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Do we really all have herpes? Debunking myths surrounding one of the most common viruses

Siri Nygren
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Do we really all have herpes? Debunking myths surrounding one of the most common viruses

Would you believe me if I told you that almost everyone you have met today has herpes? The person next to you on your commute to work, the barista at your favorite coffee shop, even your mum? 

To believe this, we need to understand what herpes actually is. Herpes is an umbrella term for eight different types of viruses. If you have had chickenpox or glandular fever, you actively and permanently have a type of herpes virus in your body, as they represent two of the strains of the virus. However, that isn’t what most people think of when they hear ‘herpes’ – we usually think of when we hear the word, HSV1 and HSV2, the sexually transmissible strains. 

Even these specific variations of the virus affect a massive amount of people. Today, according to the WHO, 67% of the global population under 50 carry the herpes simplex 1 (HSV-1) virus, and 11% carry the herpes simplex 2 (HSV-2) virus. HSV-1 is the strain that we usually call “common cold sores” which is a form of fluid-filled blisters that form around your mouth. It’s a latent virus, meaning it constantly exists in your body and occasionally gets triggered into outbreaks. These triggers depend on the person, some get outbreaks due to stress, and others get it in combination with other colds or infections, due to the immune system being lowered during these times. The second strain, HSV-2, is the sexually transmittable version of the virus which results in genital herpes. With this strain, the outbreak resembles the HSV-1 outbreak, and the triggers can also vary from person to person. 

I was 13 years old when I first was taught about sexually transmitted diseases. I was in biology class in a room filled with taxidermy rodents and dusty microscopes when we had a guest lesson from a sexual health guide. She was there to educate, and (maybe, in retrospect, intimidate), this class of around 20 kids about the reality of intimate relations.

The next hour was spent promoting abstinence, with a continuous slideshow of rather graphic photos of the symptoms of sexually transmittable diseases. The diseases were portrayed as a sort of leprosy, where any sign of an STD would make you an outcast in society. Yet today, a majority of people worldwide carry a type of herpes stain, either HSV-1 or HSV-2. It’s therefore a virus that affects billions worldwide, so why is it still so riddled with stigma, myths and misconceptions? 

To clear up some of these misconceptions I have spoken to a woman who carries both of these viruses, HSV-1 and HSV-2. She wants to remain anonymous, so for this article, I will simply call her Jane. Jane has lived with her diagnosis for almost five years now. She told me that, initially, she felt anxious and angry about the news.

I wanted to blame someone for putting me in the situation, which I now realize is wrong (…) it’s just a situation you’re put in and it might suck but there isn’t much you can do about it.

Many people with different types of STDs feel a sort of animosity towards the person they got the virus from, which Jane believes can be rooted in the fear of how you are going to be treated:

It becomes a situation where you want someone to blame, so that when you face stigma you can distance yourself from it and have a scapegoat to put all that stigma towards. 

As with many stigmatised diseases, there are many misconceptions, and those misconceptions are amplified when it comes to a sexually transmitted infection. As society retains the notion that sex is dirty and somewhat sinful, the perceived consequences of sex are equally seen as inherently dirty. We never shame someone for having chickenpox, which is one form of herpes – why should we shame someone for having HSV-2, which is simply a different strain? As long as society deems sex taboo and dirty, the shame and stigma around sexually transmitted diseases will remain. 

The shame and stigma around HSV-1 and HSV-2 run deep. In the eyes of some, people carrying herpes must also be sexually promiscuous (and, by extension, that promiscuity is inherently bad). Jane told me this is one of the most common misconceptions she faces. In reality, it only takes one sexual encounter to receive the virus – and that one encounter could be casual, or within a long-term relationship; the virus doesn’t discriminate.

The notion that a person with an STD is inherently promiscuous in nature only blames the individual for the infection due to their approach to sexual encounters, and creates an “us-vs-them” mentality, where people may consider themselves not to be risking getting a virus due to their more conservative approach to sex. Again, it only takes one encounter without protection, it doesn’t matter if it’s your first or your fiftieth. 

Connected to this, there is another myth: that you will always know if you have or have had herpes. This is also untrue. The disease can become evident to different extents in different people, so you may have carried the virus for years without knowing. To use COVID-19 as a comparison, some people got a large variety of ailments, and some went completely symptom free only realising they actively had a COVID-19 outbreak due to testing. Herpes can be similar, where the extent of the outbreaks varies greatly from person to person, and some don’t even have outbreaks but carry the virus nevertheless. As Jane noted,

I want people to understand that it’s very, very common. I think that is the main way for it to become less stigmatized.

We sometimes breeze past statistics without putting much thought into it, but 67% of us have HSV-1 and 11% have HSV-2 – that amounts to a huge number of people. Think of that the next time you’re on a train, at your workplace, or even at a family reunion. It may pause you in your steps and reconsider the preconceived notion that we all may have regarding the virus. 

There is also the myth that herpes is hard to get, but once you have it you are constantly contagious. Again, this is untrue. The virus is transmitted through contact with herpes outbreaks through genital secretions or oral secretions. Jane told me this was a misconception she had faced in her personal life:

My first boyfriend, who wasn’t very informed about the disease, thought it was something that would spread easily even when I didn’t show any symptoms, which is not the case.

The general rule is that a person can only get HSV-2 through sexual contact with someone who has HSV-2. One can, however, get a form of genital HSV-1 from receiving oral sex from a partner with an active HSV-1 outbreak. Transmissibility is at its highest when an active outbreak is occurring, but it is possible to transmit the virus even without active outbreaks. 

So, what is recommended to do if someone is experiencing an active outbreak? A person with HSV-1 or HSV-2 is most contagious during the first couple of days of the outbreak. For HSV-1, it is recommended to stop all sexual encounters during the time of the outbreak, which usually lasts around two weeks. After that, one is not deemed contagious and can continue all relations as they usually would. As for HSV-2, it is also recommended to put a stop to all sexual encounters during an outbreak. After an outbreak, the risk of spreading the virus is drastically lowered, however, it is still recommended to use a condom with sexual encounters, both to stop the spread of herpes, but also to prevent the spread of other sexually transmittable diseases and to avoid unplanned pregnancy.

As for the frequency of the outbreaks, this is also highly personal. Some might have multiple outbreaks per year, and some only have a couple of outbreaks in their lifetime. Studies have also shown that the symptomatic outbreaks are likely to decrease over time, as the virus tends to be more active the first couple of years after transmission.

When carrying HSV-1, there are also medications that one can take which reduce the prevalence of herpes outbreaks by almost 80%, which subsequently lowers the contagiousness of the virus.

Finally, we come to the myth that people who carry the virus are ‘undateable’, an idea that is untrue and that can be incredibly hurtful. When first getting the diagnosis, many individuals feel as though their love life is over. Many people who carry HSV-2 go on to live perfectly normal relationships, both with partners who share the diagnosis, and also with people who do not have HSV-2.

As for dating and having intimate relations with the virus, Jane further noted the difference in reactions between the two partners she’s had during her time carrying the virus:

My first boyfriend got a bit scared because he wasn’t very informed on what it meant for him, but after talking it through and giving him some time to process he was supportive. My second boyfriend didn’t think it was a big deal at all and it wasn’t even a discussion.

When asked if Jane preferred dating someone who already carried the virus, she said she does not have any preference other than that she wants to date someone who is an understanding partner and someone who would never shame her for carrying a virus. 

On a brighter note, she feels as though the perception of people with herpes is developing, as she’s faced less backlash in the last couple of years. She notes that speaking openly about the virus has led to other people opening up to her about also carrying HSV-2:

I think I’ve been able to calm down some of my friends that have come to me with the news that they’re carrying the same virus. Just in the last month, a good friend reached out with the news that she just tested positive and she felt a bit confused and anxious.

