peripheries

Female condom: Love in a pack of crisp?

August 12th, 2008 | by Roger |

Few people are aware that woman can also use condoms, called female condom or femidom and that the technology was developed 15 years ago. Then hailed as the tool that would finally empower women (in a long line of other empowering gimmicks) the femidon failed to live to its promise.

“This is a 15-year scandal born of ignorance and inertia,” said Mary Robinson (Oxfam’s honorary president) the Globe and Mail reports. “We now know that millions of women might have been spared HIV, unwanted pregnancies, and empowered themselves in the process, if they had access to this simple method.”

One of the reasons that explain the failure of the femidom to take off is its cost: it is 18 times more expensive than a male condom. But it may also be that it is not very practical and that it “interrupts the flow of sex” as wrote Elizabeth Pisani in The Wisdom of Whores where she described it “as a supermarket shopping bag stuck in your pussy, with handles hanging out the bottom.” Or because “it sounds as if you are making love inside a packet of potatoes crisps – crinkle-crackle-crinkle-crackle”.

However, it seems that femidoms have had some relative success in countries where no negative image became immediately associated with the product (Comedian Jo Brand, who couldn’t resist such a comic gift jested that they were “What a nightmare if one of those falls out of your handbag in the pub. What do you say? ‘It’s all right, I’m just off on a ballooning weekend.“)

Anne Philpott, who worked for the company producing the femidom (Female Health Company) and introduced it in sexual health programmes targeting female sex worker in Colombo, Sri Lanka, recalled that “their clients hadn’t heard of a female condom before. So there were no preconceptions, and rather than saying, ‘This is a condom, this is going to protect you,’ [the women] marketed it as a sex toy, allowing the client to insert it - a real thrill, because seeing a vagina up close, or touching one, is a huge taboo in Sri Lanka.”

In some other countries women have been able to establish a connection in men’s brain between the femidom characteristic noise and the prospect of pleasure.

“In Senegal, the condoms are sold with noisy “bine bine” beads; an erotic accessory that women wear around their hips. The rustle of the polyurethane during sex is now associated with the clicking of the beads - and so, a turn-on.”

Is it all about marketing? And should we trust women to market the femidom? After all, who knows a man in need of sex better than a woman who has to provide it?

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