Daily Excerpt: Porn and the Pandemic (Shea) - Thus Began the Age of Covid-19

 



Excerpt from Porn and the Pandemic by Joshua Shea

My introduction to the world of journalism came as a high school senior in August 1993 when I was hired in the sports department of the Sun Journal in Lewiston, Maine.  With the exception of short breaks here and there, I have exclusively made my living as either a journalist or editor since then.

I was never the journalist who dreamed of being dropped into a war zone or into the thick of a presidential race. I saw no reason to go to Fenway Park to cover a Boston Red Sox game. It seemed just as easy to watch the game on television and get the same quotes every other writer did in the post-game news conference. And while armed stand-offs may be exciting to read about or watch in a two-minute news clip, I’ve been to them in real life. It’s mostly sitting behind your car waiting for something exciting to happen. Spoiler: It never does.

I found my niche in research. I went to my share of five-alarm fires, and there certainly is a morbid kind of adrenaline rush that comes with watching a city block burn to the ground, I found that I’d rather learn about a fire that happened 75 years ago with historical significance and try to chase down somebody who is still alive and can tell me about it.

My “big story” was found sifting through old newspapers on a microfiche machine and examining scientific studies to learn how things have changed and if we’ve learned anything. As I write these very sentences in May 2020, several states are reopening many of the businesses and institutions that have been closed as part of a two-month quarantine to minimize the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic. Perhaps everything will be fine and we’re near the end of this crisis. Perhaps it will bring on another round of cases worse than the first and we’ll be brought back to square one. If you’re reading this in the far future, you know that answer, you lucky ducks.

Maine, where I live at the time of writing this, has been one of the least-effected states in the country. We’ve had less people die in two months of the virus combined than many of the hotspots like New York City get in one day. Although it had been making news, most people here only learned of the potential severity of the virus and started taking it seriously following the national address of President Donald Trump on March 11, 2020.

My attention had been focused a little longer than most here. I was scheduled to make a trip to Los Angeles in early April 2020 for a working vacation with my son, Kaden, which would have also included recording an audio version of my second book, He’s a Porn Addict… Now What? An Expert and Former Addict Answer Your Questions with co-author Tony Overbay and to film two episodes of the Sex & Society Podcast with sexuality writer and intimacy coach Valerie Baber.

The plan was to stay with my brother, Patrick, but he began warning me a week before President Trump’s address that Los Angeles International Airport had become the national hotspot (along with pockets of Washington state and New Rochelle, New York) for the pandemic and, lack of xenophobia aside, it was scary not knowing who was coming into Los Angeles and what they were bringing with them. Day-by-day, the news got scarier, and on March 13, I cancelled the trip and began buying toilet paper in bulk.

Read more posts about Joshua and his books HERE.

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