STD awareness: How one young woman aims to bring light to a tough, yet necessary conversation

When Jenelle Marie Davis first contracted a sexually transmitted infection, she initially felt stigmatized by the first two people that she told: her doctor and her best friend. However, Jenelle — who is now an STD awareness activist — has never been rejected by a potential partner because of her infection.

33 year-old Davis contracted herpes at the age of sixteen. “I developed really early and started to gain interest in boys, I had a couple of boyfriends and became sexually active.”

Davis was raised in a small conservative town in West Michigan, where religion had been a prominent aspect of her young life.

Her early life in the church perpetuated the inability to be open about sex, and Davis claims that the lack of support from her church ultimately led her to feeling like a pariah for being someone who was interested in sex.

“I ended up losing my virginity at sixteen, and had a couple of partners and then contracted genital herpes so it was kind of one of those things that snowballed.”

Upon contracting herpes, Davis said that her diagnosis experience was horrific. Her practitioner was not empathetic. The doctor told her that it was the worst case of herpes he’d ever seen, and she wasn’t given any sort of information or any affirmation that herpes is actually extraordinarily common.

“The sad part is that, that’s the one person who people assume are going to be non-judgmental. When the very first person who you ever have a discussion with about it is stigmatizing you, that sets the bar that now every experience I have telling someone will be a bad experience.”

When Davis told her best friend that she had herpes — this said “friend” told the whole high school. Due to ignorance and lack of information, Davis can now see why so many people feed into the idea that herpes means you’re slutty or immoral.

“People aren’t given the practical information that so many people contract these infections. So everybody’s looking at it like oh my gosh we can’t talk about this. But if they don’t really talk about it then we can just pretend that it’s not really happening, and then they face the consequences after the fact.”

Davis is now a well known activist in the community, and runs a website called the ‘STD project’ that is dedicated to reducing the stigma around sexually transmitted diseases.

“I’ve said to two people who’ve recently shown interest in me, you know what I do for a living right? I run the STD project and I’m like the STD lady,” Davis says.

But this did not bother either of those people, who actually found Davis’ confidence and honesty attractive.

Given the opportunity Davis would not change the fact that she contracted herpes at 16, because she says that it has helped cultivate her and make her a more accepting person. She does hope for a cure one day, but finds her infection manageable through holistic and suppressive therapy.