Author Archives: Condom Monologuer

About Condom Monologuer

Condom Monologuers are anyone willing to share personal testimonies, stories, pros, advice, questions related to safer sex (or lack thereof!). They are anonymous or otherwise contributors at Condom Monologues.

Call For Contributors!

Hey Sex-Positives!  CM is reaching out for more contributors.  CM wants to help with your sex-positive project.

CondomCroppedIf you like writing and making stories; If you are interested in the different meanings of “safe sex”; If you are passionate about open access to safer sex info that’s relevant to people’s diversity, Condom Monologues wants to work with you!

WTF is Condom Monologues?

It’s a newly launched open archive and small (4 writers and growing) media start-up providing safer sex information through real-life storytelling.  Drawing from our own experiences, we aim to provoke frank discussion about what “safer” sex means to different people. The project was made out of frustration about standard sex ed. curricula that continues to teach safety with a very narrow “normal” lens. Politically correct advice that emphasizes condoms and abstinence is not enough.  Everyone has a bad sex ed. story to tell, whether from the classroom, family or medical health professionals.

This is a different way to access education about bodies, desire, consent and sexual health.  Anyone can be involved, share experiences and seek information relevant to their wants and needs.  We also engage with the sex positive community by helping raise awareness of activism and projects.  The website is structured to be difference-inclusive, pleasure-oriented and sex-positive.

Seeking Storytellers

In order to be an inclusive sex ed. resource, CM needs you.  This is a call for people to share their real life safe sex (and not so safe) stories. This can be done with strict anonymity. 

Whether narratives are seemingly mundane, brief, serious, confusing, there is opportunity to convey information and relate to others.  Stories are told digitally which opens up unlimited ways of creating and sharing: We use a range of audio-visual multimedia platforms like iMovie, Vine, Tumblr, Blogposts, etc.

We do not claim to speak to everyone’s experience, but we aim to be as inclusive as possible and create an archive from which we may all unlearn and learn about sex-positivity.

How to Contact

CM wants people to join on their own terms, in their own capacity.  If you are interested in this project please contact us ASAP and we can brainstorm ways of contributing that suit you.

If you have your own sex-positive project, we’d love to collaborate and help in whatever way possible.

Email Lara (editor) at admin@condommonologues.com

Like us on facebook.com/condommonologues

Tweet @condommonologue

Read more about us in here and here (Rude Magazine).

Please help us spread the news by sharing this article or take the PDF.

PDF link: Call4Writers-CondomMonologues-May2013

(Please be comfortable communicating with us by alias or otherwise.  We take privacy very seriously.  FYI, Condom Monologues is a safe bully-free space, thus all contributions are monitored and hate speech is censored).

How I Contracted HPV and What I Did About It

This post is written by Tashia Amenerio, founder of the non-profit HPV Awakening.  She writes from her personal experience why she is pushing for HPV be reportable- meaning sexual partners must legally inform each other of their status- and why she urges you to sign the petition to get the FDA to approve HPV testing for men.

(Un)Knowing HPV

Graph from the CDC. Fourteen million will become newly infected with HPV this year. This means that almost every sexually active person in the US will acquire HPV at some point in their lives.

Graph from the CDC. Fourteen million will become newly infected with HPV this year. This means that almost every sexually active person in the US will acquire HPV at some point in their lives.

When diagnosed with HPV, life as you know it is over. You face disturbing contradictions within the medical community . On the one hand, there are those who describe it as “this generation’s AIDS”. On the other side, you are faced with medical “experts” who don’t know their head from a hole in the ground and tell you that HPV is nothing to worry about.

Here is the kicker: Most HPV strands, like most cold or flu strands, really don’t do much of anything but chill out in your body having a viral party of genome development. The issue(s) arise when you get people who are knowingly infecting others with cancer causing strands- a crime of which I’m personally all too well aware. And then you have others who are unknowingly transmitting the STI. A major reason for this is because it is not standard practice to get tested for HPV- and there are no official tests made publicly available for males- despite the fact that HPV is the most prevalent STI in North America right now.

