Upon yet another relationship break-up due to disclosing her HIV status, Virgina meets Wanda.
I was dating a guy for a short while and it was the same old story. He was head over heels until I disclosed my HIV status. He insisted it was not a problem but every day he became more distant and expressed many fears including death, dying, illness and whether I had someone in mind to care for me on my AIDS death bed. Nothing I said reassured him or removed his basic fear. About a month into the new relationship I decided to do us both a favour and call it quits and he was relieved. I saved him the trouble of looking like the bad guy in walking away from fear of HIV.
As we were walking towards my house during the break up we passed a sex shop. I watched an episode of Sex and the City where the women used a great vibrator- the Hitachi Magic Wand – and the best part of the vibrator was, it was electric. No more drawers full of batteries. After watching that particular episode I really wanted one but, being the pathologically shy person I am, it was impossible for me to go into a sex shop and buy one. So for years I walked by and only thought about it.
Sam Jones and the “neck messager”
Suddenly I turned to him, handed him $100.00 and asked him to go into the sex shop and buy my vibrator. When he came out I said good bye and never saw him again. But I am now the proud owner of Wanda and let me tell you, she is every woman’s dream. Sometimes there is a silver lining in a cloud.
Or, switch the question around a bit: When do I feel hottest?
The answer may not sound so hot at first: safety gets me hot. Or, in other words, I feel hottest when I feel safest.
I don’t mean that indiscriminately. I don’t mean I’m a medical kit fetishist. I don’t salivate over sterile gauze and neosporine tubes. I also don’t get my knickers in a twist over seat belts, locked doors, and the before-take-off emergency directions on airplanes. What I mean is that in the context of sex, safety is a must. Only when I feel truly safe do I also feel free, uninhibited, and able to totally enjoy what’s going down between me and my partner(s).
Consent Makes Me Horny
The sort of safety I need comes in a lot of forms. One of the most basic forms is consent. There’s no way I’ll get into the bed of any man or woman if I think they won’t hear me when I say “no,” and long before that look for me to say “yes”. Sex is never a promise. Watching a film together, drinking together, making googly eyes at one another across a table, is never a promise. Just like getting into bed with someone is also not a promise. Respectful partners, good partners, hot lovers pay attention and check consent all along the way. The best sex happens when partners aim to please, and part of aiming to please is paying attention to what your partner wants at every step, and never forcing it.
Condoms Make Me Horny
The essentials covered, another of the fundamentals of safety is, yes, contraceptive safety. I have a personal preference for condoms. They don’t mess with my body’s hormones, they’re reversible and fairly non-invasive. To be uninhibited in bed, I need to feel fairly confident that no babies are going to result, as I’m not yet at a point in life when babies are what I want. Condoms have the added benefit of protecting against STIs. Twofer, as far as I’m concerned.
I hate the condom discussion, and if a guy objects too strongly to wrapping it up, I’m often inclined to ditch him, no matter how into him I am. To me complaining about condoms shows a lack of respect for my welfare and also a lack of responsibility for his own. Both of those things suck.
But you know what’s really hot?
When a guy wraps it up, no questions asked, and even takes initiative and responsibility for protecting against pregnancy and infection. When he does things like, you know, ask me how I want to handle it and gets out a condom himself.
I’m so trained to equate condoms with truly hot sex that I’m like Pavlov’s dogs. Far from creating an odd moment out, for me I see those square little wrappers appear from pockets and bedside drawers and I get excited. I know what comes next!
The safer I feel with someone, the more uninhibited I feel. Everyone knows that inhibitions can really get in the way, and I’ve got to say, feeling uninhibited leads to some pretty amazingly hot encounters.
Monologues are independent personal stories. The opinions shared are the writer’s own.
Upon her sex partners herpes diagnosis, Pilar Reyes reflects on her personal path from initial anger to condoms enthusiast. The opinions shared are the authors own.