She notes that there is a sense of community growing where the stigma around the virus is decreasing, and people no longer feel the need to hide the fact that they carry a virus. She says the ability to create a world where people feel less alone and afraid about something that affects so many worldwide. 

Jane was quite young when she first realised that she carried the virus, and during that time it was something that induced a lot of anxiety and fear for her. That feeling no longer rules Jane’s life. She explained how she has grown more accepting of both the person who gave her the virus, and of herself: 

It doesn’t have to affect your life and it’s not something that will affect your life negatively unless you give it the power to. It’s a virus and there are precautions you can take to prevent it from spreading but it’s not something that is going to ruin your life. 

As positive as it may sound that we currently are living in an era of sexual acceptance where people with different types of STDs may feel less ostracised today than they did only a couple of years ago, there is still a long way to go. Looking into the future we need to focus on spreading correct information and keeping a kind and respectful attitude when discussing different types of viruses.

It’s important to not look at sex as an inherently dirty act, and with that also remember that any repercussions of this act are, therefore, not inherently dirty. After all, if you wouldn’t shame someone with chickenpox, why shame someone with HSV-2?

Reference list 

January 8th, and the insurrectionist riot provoked by Bolsonaro and the Brazilian army

Thiago Vahia Malliagros
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January 8th, and the insurrectionist riot provoked by Bolsonaro and the Brazilian army

This story begins in 2018 in Brazil; it could start before, but for the sake of not turning this into a 15-series part of articles, we’ll start there. The critical date: the election of Jair Bolsonaro to the presidency in Brazil. It was always going to be terrible – but predictable – for my country.

The important thing for the reader to understand is that, as awful as Bolsonaro is, nothing he said or did was new; he constantly affirmed what he believed. His presidency was consistent, insomuch as it was anti-science, anti-LGBTQ+, anti-native people and anti-nature. Still, importantly for this article, it was a conspiratorial presidency. His election was determined and won by a flood of what some might call fake news, but what I call conspiracy theories.

We were told that Brazil would become “a Venezuela”. We would all be forced to eat our pets, people would be forced to share their homes with homeless people, baby bottles would be replaced by bottles with penis-shaped caps (mamadeira de pirocas), and kids would be indoctrinated to be gay in school – these would all be the consequences if Bolsanaro’s opposition won the election for the presidency. They were all lies, of course, and they were even lies that had been used before, when Bolsonaro sought election to congress or when he just wanted some attention.

A Facebook picture of a baby bottle with a penis shaped teat and a "FAKE NEWS" stamp across the top.

As such, it’s not surprising that he chose to follow a conspiratorial path whenever a crisis emerged. His approach to the COVID-19 pandemic was to become a superspreader of misinformation. When faced with the destruction of the Amazon, he dismissed the numbers as fake. Even when he won elections, he would claim that he’d won by a much greater margin – so much so that he pushed for the government to use paper ballots. Since 1996, Brazil has used electronic voting machines, tested and confirmed to be fair, providing secure and clean elections. Bolsonaro, however, disagreed.

The notion that electronic voting machines are insecure and prone to fraud, while a prominent narrative in Trump’s America, was not exported wholly from the US to Brazil – we had already seen similar claims in the 2014 election when Bolsonaro and other right-wing groups pointed to vast protests in 2013 to claim that Dilma could not have won fairly. The accusation was nothing but lies, but the myth persisted. With the lukewarm results for congress in 2020, which meant Bolsonaro’s government failed to get everything he wanted, plus the pushing of the Big Lie in the US, things were heating up for 2022.

First, the attempt to move back to paper ballots failed. Bolsonaro ramped up his rhetoric, saying in speeches that they would be fraudulent unless the elections were conducted using paper. According to Bolsonaro, the elections would only be legit if he won because all the numbers and data were lying. He was the most popular president; that was his belief. He would beat Lula – or any other candidate – by a margin of at least two digits in a fair election. As the election of 2022 came around, one of the leading candidates was filled with conspiratorial belief, hellbent on the idea that his victory would be the only legitimate outcome.

The Brazilian Army

To understand what happened on January 8th, as well as Bolsonaro, we cannot overlook another factor: the role of the Brazilian Army. The Brazilian Army is an institution that gave birth to Bolsonaro. In his 15 years of military service, it provided him with all his beliefs, his lies, and his methods.

This may sound like an exaggeration, but it is not – the army sees itself in Brazil as a tutor of democracy, a moderate power to guard the country against the excesses of civilians. Even today, the army sees the coup of 1964, which caused a dictatorship of 21 years and destroyed the government, as necessary to save Brazil from the communists. So, just like Bolsonaro, the Brazilian Army is a reactionary, conspiratory force that refuses to give up what benefits it has gained.

In 2018, the army saw one its own elected to President, promising to defend and act on all their conspiratorial beliefs, including ending the “comissão da Verdade” – a commission to discuss crimes of the dictatorship – attacking native groups in Amazon, decrying other Green parties as a plot to steal Amazonia from Brazil. For the army, an explicitly right-wing, anti-leftist government was a dream that was coming true and promised all benefits like high pensions and salaries. It was no surprise that they would back Bolsonaro’s government to the end – indeed, at the time of writing, they still do. When Bolsonaro wanted a military parade, the army said yes. The army backed him when he tried to force the opposition to approve paper ballots. Any move to perpetuate its power was okay for the military.

A tank moving through a street
Photos of the military parade (Source: Correio Braziliense)

Post-defeat plotting

What could be done when the 2022 election came, and Bolsonaro lost? While Bolsonaro stayed silent for weeks, his supporters were primed by years of conspiracies and fake news – including his supporters in the army. When supporters came to the door of the military barracks, asking the army to take over in a military coup, it’s fair to say they would have loved to oblige. However, as the entire world quickly sent their notes congratulating Lula on his victory, it was clear that a coup would have no international support. Faced with the impossibility of getting their wishes and the chance of losing all their benefits and position of authority, the military allowed groups of Bolsonaro supporters to camp out in front of the barracks.

The situation continued for months, with all that resentment brewing; Brazil saw two attacks against public buildings on the 7th of September and the 1st of January. Crucially, the police and authorities were still under the control of Bolsonaro, leaving his supporters free and without significant repercussions for their actions. All of this to the 8th of January, when rioters invaded the Praça dos Três Poderes – the home of the three branches of the Brazilian government – and destroyed everything inside. We even have evidence of some army members covering for the terrorists (a more apt name), allowing some to escape and even stopping the police from arresting them.

So, that was the 8th of January in Brazil when the army and its child, Bolsonaro, riled up a group of people with conspiratorial speech and the promise of lax punishments. Did they deliberately spend four years provoking supporters to perform a coup? Or were they trying to cause enough chaos to justify the army intervention? I prefer not to answer those questions, as we don’t yet have concrete proof of the objectives, but the path that led to the events of the 8th of January is clear for all to see.

Ghoulies and ghosties and long-leggedy beasties and things that go bump in the night…

Chris French
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Ghoulies and ghosties and long-leggedy beasties and things that go bump in the night…

In a previous article for the Skeptic, I speculated that if there really had been an increase in reports of ghostly encounters during the Covid pandemic, one possible cause might be the well-documented and widely reported decline in sleep quality that occurred over that period. Poor sleep quality is known to have negative effects on memory and attention and to increase the likelihood of hallucinatory experiences and paranoia – and, of course, to increase the incidence of our old friend, sleep paralysis. It is easy to see how such factors may lead people to have experiences which they interpret as being ghostly encounters even though other non-paranormal explanations may be more plausible. We have just published the results of a large-scale correlational study that appears to offer support for such speculation.