So What Can We Do?

www.hpvawakening.org.

www.hpvawakening.org.

Well, I started a nonprofit HPV Awakening Inc. I lecture all over the Florida and have done a few media interviews. I sit here now writing you about my experiences and I’ve launched a petition that needs 100,000 signatures by May 28th, 2013, so that it can go to the White House to get HPV male testing approved by the FDA. Sign the petition.

I have contacted several local media stations and sites. And I have tried moving my civil court case Tashia Ameneiro vs. Zamil Xavier Lopez to a criminal one in order to have the state acknowledge the fact that HPV cancer strands should be taken as serious as AIDS/HIV strands.

The Miami Dade DA has kindly informed me that, well, HPV isn’t mentioned in the Florida statute at all. Thus they can’t help me. This is in spite of the fact that my case is backed with the full support from the local police department that filed my report (Miami Gardens), and they are willing to facilitate the investigative work!

So here is where you the reader come in. What can you do? Well, if you have ever been diagnosed or know someone that has been- I can relate. It sucks and it isn’t easy. And fun (insert EXTREME sarcasm) questions and situations follow diagnosis.

From Why Me? To What I Will Do About It!

In my case, I had been a virgin with no sexual experience prior to my ex, so I didn’t have to go through the questioning phase of Who? But I did have to go through the constant questioning phase of Why? After I received my diagnosis and contacted my ex he kindly informed me that he had known but since it hadn’t directly impacted me he hadn’t cared.

But that wasn’t the only “Why”. The “Why me?” phase kicked in and it kicked in for several of my friends too. Because once you get sick, it isn’t just you. It’s you and those that care about you, or who know you in a caring light- family, acquaintances, associates, co-workers and strangers you disclose to- that are impacted.

I remember one conversation in particular with a friend of mine that went through a bad life phase (attempted suicide and was a bug chaser at one point in time) sitting on the stairs while we shared a smoke (a short lived habit I picked-up during that “Why be and Why bother” phase). He was crying because he couldn’t understand how “Good people like [me], who never do anything risky end up getting sick and people like [him], who have tried every way possible to be ill and die didn’t.” Easy answer: “I don’t know what a ‘good’ person is, but sometimes Shit Just Happens.” It is a matter of what you do with the situation that counts.

I finished the cigarette and realized that some habits aren’t worth starting or maintaining just to stay wallowing in self-pity.

For those of you that are still reading, I say Yay! Thank you in sharing in my past misery. It really does love company.

Please sign the petition to get HPV male testing approved by the FDA. Go to We The People to sign.

15 Ways to Dispose a Condom

Condoms. It seems like we go out of our way to store them in some place both secret and safe: a sock drawer, their wallet, the bedside table. But when it comes to disposing of those little semen bags it seems like anything goes. Here is a list of fifteen things people do with condoms after the deed is done:

1) Flush ‘em.
2) Throw in the waste basket.
3) Throw in the waste basket under other strategically placed trash.
4) Toss out of a moving car on the highway.
5) Leave on the floor.
6) Leave in the bed.
7) Stuff in pants pockets and discard outside the house.
8) Fall asleep with it still on.
9) Wrap in tissues.
10) Mistakenly place inside tin foil containing someone’s weed.
11) Store in a cup.
12) Put back in the wrapper.
13) Bury outside in the dirt.
14) Put in a Clementine box.
15) Hide in a jewelry box.

This post was submitted by A4 Effort.

THE FIRST

The first time I saw a condom I was nine years old and slightly too old to be playing pretend. This sounds wrong, but let me explain. I was sitting my friend’s parents’ 1992 Subaru station wagon and we were playing a game called “Hippie Road Trip” where we were two hippies driving across America. I’m not sure what this game entailed besides my friend sitting in the driver’s seat of the parked car and turning the wheel every so often to not crash into imaginary pedestrians and animals. While looking through the glove box for a map (we had gotten lost—apparently our hippie sense of direction was not up to snuff) I came across a box of condoms.