We had been sleeping together on and off for a few months when he got herpes. At first, it was the usual immature reaction: panic, followed by anger, followed by bitter text messages that said, “We’re never fucking ever again!” But that wasn’t true, because despite the echoes of my high school sex education that had planted the seed of “anybody who has an STD is a dirty, bad person,” the sex was still good, and I still wanted to fuck him.
So I did my research. The Internet threw a lot of information at me, but at the end of the day I knew one thing for sure: condoms, condoms, condoms. We had always used condoms before the diagnosis, and it seemed that now using protection was imperative. The herpes virus is spread via direct physical contact. The herpes virus can shed from the skin and be passed from person to person even in the absence of a physical outbreak. Even with the use of condoms, herpes can still be passed on, although the use of condoms greatly diminishes that risk.
I looked at the odds, I looked at my needs, and I came to the conclusion that the risk was worth the reward. Armed with the knowledge that I could potentially spread an STD to my other sexual partners, I did the responsible thing and let them know. Of course, when they found out, they decided to stop sleeping with me. That was fine, because it wasn’t that serious anyways. I guess that’s the thing about casual sex – at the risk of STDs, it becomes a less worthwhile pursuit.
Which was why my partner and I became less casual and more serious. After a brief hiatus, and after the initial outbreak cleared up, I realized that the sex wasn’t the only reason I was coming back. Maybe it was the shared experience of dealing with a new STD diagnosis together, or maybe it was the fact that I hadn’t completely ditched him because of his herpes, we decided, fuck it, we clearly care about each other. Let’s stop fucking around and start dating.
It would have been really easy to instead close my legs and walk away at that point. Certainly all my friends had advised me to do so, but when I had done my initial medical research, I also came across an online community devoted to debunking the STD shaming that is pervasive in modern culture. At first I was surprised that I had never come across this point of view before. As a feminist and an avid anti-slut shamer, it just made sense. Given my initial reaction and my friends’ reactions to the situation, I realized that , much to my chagrin, our attitudes to STDs were not exactly PC. Sure, I have friends with HIV and herpes, but they were certainly not people that I would have even considered having sex with. Of course, that’s a completely unfair perspective, because all it takes is a condom to diminish your risk. So long as a person is honest when disclosing their STDs, there shouldn’t be a problem.
To give this story a happy ending, my partner and I are still together. We have safe sex every time, and, while I still do not have herpes, I’ve come to realize that if I get herpes, then I’ll have herpes. It won’t be a life shattering event, nor should it be, for myself or anyone else. Sure, I certainly don’t want an STD, nor does anyone else, but much like a cold or like acne, often times STDs are merely inconvenient medical conditions. With proper education, you can diminish your risk. Fuck it – just use a condom every time.
Monologues are independent stories. The opinions shared are the author’s own.
I 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 let’s 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…
Monologues are independent stories. The opinions shared are the author’s own. You can read more by Duncan @ DuncWilson.co.uk
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.
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.
Monologues are independent stories. Read more of Sébastian Hell at Hell’s Rumblings
Here is an excerpt from Naomi Wolf’s book Promiscuities (1997), that describes her first experience with contraceptives – her trip to the clinic and then her first time doing the “deed”. It could be argued that she tends to portray the condom as a male responsibility; and also as a very unsexy aspect of sex. Nonetheless her critique of sex education, sexual agency, and youth/adult relations around contraceptive talk is an interesting contribution to condom monologues:
“He and I could have been a poster couple for the liberal idea of responsible teen sexuality – and paradoxically, this was reflected in the lack of drama and meaning I felt crossing the threshold. Conscientious students who were mapping out our college applications and scheduling our after-school jobs to save up for tuition, we were the sort of kids who Planned Ahead. But even the preparations for losing one’s virginity felt barren of larger social significance.
