How will sexual customs change if STDs become untreatable?

This does make one wonder: how will modern sexual customs change if untreatable STDs once again become common? We think of the sexual revolution as having been sparked by the pill, and of course, that was a large part of it. But I doubt the pill would have been popular if antibiotics hadn’t already taken care of the diseases that used to afflict the promiscuous before World War II.

I’m not arguing that we’d return to pre-sixties morality–obviously, AIDS did not cause the gay community to stop having sex. On the other hand, given drug-development timelines, we actually developed treatments pretty rapidly (and very actively managed them to prevent resistance–that’s one of the reasons that patients take “cocktails” instead of single drugs). People have gotten used to thinking of pharmaceutical development as a wonder-drug factory that can pop out treatments on demand, provided that we want it badly enough. But that’s not actually how it works, particularly with antibiotics. Once chlamydia or gonorrhea develop resistance to the antibiotics we have, there’s no guarantee that we’ll get new ones that treat them. And safe sex never became as common as educators and activists had hoped.

Thankfully, syphilis is still susceptible to penicillin, though that’s not guaranteed to continue, as it’s showing resistance to other antibiotics. Still, the next few decades seem like a great time to be monogamous.