I had heard about the legendary pieces of latex in class from the school nurse. She was a portly woman with red hair who had clearly been uncomfortable explaining the birds and the bees to a class of fourth graders. Her perspiration and rushed tone, however, had made the topic more exciting, more mysterious. And so it was no wonder then that finding a box of condoms to us was like discovering buried treasure.
“They’re my parents’,” explained my friend, who had christened herself ‘Sparkle’ whilst playing pretend. I too had taken a new name for my character the most beautiful name I could think of, which at the time happened to be ‘Crystal’.

Her parents were in fact real hippies and as a result Sparkle was somewhat of an expert on the subject of sex. “Here– let me see those,” she said, extending her hand. She opened the box and grabbed a small, plastic square before tearing it open. It was long and cylindrical with a strange almost soft texture.

“Can I have one?” I asked excitedly. It was not so often that I had such easy access to illicit objects. There was something so thrilling about finding evidence of the adult world. She handed me a small plastic square of my own. Pretty soon the entire box had been completely emptied and every one of the six condoms was unwrapped. It turned out that condoms could fit over your hands, your feet and even the stick shift of a 1992 Subaru station wagon. Finally, tired of playing with them, we put all of the unwrapped condoms back into their box and into the glove compartment.

Sparkle readjusted her seat and went back to concentrating on driving. I stared out the window of the unmoving car, satisfied with our new found hippie secret.

This post was submitted by Crystal .

The POWER of 300 CONDOMS

I wasn’t in love with my boyfriend anymore. I had been keeping it to myself for about a week and didn’t have the heart to tell him over the phone as we made plans for his upcoming visit. He was driving to stay with me in my cramped college dorm room in order to celebrate our much anticipated one year anniversary. The big to-do was less about commemorating the great times we’d shared over the past year and more a manner of awarding me credit for having survived dating this maniac for so long.

Boyfriend X wasn’t such a bad guy-just a very territorial one with impossible demands and little intention of letting me experience college life to its fullest (aka hanging up the phone to go make some friends for once). The length of our relationship was chiefly indebted to our overpowering physical chemistry and how we spent about 90% of our time together naked. Our budding sex life obscured two people who were otherwise very confrontational and unhealthy together. Our passionate escape from the reality of our situation was facilitated by my boyfriend’s job as a stock boy at Shaw’s supermarket. In addition to great discounts on groceries, Boyfriend X’s employment gave him exclusive access to unguarded stock-room condoms which he quickly made a habit of slyly stuffing into his coat pockets after punching out.

After I successfully faked a weekend of anniversary merriment it finally came time to overcome the temptation of rampant sex-capades and the burden of guilt and to simply end the strenuous relationship once and for all. Heart racing, I picked up the phone to call my soon-to-be ex-boyfriend. We greeted each other as per usual and just as I was preparing to drop the bomb he announced, “Guess what?! I just stole an economy pack of condoms from Shaw’s! There’s like 300 in there! Now what did you want to tell me?”

I’m not sure what I felt worse about: not being able to do this in person, dumping him so suddenly right before the holidays, or having our break up coincide perfectly with his biggest heist yet. Nothing reminds you more that you got dumped than an unopened box of 300 condoms.

This post was submitted by Luna.

EXTRA VIRGIN by Sébastian Hell

1993 was a great year. Pearl Jam released Vs., a perfect rock record; Nirvana released In Utero, their best record; the Toronto Maple Leafs couldn’t get to the Cup Finals despite gut-wrenching performances by Doug Gilmour and Félix Potvin; and the Canadiens won the Stanley Cup for the last time so far, a miracle-working Patrick Roy taking a very average team to the highest honours almost all by himself against Wayne Gretzky’s Los Angeles Kings.