When Martin and I went together to a clinic to arrange for contraception some weeks before the actual deed, no experience could have been flatter. He waited, reading old copies of Scientific American, while I was fitted for a diaphragm (“The method with one of the highest effectiveness levels, if we are careful, and the fewest risks to you,” Martin had explained after looking it up). The offices were full of high school couples. If the management intended the mood to be welcoming to adolescents, they had done an excellent job. Cartoon strips about contraceptives were displayed in several rooms. The staff members were straight-talking, and they did not patronize. The young, bearded doctor who had fitted me treated it as if he were explaining to me a terrific new piece of equipment for some hearty activity such as rock climbing.
In terms of the mechanics of servicing teenage desire safely in a secular, materialistic society, the experience was impeccable. The technology worked and was either cheep or free. But when we walked out, I still felt there was something important missing. It was weird to have these adults just hand you the keys to the kingdom, ask, “Any questions?,” wave, and return to their paperwork. They did not even have us wait until we could show we had learned something concrete – until we could answer some of their questions. It was easier than getting your learner’s permit to drive a car.
Now, giving us a moral context was not their job. They had enough to handle. Their work seems in retrospect like one of the few backstops we encountered to society’s abdication of us within our sexuality. But from visiting the clinic in the absence of any other adults giving us a moral framework in which to learn about sexuality, the message we got was: “You can be an adult without trying. The only meaning this has is the meaning you give it.” There was a sense, I recall, that the adults who were the gatekeepers to society had once again failed to initiate us in any way.
For not at the clinic, at school, in our synagogue, or anywhere in popular culture did this message come through clearly to us: sexual activity comes with responsibilities that are deeper than personal. If our parents did say this, it was scarcely reinforced outside the home. No one said, at the clinic, “You must use this diaphragm or this condom, not only because that is how you will avoid the personal disaster of unwanted pregnancy, but because if you have sex without protection you are doing something antisocial and morally objectionable. If you, boy or girl, initiate a pregnancy out of carelessness, that is dumb, regrettable behavior.” Nothing morally significant about the transfer of power from adults to teenagers was represented in that technology. It was like going to the vet: as if we were being processed not on a social but on an animal level.
Well, the Act itself will take care of that, I thought. How did I decide that day? Civics class drove me over the edge. The thought of plowing through the electoral college – which, in all its stubborn irrationality, seemed to represent all the rigidity and hopelessness of the adult world closing in on me…..At the classroom threshold, before the teacher noticed me, I suddenly turned my heel. Down the hall, I intercepted Martin before he walked into his biology lab. I easily persuaded him, ordinarily a conscientious student, to cut class. “Today’s the day: this is it.” It felt special to be the one whose decision was so attentively awaited. We seized our backpacks from our lockers, he took my hand, and we ran up the lawn to the street car tracks just as the class bell was shrilling….
He was shy and undressed in the bathroom. I, somewhat less so but still nervous, undressed under the sheets. When he returned, I was stunned: he was so beautiful. He shivered but let me look.
This was not the sweet old Martin whose grandmother bought him his shirts. I had been taking art history and had spent many hours memorizing fifth-century statues of male nudes. The walls behind Martin were grimy, but he looked like one of those statues, only alive.
My train of association connecting Martin to Praxiteles and the sublime came to an abrupt end with the production and deployment of the condom. We had the diaphragm, but there was no way I was about to deal with that yet. I was grateful not to have to think about the little rubber disk, but grateful, too, not to be directly involved with the alternative. Putting the condom on looked terribly complex. It seemed to me, watching, that if you were dextrous enough to gift-wrap an independent-minded amphibian, you could just about manage a condom.
When we made love, it hurt, but only a little. It was nice but strange. I realized my relative good luck with every disastrous loss-of-virginity story I hear. For a seventeen-year-old boy, Martin was a rarity – a sensitive, respectful teacher. After we dressed and left, we were very hesitant, even solicitous, with each other. It would take a long time and a great deal of trust to create real exotic love between us” (Wolf, 1997: 119-24).