The data for this study were collected as part of a large-scale survey which was launched in October 2017 and was carried out in collaboration with BBC Focus magazine(subsequently renamed BBC Science Focus. The results reported, based upon data from 8,853 respondents, focus on the associations between a number of sleep variables and a range of paranormal beliefs. An index of self-reported sleep quality was computed based upon sleep efficiency (that is, the ratio between time spent in bed and time actually sleeping), insomnia symptoms, sleep latency and sleep duration. Poorer sleep quality was found to be associated with higher levels of belief in life after death, ghosts, demons, communication with the dead, near-death experiences as evidence for life after death, and alien visitation of the Earth.

Data were also collected regarding incidence of sleep paralysis and exploding head syndrome. Sleep paralysis is a relatively common sleep anomaly during which a temporary period of paralysis is experienced at sleep onset or upon awakening. It may be accompanied by additional symptoms including a strong sense of a malign presence, pressure on the chest and difficulty breathing, a range of sensory hallucinations, and intense fear. It typically lasts for only a few seconds but can sometimes last longer. Exploding head syndrome is another fairly common sleep anomaly, again occurring at the threshold between sleep and wakefulness. It often consists of the hallucinatory sensation of a loud noise such as an explosion, a scream, or a gunshot, but can also involve other senses such as a flash of light. The experience of both sleep anomalies was found to be correlated with belief that aliens visit the Earth. Additionally, the experience of sleep paralysis was also associated with the belief that near-death experiences provide evidence for life after death.

Although these findings are correlational, and therefore no definite conclusions regarding cause and effect can be drawn, it is reasonable to speculate that they may well be due to the effects of sleep deprivation upon memory, attention, the tendency to hallucinate, and so on, as referred to above. Hallucinatory experiences experienced during episodes of sleep paralysis or exploding head syndrome will sometimes be interpreted in paranormal terms.

The association between sleep paralysis and the belief that near-death experiences provide evidence in support of life after death is, we believe, a novel finding. It may be that two different psychological mechanisms underlie this correlation, both relating to the general belief that consciousness (or the soul, if you prefer) can become separated from the physical substrate of the brain. On the one hand, if the sufferer from sleep paralysis interprets their hallucination as involving an external ghost or a demon, this may well strengthen their belief in spiritual beings in general, including belief in a personal soul that may survive bodily death. On the other hand, sleep paralysis episodes often involve bizarre sensations of bodily distortion up to and including full-blown out-of-body experiences. If one is convinced that one’s consciousness has been separated from one’s body, it is likely that one would be more likely to endorse the idea that near-death experiences provide support for life after death.

The main strengths of this paper are its focus on an under-researched topic and the large sample size. However, a number of limitations are also noted by the authors in addition to the fact that the data are purely correlational as already noted. Participants were self-selected and it is very likely that those who had experienced sleep paralysis and/or exploding head syndrome were over-represented. Furthermore, over 90% of the sample classified themselves as white and our results may not generalise to other ethnic groups. Finally, all data were produced by self-report rather than by more objective means. Future research should be aimed at addressing these limitations.

The lead author of the paper, PhD student Betul Rauf, and her supervisor, Professor Alice Gregory, are both based at Goldsmiths. They were supported in their efforts by an international team of sleep researchers consisting of members from the US (Brian Sharpless), Spain (Juan Madrid-Valero), and the UK (Rotem Perach, Dan Denis, Guilia Lara Poerio, and yours truly).

Virulent: The Vaccine War – a close-up look at the American antivax movement

Wendy M. Grossman
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Virulent: The Vaccine War – a close-up look at the American antivax movement

I am not old enough to remember diphtheria. I am old enough to remember measles, chicken pox, mumps, and, dimly, polio. Folk wisdom then was clear that the first three of those were hard to escape in childhood and could be dangerous, but that they were much worse if you got them as adults. Polio terrified people.

I have a theory of generations that goes like this: 80 years is about the longest our society remembers anything. Once past the generations who lived through a major event, we are free to ignore the lessons they learned. A vaccine against diphtheria arrived in 1942, followed by pertussis (1957), tetanus (1961), polio (1962), and measles (1968) – long enough that today’s parents don’t remember what these diseases were like – and neither do an increasing number of grandparents. They have no idea how desperately everyone wanted these vaccines circa 1960.

The cover image for Virulent

“How is that natural?” a young mother asks of sticking a needle filled with particles of disease into a baby at the outset of Virulent: The Vaccine War, a new documentary film produced by Laura Davis and Tjardus Greidanus, who also wrote and directed the film. Responds Terence Dermody, the chair of pediatrics at the University of Pittsburgh: “Disease absolutely is natural.”

Early on, Paul Offitt, a pediatrician who specialises in infectious diseases, divides vaccine hesitant people into two groups: one is those who are genuinely hesitant, and who often respond to scientific explanations and compassion from a doctor who engages with their issues. The other… is the much smaller group of conspiracy theorists and people who genuinely believe their children have been harmed by vaccines. The second of these, the film shows, colonises the first via online forums on sites like Facebook and YouTube, helped by algorithms that push everyone to extremes.

Particularly if you expand your lens outside of the US, there are bound to be more groups than that. But this schema helps the film narrow its focus to its real subject: the modern anti-vaxx movement as it’s developed from Andrew Wakefield’s fraudulent paper and its pickup by Jenny McCarthy and other celebrities, through to today’s aggressive profiteers and their followers, who seek out women who’ve posted online about their children’s deaths and seek to turn them into evidence.

The film features a broad array of voices: activists on both sides, scientists, bereaved parents, and a former vaccine resister whose views were forced to change abruptly when her youngest child’s heart transplant made being around her unvaccinated siblings too risky.

The movie works through several of these human stories before profiling several of the movement’s best-known spokespeople.

“Expertise is no match for a good story” – especially when the story is delivered by an attractive blonde celebrity or the son of a revered politician. One of the loudest spokespeople against vaccines is Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., who insists he’s not anti-vaxx but pro-science and accuses CDC scientists and Bill Gates of profiteering. When NBC reporter Brandy Zadrozny checked his sources, most wouldn’t speak to her for fear of career repercussions and the retiree who did explained how Kennedy was misinterpreting his work.

From there, the film moves on to outlining more recent, more aggressive tactics, stressing the profits made by the loudest anti-vaxx campaigners. Also chilling is the movement’s co-option of language derived from the struggles for civil rights and reproductive rights, appropriating slogans like “my body, my choice” and “fighting” for “freedom”. As epidemiologists’ warnings of new outbreaks of measles and other preventable diseases materialise, the film highlights the battle over the passage of California’s 2019 vaccination law, which cracked down on the use of the personal medical exemptions that were filling the schools with unvaccinated children.

Overall, this is a well-done portrait of the American anti-vaxx movement as it’s developed over time. Well-informed skeptics are unlikely to find a lot that’s new, but the personal stories offer food for compassion. One of these is Offit’s own, which he gives in response to Kennedy’s accusation that he’s only in vaccines for the money. As a young child, Offit was kept on a pediatric polio ward while he recovered from surgery to correct a clubfoot. He never lost the memory of the vulnerable children he saw there or his resulting desire to protect them. “How exactly does Bobby Kennedy make the world a better place, please tell me that?” he asks, exasperated.

Offitt also offers a bit of extra perspective on Wakefield’s paper, reminding us that it had 13 authors – and eight study subjects. “Just as a tip to future epidemiologists, you should always have more, more study subjects than authors.” Words worth remembering.

Len Dong: the role of traditional rituals in modern Vietnamese communities

Gia Phuong Phan
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Len Dong: the role of traditional rituals in modern Vietnamese communities

“If I didn’t take him to Master Huong [for the len dong ceremony][…], he would have lived slightly longer with his wife and children,” Mr Dang recalled how his superstition led to the death of his brother.