In what was probably June of that year, the decisive Cup Finals game between the Kings and our beloved Habs was at home. My family had season tickets, but I opted out of going and instead set my sights to La Ronde, the local Six Flags amusement park, with a bunch of friends and maybe catch a bit of the end of the riot afterwards; I didn’t end up with a free TV, but I lost my virginity to a 19 year-old chick I picked up at La Ronde, so all in all, I must say it was a decent night.

It was a time when I was slimmer, when I would wear two band t-shirts at once and tie a third one around my waist with the logo facing outwards toward those behind me; it looked pretty fucking cool to me, and I was the only one doing it – it was my style, easily identifiable.

It wasn’t rare for me to get hit on in those days, what with a tall athlete’s frame, long straight rocker hair and a shyness I hid behind feigned confidence. Often, I would leave with girls’ telephone numbers. That night, I left with the girl.

Normally, at almost 15 years of age, after a day of walking in the sun and light entertainment, I’d be ready to go to sleep by 1AM – but not that night. That night, in the basement where I often slept (I had an actual room on the second floor, but my little brother and parents also slept there, so I had the basement as additional living quarters where I could sometimes get more privacy, especially at night) it seemed I was going to get a go at it. She was older than me, at least 4 years, and she knew what she was doing. She even interrupted a make-out session to ask, specifically, ”do you know what you’re doing, have you done it before”?

”Yes”, I was quick to reply, ”of course”. It wasn’t really a lie, because I had lived that moment time and time again, millions of times, in my head. And already I knew the gizmo I carried around in my underpants through and through – I’d lived with it my whole life, after all. And I knew ladies’ equipment pretty well, too, having already toyed around that area enough in the couple of years previous to this night on an average of maybe once a week – just not actually been inside there with my machinery.

So the mouths went from the mouth to everywhere our hands had been previously, and came time for the fatal question – one that I’d previously had the answer wrong to, which had cost me an earlier deflowerization: ”do you have a condom?” This time: ”yes”! We had a winner.

So together we struggle to release the condom from its packaging, succeed, and together we put the fucker on.

KABLAM!

I ejaculate right then and there.

I had tried condoms on before, even jerked off into them. Never had it had that impact on me. But this time, maybe it was the nerves, the sexual tension, the fact that she was so hot despite wearing way too much make up, the lack of experience on my part, but it happened. I came in the condom before even entering the comfort zone.

I tried getting away with it, too, and lucky for me I’m still pretty well hung even when getting flaccid, so we made do, having soft-cock sex. She did her best to pretend not having noticed, and we still went at it for a few hours.

Believe it or not, that was not the most embarrassing moment of the episode. No, that came the next morning, when we went upstairs for breakfast, with the parents at the dining table.

”So, Sébastian, are you going to introduce your friend?”

Oh, yeah.

Her name was Katia, and I never saw her again. But I did see a few of her friends for a while, including a very short but very hot girl, my age, named Manon – a name usually reserved for people over twenty years older than she was. She was a blast – and she still has a cap of mine that I really loved, corduroy, all black, with an Esso insignia in front – sarcastic branding was all the rage then, and would be even more so the following year.

(Read more of Sébastian Hell at Hell’s Rumblings)

This post was submitted by Sébastian Hell.

A Town Called Condom…

Condom, FranceI can’t imagine it’s easy being a French town at the best of times, without having the daily struggle and ridicule of being known as ‘Condom’. All the other towns must point and laugh, and lets be fair, they have every reason to. I mean, naming a town ‘Condom’, it’s just not fair. Would you name your baby ‘Coil’? Or your new dog ‘The Pill’? Even as middle names, contraceptives rarely work. That said, ‘Sheath’ seems to be a fairly well accepted surname. Anyway, despite the word ‘condom’ not strictly being part of the French language, the people of this town have accepted it does have an English meaning. They have built their own museum detailing the history of the Rubber Johnny. They ensure each and every shop has a regular supply of everyone’s favourite rubber things and even some of the road dividers have been gifted a rather humorous shape! Good to see a town’s sense of humour breaking a very well established language barrier…

You can read more by Duncan @ DuncWilson.co.uk 

This post was submitted by Dunc.