hand and started masturbating, you could give yourself herpes.
Cathy: Yes.
Reid: Masturbating alone, having touched no herps, nope.
Cathy: Or masturbating even lying next to each other not touching, as long as you’re not touching there’s no chance of spreading herpes.
Reid: Understand that herpes is a situation where it’s skin-to-skin contact and we’re learning more about herpes than we’ve ever known before because we have other sophisticated testing situations and ways of studying herpes now. What we do know is that you can be contagious, what’s called shedding, even when you’re not having an outbreak. A lot of people may have herpes asymptomatically, meaning that they’ve never had an outbreak, they don’t know they have it. The only way to really know you have herpes is if you’ve have an outbreak then you know, and a cold blister is a herpes, is HSV1 or 2 because now they’re jumping locations. This are all geeky-geeky things, you don’t need to know.
Great things are herpes aren’t … it’s not fatal, it’s more of a skin situation that has a lot of cultural shame and it can be passed from skin contact. If you’re using a toy and you’re sharing it, and somebody has an outbreak, or is shedding, you could possibly get it from them that way, too. Just lying next to each other masturbating, or you just masturbating alone, you should be pretty fine.
Cathy: Yeah. There’s a lot of cultural shame around herpes, for most people it’s not that big a deal. I invite you to watch, we have a couple of other videos about the shame around herpes that you can watch and get more details there.
Reid: Another amazing resource is the website called theHopp.com. It stands for the H Opportunity and it is a website devoted to the support of people with herpes and reducing the stigmatization and the shame around having herpes. That’s T-H-E-H-O-P-P.com. Leave your comments below.