Growing up Buddhist in Vietnam, I cannot remember the number of memorial services and ceremonies that my family organised to commemorate our deceased family members and ancestors. While most of these occasions are similar in nature, there was one that particularly stood out from the rest. Although I did not directly witness the incident, the story that my family told me was so peculiar that I still remember the details vividly today.

It was a memorial service that my family hosted for my grandmother, whose new grave had just been built (she had been buried at another location previously). Everything went as usual until my Aunt Dieu suddenly cried, seemingly mourning for someone. “She’s been possessed,” someone shouted in Vietnamese. Everyone else in the room started to pay closer attention, noting resemblances between her behavior and my long-deceased great-grandmother’s.

Later that day, Aunt Dieu had no memory of the event. However, everyone felt almost certain my great-grandmother “visited” them. They were sure Aunt Dieu could have not faked it, as she was born after my great-grandmother’s death, and they never met each other. “It was too realistic,” my father emphasised.

As a young teenager, I accepted the narrative as it was and did not bother questioning its legitimacy. It is perhaps the earliest memory that I have of “len dong” (also referred to as “hau dong”) – a shamanistic ritual in Vietnam.

Len dong originated in the Mother Goddess worship (“Dao Mau”) of Vietnamese folk religion. During these ceremonies, people are said to be possessed by divine entities. The mediums could either be the priests/priestesses or the devotees attending the rituals.

To better understand this practice and why some people might believe in it, I spoke with my cousin Jen (not her real name), who came into contact with len dong a few years ago. In explaining how it all began, she said,

I was diagnosed with a hereditary disease. The doctors said it would significantly shorten my lifespan, and it cannot be treated effectively.[…] The news shocked my entire family. […] For quite some time, we were lost and didn’t know what to do.

After the initial diagnosis, her parents took her to the best hospitals, but modern medicine did not offer them any hope. “We tried everything we could, but nothing worked. The doctors said the development of my condition is unpredictable. […] They simply can’t tell us when things would go south. I was repeatedly told to be ready for major surgeries, potentially fatal, at any moment. It could be next year, but also next month, or even next week,” Jen told me.

Out of desperation, her family turned to faith. “My siblings and I are raised by our devoted Buddhist parents, but since then [the diagnosis of her disease], they have been more devoted than ever. We have visited pagodas more often, and my parents have donated more to temples,” Jen said.

One day, an acquaintance introduced her parents to a len dong master in the city, who reportedly had cured the illnesses of many of her followers. Jen recalled, “My parents wanted to take me there. I didn’t really believe in len dong and its healing power, but I agreed to go because I love my parents.”

However, it did not go well for Jen. “It felt like I was in a haunted house. I instantly felt my goosebumps the moment I stepped inside the door. The surroundings and people who worked there made me nervous,” she shared. She felt uneasy seeing those people, who wore elaborate costumes and had scary facial expressions, dancing around her in such a way that “people would think that they have gone insane”. As she expected, the ceremony did not have any effect on her health.

However, her parents persisted. They took her to the house of worship a few more times to pay respect and offer some gifts to the deities. However, Jen always insisted on waiting outside. “They eventually gave up because we didn’t witness any improvement,” said Jen.

I was curious about why Jen’s parents – an engineer and a doctor – chose to momentarily believe in such a superstition as len dong. Fortunately, they agreed to speak with me. “Modern medicine has failed us. So as long as there is something else that we could try, we will because the hope is there. We have nothing to lose and much to gain if it [len dong] works,” her father said.

While Jen’s experience with len dong was somewhat similar to a Halloween horror event, some people have it even worse. For instance, a report for Tien Phong Newspaper about his visit to a famous len dong master in the region, a man called Tam said, “I came hoping to be cured from gout. However, after she forcefully stepped on my legs [during the ritual], I became crippled and have not been able to walk again.”

In another incident that I found online, Mrs Nguyen Thi H. and her husband, who was diagnosed with leukemia, visited Master Huong, a len dong practitioner. They had heard rumors about her healing powers through len dong and hoped that the husband’s condition could be alleviated with her help. “I still remember that day vividly when Ms Huong [the len dong master] was possessed, dancing, […] and constantly punching my husband until he was unconscious,” Mrs Nguyen Thi H. told Tien Phong Newspaper. Her husband was immediately taken to the hospital, but he passed away a few hours later.

A similar accident happened when Master Huong performed the ritual on the brother of Mr Dang. Mr Dang suggested his brother try his luck with len dong when he was in the last stage of lung cancer. Unfortunately, after being struck in the head by Master Huong during her len dong rituals for days, his brother passed away. Since then, Mr Dang has always felt guilty about the early death of his brother.

A len dong ceremony. Four people wearing traditional outfits sit in front of an alter on a rug surrounded by an audience who are sitting on the floor around them.
A local len dong ceremony (Source)

Besides causing physical harm to people as illustrated, len dong could also abuse people financially. In Jen’s case, her parents donated VND 3,000,000 (approximately £100) on average to the house of worship for each visit. Although this is a small amount to Jen’s family, it could mean a great deal to many others. In many cases, people have to take out loans in order to pay for these ceremonies.

In a research paper by Swarthmore College, Master Tri, who led a local organisation aiming to preserve Mother Goddess worship, explained, “Some people charge too much money. They take advantage of the people who really seriously believe in len dong.” Although there is no official data, researcher Bui Thi Thoa estimates that a len dong ceremony could cost followers anywhere between VND 15 – 100 million (approximately £500 – £3500). To put it into perspective, the average monthly wage in Vietnam is only around £115. Therefore, this could amount to the life savings of an average Vietnamese person.

As people’s faith could easily be exploited, the Vietnamese government has banned for-profit len dong practice. Offenders could receive a fine of up to £3500, and 3 years in jail. However, they would only actively enforce the law “[if the practitioners] do something crazy—if it hurts people instead of helps people; or, if the ceremony is too expensive… The government thinks it’s a waste of money if a ceremony is too expensive. The money could be used for more practical things,” said De, whose parents work for a len dong master.

While len dong is largely considered superstitious and taboo for its negative aspects, and clearly an outright danger to the health of those undergoing the ceremony, there are those who argue it does have some positive contributions to Vietnamese society.

According to the Vietnam Centre for Research and Preservation of Religious Cultures, len dong has been effective in treating people with mild mental disorders. Regarding this matter, scholar Bui Thi Thoa provides a possible explanation: the mystical music, lively dance, and vibrant colour during len dong ceremonies helps people release unwanted tensions.

Len dong rituals may also serve a role in cultural healing, too. Throughout the 20th century, Vietnam was constantly in between wars – against France, Japan, and the United States. Families were separated, and people lost touch with one another during this period of turmoil. Once peace was restored, many rushed to find their families and friends; some were alive, some dead. As Vietnamese culture places an immense significance on the proper burial of the dead, retrieving bodies and remains of lost relatives has been at the top of many people’s personal agendas. However, wartime has made this challenging.

In len dong rituals, priests and priestesses claim to summon the dead and communicate with them, facilitating the search for their bodies and burial sites. “Today, Vietnamese government supports the use of mediums for finding Vietnamese lost to the war time,” Master Tri, who was introduced above as the President of an organisation that advocates Mother Goddess worship, shared.

These words remind me of how my father always loved his mother for the sacrifices she made for the family and for her children to go to school despite their financial difficulties. One day, he told me, “Despite her [my grandmother’s] sacrifices, we never managed to give her a proper place to rest. She was hastily buried in our hometown during the French invasion. Once the wars were over, we came looking for her [grave]. […] We asked everyone we knew, but nothing came out of our effort.” It was a hopeless search that bothered my father for years.

