Love, Honor and Obey the Vah-Jay-Jay

How many of you remember 8th grade health class? I’m sure most of the girls out there have it burned into their memories — if your class was anything like mine, it probably involved some sadistic male teacher who took that video about “The Miracle Of Life” and waited until the moment the baby’s head was poking out and then proceded to rewind and fastforward for about 10 minutes, narrating “Baby goes in, baby comes out! Baby goes in, baby comes out!” I’m pretty sure my health teacher single-handedly ensured that our entire class would adopt.

But health class was also where we learned about condoms, that wonderful invention that has kept me a happy, satisfied woman for the past, well, I’m not going to say how long I haven’t been a virgin, but it’s a significant period of time that would have been much shittier had I not been having sex. And so, while the male condom has been my friend for years, I have long forgotten about that other weird latex contraption they showed me (and which is somewhat illustrated above): the Female Condom.

[I was going to put a picture of a female condom here, but you'd be surprised how Not Safe For Work all those pictures are... and I happen to be at work right now. Sorry folks.]

I’m not the only one, apparently. The New York Times has an article today about how scientists are now re-designing the Female Condom in hopes that more women, especially in the Third World where AIDS continues to be pandemic, will use them and therefore start slowing the spread of the disease:

Only about 12 million female condoms are delivered each year in poor countries, compared with about 6 billion male condoms. Couples complained that the female version was awkward, unsightly, noisy and slippery — or, as Mitchell Warren, who was one of its earliest champions, now says, “the yuck factor was a problem.” Many women tried it, but in the end, it was adopted mainly by prostitutes.

[snip]

The redesigned female condom is made of softer, thinner polyurethane to better transmit warmth. It is easier to insert; one end is bunched up as small as a tampon, an improvement on the old design, which resembled the stiff rubber ring of a diaphragm and had to be folded into a figure 8 for insertion.

During sex, the new female condom also moves more like a vagina than the old design did, according to couples in Seattle, Thailand, Mexico and South Africa who tested a series of prototypes, said Joanie Robertson, project manager for the condom at PATH. The old design hung passively from the rubber ring, which could shift around and sometimes hurt; the new design has dots of adhesive foam that adhere to the vaginal walls, expanding with them during arousal.

According to PATH, more than 90 percent of the couples were satisfied with the ease of use and comfort of the new condom, and 98 percent found the sensation of sex to be “O.K. to very satisfactory.”

Unfortunately, scientists are encountering two basic problems in getting women in developing countries to wear these things (new and improved as they are). One is trouble with gender politics:

However, the new design does not overcome the glaring drawback that doomed the first to be a niche product: it cannot be used secretly. For that reason, married women, now one of the highest risk groups for AIDS in poor countries, rarely use it.

“I don’t want my husband to know that I am wearing a condom,” said Lois B. Chingandu, the director of SAfaids, an anti-AIDS organization in Zimbabwe.

“Condoms are almost undiscussable within a marriage” in Africa, she added. “It is something associated with casual sex. If a wife uses a condom, the message is that you have been unfaithful. If she even initiates the discussion, it tips the power scale. Men resist quite a lot, and it can result in violence.”

Many developing countries, and especially in Africa, emphasize the importance of men and the dangers of women — women who have AIDS are unclean or impure; they have gotten it because they have cheated on their husbands (it doesn’t matter whether or not they have gotten it from their husbands in the first place); men believe that sex with virgins can cure AIDS; women cannot be raped (as the subserviant gender there is no right to say “no”), etc. Women who insist on condoms in the bedroom are seen as undermining their husbands, or — if they are about to be or newly married — as impure and deviant females who deserve punishment. Because the female condom cannot be used in secret, men can deny women from using them, even beat or kill the woman trying to wear it. And that will do nothing to stop the spread of AIDS.

There are also problems with cost, with material, and with marketing. But the new design is a start, and we need any start we can get.