The History of Condoms

Author Unknown

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Late in the nineteenth century rubber replaced animal gut as the condom material of choice ...

It's not known how long condoms have been in existence. Some scholars claim to have found allusions to them in the works of Virgil and the Roman satirists.

Condoms (and dildos) first appeared in England in 1660, supposedly brought over from Italy, and were in wide use by the eighteenth century, when sexually transmitted diseases had become rampant in Europe. By then they'd become so common that they were manufactured, openly sold, even advertised as "implements of safety which secure the health" in Paris and London. Mrs. Lewis held the London monopoly in the 1740s. By 1770 the monopoly passed to Mrs. Phillips, who became famous for her products.

We find many references to condoms in the literature of the day: Samuel Johnson's biographer James Boswell casually writes in his journals of sexual encounters in which he was "unclad" - i.e., not wearing a condom. The young author agonises over whether he's contracted a venereal illness and will have to undergo a protracted and painful cure for "the clap".

Early condoms were expensive if natural, products usually made of lengths of sheep intestine sewn closed at one end and colourfully secured at the base with a red ribbon tied around the balls. Often ill-fitting and strong smelling they became increasingly expensive, rare and difficult to obtain as rural areas shrank and sexual hypocrisy grew in strength during the Industrial Revolution. Late in the nineteenth century rubber replaced animal gut as the condom material of choice, but these early products broke easily unless they were made so thick that most pleasurable sensations were completely dulled. The perfection of vulcanised rubber in the beginning of our century not only made possible the durable rubber tyres that assured the ascendancy of the automobile in America, but also allowed for the cheaper, safer, thinner, and thus more pleasurable latex condom.

By the Second World War, every kit handed out to the millions of men in the United States armed forces contained its share of "rubbers" - as latex condoms had come to be known - for protection against venereal disease. At the same time, the discovery of penicillin and antibiotics seemed to promise a future free of the worries that had afflicted our ancestors' sexual lives. Up to about 1970, young men still carried fold-up wallets indelibly deformed by the impression of a rolled up Trojan, Sheik, or other brand of condom, but with a somewhat different intention: birth control. With the advent and instant popularity of the oral birth-control pill taken daily by women, condoms all but vanished from American life.

Condoms hadn't ever been in widespread use among homosexuals to begin with; when they entered gay sexual life at all, it was usually as a curiosity, a sex toy. Especially among those gay men who'd come out since the Stonewall rebellion of 1969 or who'd never had any heterosexual experience, condoms - if they were thought of or used at all were considered kinky, sometimes a little daring.

Now however, with the spread of H.I.V., condoms have become mandatory in all of our lives - truly a matter of life or death.

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