Eventually, as a last resort, my father’s family sought help from a len dong master, who directed the family to an unknown grave, which he claimed belonged to my grandmother. My family was skeptical at first because they were unable to verify anything – it was impossible to say whether the grave was my grandmothers or just that of a stranger. But then my Aunt Dieu had her experience at the memorial service for my grandmother. “Your great-grandmother told us that we finally found your grandmother”, my father tells me. “She told us, through your Aunt Dieu, that she finally can rest in peace knowing her daughter will soon reach eternity safely”.

Was the grave truly that of my grandmother? We have no way of knowing, but what we do know for certain is that my father’s hopeless search is over, and he can let go of a concern that has troubled him for so long.

When copyright credit scammers target skeptical organisations

Michael Marshall
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When copyright credit scammers target skeptical organisations

As one of the organisers of the QED conference, I was understandably concerned when, a few days after Christmas, we received a notification explaining that we had committed copyright infringement. The issue concerned a blog post we published on the 21st of September, when we introduced the “Let’s actually talk about sex panel”, which – according to the legal letter we received – included a header photo without due credit to the image owner.

The legal threat read as follows:

You are receiving this legal infringement notice from Nationwide Legal Trademark Department due to the unauthorized usage of our client’s image.

The use of this image : https://i.imgur.com/4MkrZVH.png on this page: https://qedcon.org/news/2022/lets-actually-talk-about-sex is fine, as long as our client (LustGasm) is fully credited.

The credit must appear under the image or the footer of the page and be clickable to https://www.lustgasm.com/  within 5 working days. We await your response to confirm this has been completed, removing the image does not resolve the case.

Failure to do so in this time frame, will result in legal case (No. 84827) proceeding under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act’s Section 512(c) (” DMCA”) for past and or current usage.

Past usage of the image can be seen in the records on Wayback Machine (https://web.archive.org) – a permanent public archive of the web, which will be called upon as evidence in this case.

This email serves as the required official notice.

Regards

Julia Frank
Trademark Attorney

Nationwide Legal
401 Congress Ave. #1540,
Austin, TX 78701

[email protected]
www.nationwidelegalservice.org

We take the law very seriously at QED, and we take copyright infringement seriously too. The last thing we’d want to have done is to inadvertently steal an artist’s work, but we’re also a not for profit conference who can’t afford to pay commercial rates for a Getty Images license, so we’re heavily reliant on free imagery.

We actually face the same issue with this very magazine – providing each article with a suitable and royalty-free image is a challenge. Sometimes that means turning to Google image search, and setting the filter to copyright free, and seeing what comes up, but that’s not always reliable as sometimes people label things as copyright free when they aren’t. Could we have inadvertently stumbled into something like that at QED? It’s not impossible.

Except, something about this particular legal approach seemed off. For one, where it provides an example of the copyrighted image, it links to a copy of the image on imageUR, the free image hosting site. This seems rather an odd thing to do for a legal company. Haven’t they their own place to host it? And even if they don’t, why wouldn’t they just attach the image to the email they sent us rather than upload their copyrighted image to a free website where other people could see it devoid of any copyright marks. In attempting to remedy the situation, they may well have just multiplied their problem.

It also seems odd that the legal notification stated that evidence of us using the image can be seen in the records on Wayback Machine… but the link provided was to the homepage of the Wayback Machine. Which is a bit like writing “more information can be found on Wikipedia”, and linking to the homepage of Wikipedia.

Plus I was a little confused to see it reference legal case “no. 84827” – that seems rather an odd numbering for a legal case. In what country is the case with that number filed? If the US, in what state? And what year? There’s nothing other than a five digit number to work with, which would give a maximum of 100,000 numbered cases. I’m no expert, but I don’t think legal case numbering works this way, and I am fairly sure there have been more than a hundred thousand court cases. There’s even been more than 100,000 copyright or DMCA court cases. I’m also surprised that our case has a number when, so far, all we have is, at best, a letter before action.

For a copyright claim assertion, it seemed strange that at no point in the legal letter was there any attempt to demonstrate that the copyright was actually held by the company they’re representing. Which is almost certainly because the client they’re representing does not hold the copyright as claimed. We know that, because we got the image from Pixabay, the royalty-free stock image site, and it was originally taken by KlausHausmann. It appears to be part of a series of medicinal products he’s taken and uploaded to the site – including hand sanitisers, masks, disinfectant, syringes, and toilet roll.

That’s not to pigeon-hole Klaus’ art – he’s also taken series of cats, dogs, guys dressed as Santa, landscapes, and quite a few bare bums with flowers held between the cheeks. He has range. But he also has community spirit, and so he makes these images freely available on a license that, crucially, specifies that it does not require attribution.

Whereas, the legal letter was demanding attribution for their client. Specifically, for an online sex toy reviewer called “LustGasm”. The threat demanded that the credit must take the form of a clickable link through to the LustGasm website. But it did not include any proof that lustgasm own the image. So I took the image, pasted it into TinEye, the reverse image lookup engine, and found 39 instances of the image online… none of which were on the Lustgasm site. It’s possible that they own the rights to an image that they’ve not used, but it still seemed like something of a red flag.

Further, we were told that removing the image won’t resolve the case. This makes very little sense –if this is a notification of copyright violation, and all they want is credit, removing the image clearly would resolve what they’re asking for. Or, if we were to remove the image, would they still demand there is a link to their site, even though there’s nothing there to credit. What if we removed the QED site altogether? Are they arguing that we must keep the QED site operational so that it can include a link to their client’s site? It all seemed rather ill-thought-out.

Nationwide Legal Services

Given the red flags, I decided to look into who this email came from. According to her email footer, Julia Frank is a Trademark Attorney with Nationwide Legal. I went across to their website, which appears to be a fairly boilerplate website for a legal firm. It lists areas of expertise: corporate disputes, copyright litigation, personal injury, arbitration, divorce and property. Scrolling down their page, we even see a photo of Julia Frank, though she’s listed as Civil and Personal Injury Law.

The "Our Lawyers" page of Nationwide Legal Services listing: Bob Rice, Alicia Weber, Harry Sanders, Julia Frank, Jack Moore and Kristy Barrett.

Maybe she was covering for someone – it was, after all, Christmas. Presumably for her colleague Bob Rice, who is apparently the Real Estate and Copyright Law specialist. Or maybe she was covering for Victoria Boyd, who is the Criminal Law/Copyright Law specialist. Apparently, it’s routine for employees of this firm to specialise in two vastly different areas of the law.

Julia’s background is pretty mixed. According to her company profile:

Julia Frank focuses her practice on first-party assets and defense against personal injury and no-fault cases. She has previous courtroom research and drafting experience.

Julia worked as an attorney at the institutional and retail and overall real estate law office before joining Nationwide Legal Services, where she assisted colleagues in real estate disputes, including the preparation of case documents, false allegations, property audit inspections, and all other legal issues related to real estate.

Reading her bio, it does rather sound like Julia assisted colleagues in the preparation of false allegations – which, as it transpires, might be the most honest sentiment published on her website. Curiously, Julia’s profile page lives on the URL “nationwidelegalservice.org/attorneys/janet-harwood/”.

Julia's profile page with the url referencing Janet Harwood

It’s not the only error on Julia/Janet’s website, either: their “Corporate Disputes” page, which has the URL “nationwidelegalservice.org/practice-areas/medical-malpractice/”, reads:

Our lawyers can give legal advice or recommendations to the concerned parties and act as the mediators in any case.

At Thornton  Sims we have expanded to offer multiple types of corporate litigation services. We have also seen a been rapid growth in the number of personnel required for the corporate sector.

The corporate disputes page as described in the full text

Who are Thornton Sims, you might well be asking, and is it Julia or Janet that works for them? Confused, I decided to give Julia/Janet a call for myself, as her number was right there on her company website. Sadly, each time I called it, the call rang for a while and then dropped, as if the number wasn’t real.

