Anxiety & Vibrators: How the Pandemic Changed Our Sex Lives

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When we think of sex during lockdown, our mind immediately goes to Matt Hancock.

Bare with us on this one. 

We don’t just mean that infamous CCTV footage we’ve spent months trying to forget. But also his annoucement that came last autumn, after months of it being illegal to touch someone outside of your household, that we no longer needed to socially distance. Well, only if we were in “established relationships”. Did anyone else panic about asking the person they were seeing if you’re “established” or not? Or how to even ask that? When Hancock was pressed to define this, he laughed and avoided the question. We weren’t exactly expecting him to pull up a PowerPoint presentation detailing the ins and outs of being in a situationship, but his laugh confirmed one of the truths of the pandemic: sex didn’t exist.

Or it was easier to pretend it didn’t exist. Because if you weren’t in a relationship, and living with your partner, you couldn’t have sex. You couldn’t date beyond FaceTime. Overnight, an entire aspect of our lives just seemed to vanish. Research found that nine in ten people didn’t have intimate physical contact with someone from outside their household during the first Covid 19 wave. The guidance we were given during that time focused only on what were seen as traditional relationships, and questions over how to see partners we didn’t live with, how to have casual sex, or how polymorous relationships may work during lockdown were all met with raised eyebrows. While everyone was baking banana bread and trying to do TikTok dances, we also had to learn to redefine our sex lives and our relationships. 

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For many of us, we became our safest sexual partener, with sex education charity Brook having recommended lockdown as a time to masturbate and enjoy time with ourselves. Sales of sex toys did increase over lockdown, with Ann Summers annoucing that sales of their quietist vibrator were up 60% on the last year. Though the idea of embracing your sexuality and getting to know your body sounds like an ideal way to have spent lockdown, it also ignores the more complicated way the pandemic may have effected our relationships with our bodies.

Our desire to have sex can decrease when we’re stressed, and the pandemic has felt like it’s given us one anxiety after another after another. What about those of us who haven’t used lockdown as some sort of sexual reawakening, and haven’t even been able to think about sex? When we’ve been told not to go near other people for 18 months, it seems only natural that, for some of us, the idea of touch is now assoicated with anxiety rather than excitement.

“Our desire to have sex can decrease when we’re stressed, and the pandemic has felt like it’s given us one anxiety after another after another.”

Getting back into dating after lockdown found us asking questions we’ve never have to consider before a first date before – is seeing this person worth risking my health? We found ourselves having conversations about being exclusive increadibly early on, for the simple fact that it reduced the risk of Covid. The pandemic has put an immense amount of pressure on those of us who were single when lockdown hit – after months being on our own, we’re asking whether we need to be in a relationship in case another lockdown happens, and now have to evaluate whether it’s worth taking risks around our health to see someone. 

This means the conversation around sex and the pandemic isn’t as easy as ‘Oh you were living together, so it was fine for you’ or ‘it was a chance to get to know our bodies’. The feelings of anxiety and stress that the last 18 months brought can’t be disentangled from the way we feel about our bodies. And the pandemic meant we also lost the space to talk about these worries we were having and chat about sex and sexuality. When doors closed, we lost the communities where we could discuss sex and dating. Whether that was loosing the fun of getting to meet up with a friend and share about the night before, or not being able to connect with Queer groups to ask questions around our sexuality, we found ourselves without that comfort of others.

That’s why at Lemon House Theatre we’ve created Behind Closed Doors. This online new writing night will feature rehearsed readings of four short plays, all exploring sex, bodies and relationships. Showcasing work by writers of underrepreseneted genders (cis women, trans women, trans men, non-binary people, and those who are otherwise marginalised), the night will be asking how much have importrant conversations around sex opened up – are we cactualy more liberated? Or just finding new ways to take issues with our bodies? And how has the pandemic changed the way we date?

Behind Closed Doors is aiming to provide the community space we have been missing for so long, and to have those conversations that have been put on hold for the last 18 months. The launch night of Behind Closed Doors is happening at 7.30pm on 16 November as part of Theatre Deli’s LiveFromDeli programme, and then the night will be avaliable to stream until 7 December. 

The pandemic has changed our sex lives, but that isn’t a conversation we should be ignoring. It’s one, after many months apart, we can finally have together. 

Get your ticket for the Behind Closed Doors here: https://www.theatredeli.co.uk/Event/behind-closed-doors

Words: Lemon House Theatre | Photographer: Diana Serban Battlegrounds 19