Receiving The HPV Vaccine Won’t Turn Eighth Graders Into Sluts

In a new study, researchers have found that receiving the HPV vaccine does not—repeat, does not—make young women more promiscuous.

The study, published Monday in the Canadian Medical Association Journal, tracks the medical data of 260,000 Ontario girls. Half of the girls were eligible for the HPV vaccine when it was introduced by the province in 2007 and 2008. They were in grade eight at the time.

Researchers obtained their (anonymized) data and determined the vaccine does not cause "risky" sexual behavior. They found that pregnancy rates, and rates of non-HPV-related STIs, did not increase in the group that received the vaccine as compared to the group that didn't.

Presumably, that's because women know that the vaccine protects them from one type of STI that can cause cervical cancer, and not all STIs.

The question should be, however, why are researchers measuring the "promiscuity" levels of young women in the first place? Increasingly, society at large is beginning to recognize that labeling women as promiscuous feeds directly into slut-shaming and a wider rape culture. Sexualization of little girls through policing their clothing and bodily autonomy is problematic. Thirteen-year-olds themselves are aware of this.

But though HPV (or the human papilloma virus) causes about 70 percent of cervical cancers and genital warts, parents, apparently, are fearful that their girls will engage in more sex if they receive the vaccine.

I was left with lots of other questions, too: Is it not creepy, at the very least, to so closely track the sexual behaviours of women at any age? Are conversations on rape culture lost on the medical community?

With these questions in mind, I called up the study's lead author, Dr. Leah Smith, and senior researcher, Dr. Linda Levesque. Smith conducted her work on the project as part of her PhD at McGill, but the study's base was Levesque's department at Queen's. The women had heard parents' concerns, and they wanted to put some science behind the speculations, one way or another.

"The reason this question came up in particular was really because of some of the public controversy that's been going on about this, some of the media attention [suggesting] that the vaccination would make for an increase in sexual behavior," Smith says. "Parents are citing this as a reason why they're reluctant to have their daughters vaccinated."

She reminds me that Catholic school boards in Alberta and Ontario have been against the vaccine in the past for this reason. In fact, Mike Del Grande, the new chair of the Toronto District Catholic School Board, said just last week that HPV vaccines are a moral issue.

The researchers decided it was time to figure out whether these parents were operating based on a misconception.

"We really wanted to take some kind of an objective, scientific approach to investigating whether or not" the vaccine has this effect on sexual behaviors, Smith says.

Though their intent is good, the language in the study is troubling. It treats promiscuity as a danger in itself. Further, no one ever seems to measure boys' promiscuity. From the study:

"A major topic of public debate has been the possibility that HPV vaccination might lead to sexual disinhibition, that is, that receipt of the vaccine might give women and girls a false sense of protection against all sexually transmitted infections and that this false sense of protection might lead them to engage in more risky sexual behaviors than they would otherwise (e.g., be more promiscuous or neglect to use condoms). Increases in these risky behaviours could have important clinical consequences, including increased risk of pregnancy and sexually transmitted infections.

"…Moreover, parental fears of increased promiscuity following HPV vaccination have been reported as a major determinant of vaccine refusal, which may help to explain suboptimal HPV vaccine coverage in some jurisdictions. Evidently, both actual and perceived sexual disinhibition can have a negative effect on the potential health benefits of HPV vaccination."

I told Smith and Levesque that if girls are labeled as promiscuous and then something sexually violent happens to them, they often are blamed. I asked if they worried about the potential for harm in their word choice.

"I think we were really focused on the HPV vaccination issue; that was really the driving force behind the question for us," Levesque says. She says it's an important question, and that she identifies as a feminist, but that "we weren't really thinking about the broader social context that you bring up."

As for the word "promiscuity," they say it was used because that's the predominant wording found in the HPV literature. And the reason only girls were tested, Smith says, is that they were the only ones vaccinated at the time.

The wording of the study leaves me a bit confused as to whether they were testing for only pregnancy and STIs, or were using those tests to determine sexual behaviour in general.

Smith and Levesque say they didn't look directly at all sexual behaviors, like condom use and number of sexual partners, because that information would need to be self-reported and could easily be skewed due to societal pressure. Young women, for example, may be less likely to admit to having had several partners, lest they be branded a slut.

It's interesting to me that they're aware of these nuances, but their study contained harmful language anyway. Parental hysteria over teen sexuality should not be creeping into medical journals.

Again, while the intentions here are good, where does it leave us if the medical community is applying potentially harmful words to such young women? Levesque may have said they hadn't considered the wider societal context of their words, but it's time for our institutions to start doing just that.

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