It gave me cause for concern, so I looked into when the website for Nationwide Legal was registered – according to Whois, it was registered on the 6th of December 2022, just 22 days before they issued QED with a copyright notice on behalf of Lustgasm.

The Who.is webpage for Nationwide Legal listing the registration date as 06/12/2022

Lustgasm

Lustgasm themselves seem an equally odd company – they were founded by Elena Johnson and James Hamilton, and their site was registered in December 2021, though their first post was apparently published on April 26th, 2021. That first post was a review of BDSM flogging implements, including Click-To-Buy links for each of the recommended products, and an offer code (“BADUMTISH”, in case you’re interested) that would secure a 10% discount.

According to the About page of the website, Elena Johnson is a Sex Educator, Writer and Co-Founder of LustGasm, who originally became fascinated with the relationship between sexual fulfilment and our overall well being whilst studying psychology” and James Hamilton has “always been passionate about optimising my body, and finding ways to improve my experiences in life, and having a good sex life is top of my list of priorities. Over the years, I have spent countless hours researching supplements, exercise and more, but analysing sex toys and products for LustGasm is by far the most fun!”

The "meet the team" page with bios for Elena Johnson and James Hamilton as described in the main text.

Elena and James set up Lustgasm’s Twitter in Feb 2022, but have only tweeted 16 times, they follow nobody and have 2 followers. Hardly a prolific output for a would-be sex toy influencer.

The LustGasmReviews Twitter profile showing 2 followers

Their Instagram footprint has fared little better, with just 20 posts, and 2 followers.

What is particularly strange is that, despite such little penetration into the online sex toy review industry, and despite having come to the scene so recently, they – and Elena especially – are quoted giving sex advice in a number of places around the internet, dating back as early as 2017. For example, there’s an article of valentine tips from Grace Carlson at Actively North West from February 13th 2020 that includes:

if you’re thinking of “adding a distinctly grown-up element” to your day, check out what Elena Johnson has to say on Lust Gasm. You can never say no to some additional advice!.

And in the August 5th, 2019 blog from Mama The Fox about relationship advice to give your teenage daughter, they write:

You can’t shelter your daughter forever, but you can arm her with knowledge, wisdom, confidence, and values to face the wider world. If you’re not too worldly yourself, remember you could always point her towards the advice of someone like Elena Johnson from LustGasm, who talks about the “need to relax, and get into the right mental state” before doing anything with boys.

What could be happening here? How can Elena Johnson be someone whose name has been around the sex advice world in conjunction with the business name LustGasm for at least three or four years, if LustGasm itself is so recent? That’s where things get even more interesting.

Astroturfing in action

To make sense of this confounding timeline, we need to get a little more technical – rather than relying on the dates that appear besides articles and posts in Google search results, we can set the date parameter in Google to exclude any article from 2018 onward, and then search for the term “LustGasm”. Do that, and Google finds no mention of LustGasm anywhere online.

The earliest mention I could find of LustGasm as a business name appeared on the question-and-answer site Quora, in a post that was originally dated from 2017, in which a questioner asks for good names for a sex shop, and a web developer named Matthew Davis responds to say:

“Hmmm. This is a good question. I kept thinking on a catchy name that would still look like a humble store but of course, can fulfill one’s wildest dreams. The names that I came up are Wild Store – they might think this is an animal shop (LOL!). If you need some ideas for the toys you want to sell, please check the link below.”

And the link below is to Lustgasm. Except, the post was updated 9 months ago to add the LustGasm link. In fact, Matthew seems to be quite the evangelist for LustGasm, as he has posted 24 answers in total to Quora, and in March 2022 he went back and edited around half of them to remove the existing link and replace it with a link to LustGasm’s website. In each of those cases, Matthew’s original link, as posted when his reply was first posted, was to a website called “Badumtish” – which, you may recall, is the discount code on that first post from LustGasm.

The upshot of all of this is that when you do a Google search for Lustgasm, what you see in the results is a post on Quora – a well-known site with good brand recognition – recommending Lustgasm.

The Quora link sharing LustGasm

And what about those mentions of Elena Johnson’s advice from 2018 and 2020? How could they have preceded the creation of the LustGasm site? If you take those blog posts and put them into the Wayback Machine, you find that when they were first posted, neither Actively North West nor Mama The Fox mentions Elena Johnson or LustGasm at all. They’ve been subsequently edited to insert her into history, and to give her a realistic looking past.

As best as I can tell, not only is LustGasm a completely fake company, but so is Nationwide Legal Services, and more than likely so are the blogs of Actively North West and Mama The Fox – likely all set up by the same person, who may or may not be web developer Matthew Davis.. or that may be a fake name and fake profile too.

The point of all this

You might be wondering what our Elena/Julia/Janet/Matthew faker gets out of all of this. The answer lies in that first LustGasm blog post – the links to products, and the discount code that users can enter to get 10% off their flogger of choice. That discount code is an affiliate marketing code, and any user who visits the LustGasm site and uses that code to gain their discount will result in a small commission to the site owner.

Given that the commission is likely to be relatively small, the key for Elena/Julia/Janet/Matthew is to maximise the number of people who come across their discount code, which means to gain maximum traffic to the site. Essentially, everything else that’s gone on is to exploit the way search engines rank and prioritise websites.

Search engines – by which we obviously mean Google – try to send users to sites that are relevant. To work that out, they look at a range of proxy metrics – one of which used to be “how many other sites link to this site?”. If it’s a good site, lots of people will link to it. But this incentivised people to devise exploits, like creating link farms: pages filled with links, that only exist to provide backlinks to sites. So Google changed up, and began to penalise sites that linked to a large number of other sites, without providing content of their own. No problem, the affiliate marketer simply creates a network of phoney sites to link to each other, and exploit Google’s reward system.

So Google changed up again, and decided that what’s important isn’t the quantity of links, but the quality of the site that links to your site. That quality would be measured in various ways: age, traffic, type of content, those kinds of things. So how do you exploit that? You need to get high quality sites to link to you. That’s not easy, because those sites are by definition better run than the phoney throwaway sites people can create in a moment.

One way to get backlinks into reputable sites would be to find sites that have regular blogs, and pose as a would-be writer and offer them content that you can tailor to what they do. Find a food blog, write a food article, include a link to your site along the way, and the Google juice will flow. Here at the Skeptic, we get at least five emails a day from would-be marketers. We don’t accept them, even when they offer to pay to place articles.

However, there are other ways to pressure sites into linking to your affiliate marketing site, and this is where our many-hatted scammer comes in. Simply pose as a fake law firm and threaten copyright infringement, and demand that your link get added to their site. A lot of people will get too scared to question it, and will simply add the link, after all, it’s just a link. Like the online women’s magazine “The C Word” did on their April 2021 article “Common Myths About Female Masturbation debunked”, which credits its header image to LustGasm. Or like TimeOut did, with their August 2021 article “The best online sex shops that deliver to Brisbane” – where the header image is credited to the royalty-free image site Unsplash… and to LustGasm. This latter example is particularly impressive: TimeOut clearly knew the source of their header image, and knew that it is a royalty-free image website, but they still decided to grant a copyright credit to a scam site rather than investigate it for a moment.

And this all might sound like a lot of work, but it is easier than you’d think. The Nationwide Legal Services site is, in all, maybe a dozen pages. All of the images are stock images – in fact, I traced many of the images back to Shutterstock, a paid-for image library. In all likelihood, our legal letter came from a phony law firm who themselves were committing copyright violation.

