The Global Impact of the COVID-19 Pandemic on Individuals’ and Couples’ Sexuality

Choose a Girl

Participants no longer at their original school were surveyed at an alternate time and location. A total of 557 individuals participated in this study, of who 196 (35.2%) identified their gender as male, 347 (62.3%) as female and 13 (2.3%) as “other”, “neither” or “both” genders. Regarding sexual orientation, 429 (77%) reported being heterosexual, 56 (10.1%) bisexual, 30 (3.6%) gay, 13(2.3%) asexual, 12 (2.2%) pansexual, 6 (1.1%) lesbian, 1 (0.2%) queer, 11 (2%) were questioning or unsure and 6 (1.1%) reported “other” sexual orientation. Regarding couple relationship status, 385 (69.1%) of the participants had a steady partner in the three months before COVID-19. The state-of-the-art literature represents the first attempt to understand the changes in couples’ and individuals’ sexuality, during a stressful situation such as the COVID-19 pandemic.

LGBT People’s Sexuality in the Pandemic

For sexual desire, 23.1% of participants reported a reduction in desire during the restrictions period than in the pre-pandemic period (Shilo and Mor, 2020a). This new form of fraud is perpetrated not by individual scammers but corporate entities marketing themselves to potential employees and clients as social media and customer service management companies. Companies hire individuals online to work as “chat moderators” or “customer service providers” with the expectation that workers will employ the company’s customer service database to guide “clients” through a customer service complaint or service request. In other cases, employees are told that they are being hired to advance engagement on new social media platforms. Romance scammers can thereby maximize the rate and efficiency of their criminal behaviors across many more victims in many more locations than would be possible in a traditional FtF scam (Topalli & Nikolovska, 2020).

Contents

When then-FBI Director James Comey pronounced her a liar but a liar who could not be prosecuted, her campaign pronounced the candidate absolved of wrongdoing. Trump hyped a purported criminal investigation into the Clinton foundation on the eve of the election — a “likely indictment” that never materialized. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms. The reviewer LP declared a shared affiliation, with no collaboration, with one of the authors SE to the handling editor at the time of the review.

We chose three country-level measures that could both immediately and more proximally impact access to sex. Data for the current study were drawn from a larger project, “International Sexual Health And REproductive Health during COVID-19” (I-SHARE-1)—a cross-sectional, online, 30-country study conducted between August 2020 and January 2021. The purpose of the study was to assess adult sexual and reproductive health before and during the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic in respective countries. Research teams were initially identified through a UNDP/UNFPA/UNICEF/WHO/World Bank Special Programme of Research, Development and Research Training in Human Reproduction (HRP) crowdsourcing open call and additionally recruited affiliates of the Academic Network for Sexual and Reproductive Health and Rights (ANSER).

From a sampling perspective, the predominance of existing data documenting changes in sexual behavior comes from single-country studies. To date, very few studies have had appropriate data to enable multi-country comparisons of sexual behavior change (Michielsen et al., 2021), and studies have been disproportionately from high-income countries (Batz et al., 2022; Dema et al., 2022). Policymakers at the national and global levels have underscored the need for high-quality, multi-country studies that more robustly represent country-level differences in important factors, such as income or pandemic response. In addition, the different wording of questions (e.g., survey items for main vs. casual partner sex) may have impacted how participants responded. In addition, we were not able to offer specific definitions of terms (e.g. providing expanded wording for terms or defining partner type). Some of the factors we examined (e.g. household context, mental health, or partnership status) could have impacted the selection of one behavior relative to another.

• In this context, it is necessary to develop educational programs that consider personal, familial, and situational vulnerabilities and weaknesses in order to foster resilient individuals who can successfully confront the risks inherent to cyberspace.
• Furthermore, the similarity of COVID-19 symptoms with those of other diseases, the concern for children, the fear of losing loved ones, and the lack of support to vulnerable individuals are other threats to psychological well-being (Brooks et al., 2020).
• In this vein, sexual activity seems to play a protective role on individual psychological health.
• Furthermore, compared to those who used to have casual sex before the pandemic but stopped after the COVID-19 outbreak, MSM who continued to engage in casual sex were more likely to engage in sexual behaviors (having anal sex, using sex toys during intercourse, paying or being paid for sex) before the pandemic.
• Authors found that experimental sexting behaviors were used to promote emotional closeness with their partner, rather than to escape from their negative feelings.

However, the photos were now lingering in a state of political purgatory after a long-time supporter of Mei struck a deal to keep them from being made public. I’ve seen them and I was told to suppress them,” a local political operative said. Cyberbullying refers to the misuse of electronic media, aiming at harming, humiliating or intimidating others and leads to severe, long-lasting traumatization and even life-threatening consequences.

Moreover, women working as healthcare workers, living with their partner, and having low sexual satisfaction experienced low levels of desire (De Rose et al., 2021). Additionally, this survey assessed self-reported sexual behavior changes at one point during the pandemic. Because they survey was open for several months, it likely that we collected data from participants during types of local infection periods (e.g. “stable” vs. “surge”), which could have influenced their recollection of any behavior change. These same time-based limitations also apply to our country-level measurements of COVID-19 strictness, income inequality, and human development.

It is plausible for such changes to also have affected sexual behaviors and sexual satisfaction. For age, during the quarantine compared to before, Wignall et al. (2021) found a decrease in sexual desire and a general decrease in sexual behaviors in a sample of young adults, aged 18–32. In another study, Cocci et al. (2020) found that sexual dissatisfaction in both men and women was significantly correlated with younger age and depression levels. The literature showed that young adults cope with many normative transitions (Arnett, 2000) including educational and professional development, social and romantic relationships, and living away from family.

Nearly all (84.2%) reported no change in how often they performed or watched sexual acts over the internet using a webcam. While some differences were noted with respect to sex, age, and race/ethnicity, it is clear that teen sexting is prevalent among adolescents. More than a quarter of teens in the current sample reported sending a naked picture of themselves to another teen, and more than half have been asked to send one.

Moreover, encouraging people to trying new sexual activities with their partner can be useful to cope with a stressful situation and to improve the couple’s sexual life. Special attention should be paid to categories mostly at risk of negative outcomes such as women and LGBT+ people, as well as individuals at risk for maladaptive use of sexting or pornography. Interventions to these latter risks should be focused on raising awareness on individual’s own coping responses and on the implementation of functional coping strategies. In a survey conducted on a sample aged 18 or older living in Australia, participants were asked about their sexual lives during all of 2019 and the period after March 22, coinciding with the lockdown period (Coombe et al., 2021). Responders reported a median of one sexual partner in both time windows considered but 89.8% said they had sex in 2019 while 60.3% said they had sex during lockdown. Only 14.3% of participants affirmed that they were having more sex during lockdown vs. the remaining participants (53.5%) who suggested a decrease in sex frequency.