For something more bespoke and less traceable – say, the images of your imagined lawyers and sex bloggers – you can simply visit https://thispersondoesnotexist.com/, the random face generator, and find a face that looks realistic. That’s why they all have that same uncanny valley quality. This might be why Elena, James, Julia, Matthew and each of Julia’s legal colleagues can’t be found anywhere else online.

The faces from the Nationwide Legal website and the LustGasm website

To populate your fake legal site or fake sex blog, you can either grab copy from legitimate sites in those areas, or you could use a text generator like ChatGPT to fill your pages.

Crucially, if and when your whole scam gets uncovered and your fake legal company has so many online warnings that the cover is no longer credible, you can simply change the company logo, the names of the lawyers, the stock images on the pages and the URL of your site, and hey presto, “Thornton Sims” becomes “Nationwide Legal”. You can register a new sex toy review site (moving from “BadumTish!” to “LustGasm”), taking over the old blog content you’d put together, and start again.

Most interestingly of all, you can then go into the various other places you’d posted to give your sites credibility – like Quora, or the astroturf sites you created – and update the posts and articles to refer to your new expert and your new scam business. Those sites are kept at arms’ length from the scam itself, and in some cases they’re posts on legitimate and recognisable websites, so when your main scam company gets burned, those posts don’t burn with them. Even better, once edited, those posts retain the original publishing dates, even though the names and recommendations get updated – giving your freshly-minted scam website the illusion of a history and a footprint.

Now, none of this is to say that you should ignore DMCA notifications. But if you do get asked to add a credit to a weird company for an image you’re pretty sure is royalty free, or if you get offered money to accept an article for your blog, maybe give it all a second thought, because it might just be a scam.

Institute Question of Science in Brazil: from fighting pseudoscience to advising governments

Natália Pasternak
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In January 2021, the then governor of the State of Sao Paulo – the wealthiest state in Brazil, and home of the country’s most prestigious universities – asked me to take part in an official presentation to reassure the public about the safety and efficacy of COVID-19 vaccines. A few months later, in July, I was deposing in the Brazilian Congress, explaining the logic of clinical trials to the Senate Investigating Committee who were trying to establish the culpability of then President Jair Bolsonaro in the Brazilian COVID-19 tragedy. And last November, I was invited to offer public policy proposals on science and health to the transition task force organising the new federal government, under President-elect Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva.

I have a PhD in Microbiology and I am an award-winning science writer, but in all of the above I was acting as founder and president of a skeptical organisation – the Instituto Questão de Ciência (IQC), or Question of Science Institute.

We – three friends and myself – created IQC in 2018, the year Jair Bolsonaro was elected President. Our goal was to inform the public and policy makers about the importance of making science-based decisions. We wanted to influence the public debate and help make science a general topic to be considered among those that usually figure in everyday conversations such as politics, education, and of course, in our country, football (soccer). We had some role models in mind, and CFI/CSI was on our list.

One of our founding partners, Carlos Orsi, was very familiar with CFI and the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry, and wrote to the director, Barry Karr, asking for help. Barry couldn’t have been kinder and became a dear friend to all of us in IQC. We presented a paper on the Sunday Paper session of CSICON 2018, and had the privilege of having long conversations with Barry Karr, Ray Hall and Susan Gerbic, who gave us advice on how to run a Skeptic NGO. Professor Richard Dawkins recorded a video wishing us luck and expressing his hope that IQC became very influential, and James Randi did the same.

I wonder if Professor Dawkins knows just how prophetic he was. Maybe he is psychic. In four years’ time,  IQC went from a niche skeptic organisation to participating in hearings at the Congress, being a constant presence in the national and international media, partnering with international organisations, participating in a taskforce at the World Health Organization, exposing the growing antivax movement in Brazil (and getting sued for doing so), and, as Bolsonaro’s government finally comes to an end, getting called up to advise President-elect Lula’s transition team.

We launched IQC in November 2018, with Professor Edzard Ernst as our keynote speaker, and with the clear message that one of our main goals would be to fight pseudoscience and alternative medicine in Brazil’s public healthcare system. As of now, the Brazilian SUS – our homegrown version of the British NHS – pays for 29 different alternative practices, ranging from homeopathy and acupuncture to ones you probably never heard of, such as family constellation, circular dancing and mud therapy.

Our online magazine, launched in 2018, publishes an average of four articles a week, and has accumulated over 3.7 million readers since its inception. During the pandemic we reached a peak of 200 thousand readers per month, and 80 thousand in one single day. We were the first Brazilian publication to expose hydroxychloroquine as a hoax.

IQC began as a very “garden variety” skeptical organisation – a niche group, doing on-the-ground work to try to push against the waves of commercial propaganda, official endorsement (or complacency) and media sympathy for things like horoscopes and quantum healing. Besides sustaining our own online presence, we would do seminars, send letters to the newspapers, and offer training courses for science and health journalists.

Then the pandemic hit, and the federal government, taken by conspiracy-mongers and denialists, couldn’t be trusted. Suddenly we were the media’s go-to institution for clear, understandable and trustworthy information on the virus and its purported “cures”, like hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin. Our team worked non-stop producing pandemic-related content and debunking Covid myths. We started our own YouTube show, “The Plague Diaries”. As a result, we were sued for referring to President Bolsonaro as a “plague”. We also organised the Science “C” Day (C for Ciência in Portuguese), in response to the government’s “D Day”, when the Ministry of Health was supposed to hold an online press conference to promote miracle Covid cures. The “D Day” was cancelled after we announced that our “C Day” would present the opinions of seven former Health Ministers and several scientists.

The year of 2021 was marked by our first experience co-organising an international event, the Aspen Global Congress for Scientific Thinking and Action, in partnership with the Office for Science and Society of the Aspen Institute. One of the outcomes of this congress was the launch of the PBS documentary Infodemic, featuring many of our speakers. IQC was also hired to advise the office responsible for the national census on Covid safety.

In 2022, we launched our Observatory of Science Policies, to keep track of science, health and environmental-related legislation and public policies in Brazil.

The high point of this period came perhaps when we were called by the presidential transition team to present proposals in health and science. We suggested the creation of the post of Chief Scientific Advisor to the President, and changes in the structure of the National Vaccines Program to keep it free from ideological interference.

As the Covid emergency recedes, we see that our initial fight, the guerrilla war on pseudoscience and alternative medicine, still has to be fought. Some of the people who were our allies and cheerleaders against ivermectin seem to find it hard to sympathise with our criticism of homeopathy. We went from the margins to the mainstream, and now we try to find our proper place somewhere in between, while strengthening our position as advisors for science-based policy making. It’s going to be interesting.

Vabbing: the TikTok trend of using vaginal secretions as perfume, to attract a partner

Mike Hall
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Vabbing: the TikTok trend of using vaginal secretions as perfume, to attract a partner

Two of the things I think 2022 will be remembered for is the fall of Twitter and the continued rise of TikTok. For the uninitiated, TikTok is a social media platform that allows users to create and share short video clips, often set to music. It has become particularly popular among younger users, and has gained a reputation for being a breeding ground for viral content.

Content on TikTok moves very quickly and can become extremely popular and widely shared on the platform, with many users actively striving to create content designed to go viral, as this can lead to a large number of views and followers on the platform.

One trend of this sort which became popular with TikTokers was ‘vabbing’. Proponents of vabbing, who are almost exclusively young women, say that the practice greatly increases their sexual success.

‘If you vab, you will attract people,’ said one vabber. ‘I have done this for years and it works every single time,’ said another. ‘Men can’t resist’.

Vabbing, is a contraction of ‘vagina’ and ‘dabbing’, where you wear your own vaginal secretions as if they were perfume. Dabbing it behind your ears, on your neck, and on your wrists — before then going on a night out and letting your natural pheromones attract the manly men that your Chanel No5 would have left un-phased.

Exactly which secretions vabbers refer to is unclear, because the technique is often described in euphemisms, but I assume they are referring to the vaginal lubrication produced during arousal, rather than the more common-or-garden wetness which keeps your ecosystem ticking along.

While some claim to have been vabbing for decades, it came to prominence recently when the self-described sexologist Shannon Boodran wrote about it in her 2019 book The Game of Desire. At the time, she wrote:

I am certain that every single time I employ it, it makes me feel like an enchanted goddess with a delicious secret.

Vabbing has recently enjoyed a resurgence in interest, with predominantly young women trying out vabbing at the gym, on a night out, or wherever, and then reporting their amazing success on TikTok.

Of course, because of the way TikTok works, this not only drives other people to try it for themselves and publish videos of their own, but it also drives other people to post videos decrying the practice as disgusting, and yet more to post videos on how this vabbing stuff this is all nonsense and you’re falling for a scam. All of which means that vabbing as a topic gains prominence and is pushed into more and more people’s feeds.

But does wearing your vaginal secretions increase your sexual success? Is there any good data to support vabbing?

You will probably be unsurprised to learn that there is no good data on vabbing itself. While proponents claim it is not a new phenomenon, it is at least a niche phenomenon, so nobody yet has conducted twenty-year studies on it. Proponents do often cite pheromones as the mechanism by which vabbing works, however, and there is certainly data on that.

Pheromones are chemical messengers which are transported outside of the human body, in contrast that with hormones, which are similar chemical messengers that remain within the body. Many animals use pheromones as part of reproduction, with sex pheromones being used to indicate to others that a particular animal is sexually available.

But are humans one of those animals? As best we can tell, probably not. Humans do not appear to be biologically equipped to use pheromones. The organ responsible for the detection of pheromones – the vomeronasal organ – is present in many common mammals, including cats, horses, pigs, and even some primates. But in humans the genes which code for this organ appear to be nonfunctional, and the organ itself, assuming it can even be located, does not appear to be connected to our nervous system. Even if the human vomeronasal organ were functional and detecting something, it has no means to tell the rest of the body about it.

Evolutionarily speaking, this might make some sense. Many other animals use pheromones for communication — indicating sexual availability or marking territory — whereas humans have replaced these functions with Tinder and the Land Registry.

Many animals use pheromones for communication — indicating sexual availability or marking territory — whereas humans have replaced these functions with Tinder and the Land Registry.

Even if the vomeronasal organ is functional, which we don’t know is the case, do human even produce chemicals we could characterise as pheromones at all?

A study published by the Royal Society in 2017 looked into this question. Ninety-four participants, forty-three male, fifty-one female – all self-reported as heterosexual, non-smoking, and white, were recruited from the campus of the University of Western Australia. One assumes the participants were also all cisgendered, though the paper itself is silent on this.

Across two days, participants were assigned to exposure to either androstadienone (AND) or estratetraenol (EST), purported to be a human male and female sexual pheromone respectively. Exposure was achieved by a cotton ball taped under the nose, and in both cases, the scent of the pheromone was masked with clove oil. So this wasn’t just as simple as recognising a smell, there had to be some chemical-biological reaction to the pheromone. And of course there was also a clove-oil-only control.

The treatment order was randomised. So you either got clove oil on day one, and clove oil plus pheromone on day two, or the other way around. The choice of pheromone used each session was assigned pseudo-randomly (pseudo in this case to ensure balance).

Participants were then shown photographs and asked to rate them. The women were asked to rate men, and the men asked to rate women, on the basis of how attractive they found them. And what they found was… absolutely nothing. There was no difference in attractiveness scores when exposed to pheromones compared to controls.

From the paper:

Exposure to the putative pheromones had no effect on [attractiveness ratings]. These results are consistent with those of other experimental studies and reviews that suggest AND and EST are unlikely to be human pheromones.

This tells us only that AND and EST is not likely to be a human pheromone, not that we don’t produce pheromones at all, though AND and EST are the most commonly cited candidates for human sexual pheromones.

We also don’t know, of course, that EST is the pheromone which is supposedly associated with vabbing, not least because the proponents of vabbing don’t name a specific chemical which is supposed to be the ‘active ingredient’ here, they just say hand-wavingly claim ‘it is pheromones’ and maybe point at some animal studies.

But the presence of AND doesn’t seem to increase men’s attractiveness to women, and EST doesn’t seem to increase a woman’s attractiveness to men. But then we should have known this already. You go into any one of the (variably) discrete sex shops you’ll find tucked away in UK high streets, and you’ll see for sale so-called pheromone sex sprays, which purport to make you irresistible.

And of course they don’t do a thing. If human behaviour was significantly influenced by the effects of pheromones, products like those sprays wouldn’t just be something you find behind the counter at a sex shop. It would be sold in bundles alongside a pack of viagra. It’d be next to the condoms in Boots. Or maybe they wouldn’t be legal at all, as a form of sexual coercion.

So if pheromones play no part in human sexuality, why do so many young TikTokers report vabbing as an amazing success? There are a few possible explanations. One is the file drawer effect. Women who vab and then go out clubbing and don’t pull perhaps aren’t as likely to make a TikTok video about it. That will skew reports into the positive.

Another is confirmation bias. Women who vab and then go out clubbing are going to attribute any romantic or sexual success to the vab, because that’s what they’re expecting to happen. Even if those successes would have come anyway.

A third is what some reporters characterised as a sexual placebo effect. Women who vab and then go out clubbing are going to feel more confident in themselves, they are going to feel more attractive, feel more irresistible, and that additional confidence might be what is resulting in an increase in their romantic and sexual success.

And finally, there could be a scent thing going on. That doesn’t mean it is pheromones at work, but it could be as simple as men, consciously or subconsciously, recognising the smell from sex. It’s classical conditioning: you smell that a lot when you’re engaged in sexual activity, and when you smell it in another context it turns you on.

Personally, I think this latter explanation is unlikely because, let’s be honest, there are an awful lot of far more potent smells you will find in your local nightclub or gym that you would have to get past before you can detect the subtle scent of vaginal lubrication on a woman’s neck. But I struggle to argue that this is impossible.

Returning to Shannon Boohran’s book The Game of Desire, she is a lot more circumspect about the efficacy of vabbing than the current TikTok vabbers appear to be. The full quote from Game of Desire was:

Regardless of if vaginal pheromones truly make a person irresistible or not, the fact that you think it does, will cause you to act in a bolder, more confident manner. There are no health risks for others and unless you suspect you may have bacterial vaginosis, it will not make you smell bad. I’ve used this technique countless times in the past ten years and have had mixed results: sometimes people are flocking to me, sometimes I don’t notice a difference. So while I’m not sure how effective this experiment is, I am certain that every single time I employ it, it makes me feel like an enchanted goddess with a delicious secret.

So maybe it is just a confidence thing? And if so, does that mean it’s all okay? I mean, there are plenty of other things that people do to give them a lift of confidence when they’re on the pull. Contouring your boobs, wearing lifts in your shoes, or putting on your best shirt. Is a little spritz of vab maybe a-ok?

While vabbing is probably harmless in 99.9% of cases, there may be some risks. Most notably, the risk of passing on an STI. Now this is probably low risk, as many sexually transmitted infections are actually remarkably fragile and don’t survive well outside the body. But Hepatitis B, for example, can live on a surface for several days. So if you have an STI, especially Hep B, probably stick to your bottle of Chanel.

Ultimately, if it helps you feel good about you — and it is safe to do so — I don’t think it’s my place to tell anyone how they should be living their lives. So while it’s unnecessary, if you’re going to have fun then vab away. But it probably isn’t going to be the magnificent man-magnet you think it is.

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Expert skeptical analysis of pseudoscience, conspiracy theory and claims of the paranormal.

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