Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Aine Collier, EdD, is an assistant professor of English at the University of Maryland University College. She holds degrees in European history, international business, and English education. She has been a historian for the Hughes Flying Boat Museum and a 1932 Olympics archival project, as well as an oral historian for a series of interviews with famous figures from the peace movements of the 1930s and 1960s.

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the humble little condom

Prometheus Books

Contents

Acknowledgments...........................................................................................................................7Introduction..............................................................................................................................9One Papyrus, Serpents, and Loincloths: The Ancients and the Condom...................................................................11Two From Sex for "Delit" to the Great Pox: Love in Early Modern Europe...............................................................33Three Le Male de Naples, la Mal Franois, las Bubas, or the Venetian Disease: Columbus and the Great Pox...............................47Four May Prick nor Purse Never Fail You ... Parliamentarians, Poets, Pundits, and Provenance..........................................65Five Medical Arguments against Armour and a Case of Caveat Emptor: Doctors, Debates, Debauchees, and the Mrs. P's.....................85Six The Most Famous, and Infamous, Users of All: The Celebrity Overcoat..............................................................107Seven Malthus, Skins, and Dead Letters: The West's Culture Wars........................................................................123Eight A One-Man Fight against the Condom: The American Civil War and Comstockery.......................................................139Nine Obscenity Laws, American Tips, and French Ticklers: Was There an English Comstock?...............................................161Ten "The Nineteenth Century's Greatest Invention": Muckrakers, Moral Armour, and the Great War.......................................173Eleven Nookie in the Struggle Buggy: All That Jazz and the Age of Advertising...........................................................195Twelve Brother, Can You Spare a Dime ... for a Rubber? The Great Depression.............................................................215Thirteen Victory ... Will Ride on the Rubber You Save: The War Years......................................................................231Fourteen Backseat Bingo with My Classy Chassis ... Let's Get It On! From Baby Boom to Modern Plague.......................................263Fifteen Abstain Was All He Said: In the Age of AIDS......................................................................................291Epilogue Plenty of Condoms, No Water: The New Millennium..................................................................................341Index.....................................................................................................................................349

Chapter One

THE ANCIENTS AND THE CONDOM

Long before boy-pharaoh King Tut came to the throne, a prehistoric artist chronicled a man and a woman having sex-with his penis covered. The twelve-thousand-year-old cave art found in France's Grotte des Combarelles has no caption explaining just what the couple had inmind, but since their discovery in the late nineteenth century, archaeologists and historians have debated as to whether the "fecund" caveman and cavewoman were actually practicing safe sex.

* * *

Sexuality in ancient Egypt was open, untainted by guilt. Even the Egyptian gods were positively promiscuous, earthy enough to copulate with abandon, their lives filled with tales of adultery, incest, homosexuality, masturbation, and necrophilia. The Egyptians were sex obsessed and that obsession was often displayed in phallic worship: one of their creation stories has Chaos, their god of creation, masturbating, the act that produced all of the other gods in the Egyptian pantheon. Then there is the strange little god Bes, usually depicted as a dwarf who alternatively looked after childbirth and procreation-along with his other duties-and had a phallus that reached all the way to the ground. Bes's importance grew to such an extreme that rooms where the inhabitants were most likely to have sex were dubbed "Bes chambers."

With all this love, and given the fact that Egyptians preferred small families, these technologically advanced people developed a number of methods to prevent too many or inconvenient pregnancies. Hieroglyphs from the second century CE recommended both male and female castration to prevent conception. Surgeries like the ovariotomy, the removal of the ovaries, were mentioned in medical papyri as a radical attempt to control fertility, but most methods were far less intrusive and were used only by women. Probably the most common was the tampon, a wadded-up linen strip, treated with spermicidal acidic oils or herbs. There were also herbal concoctions recommended in case the other precautions failed: recipes for drinks that would cause a woman to abort, a common practice that sparked no moral debates, were shared from generation to generation.

Various medical papyri also describe devices and recipes for making pessaries, which are a sort of female condom that prevents semen from going all the way in, but does not actually trap it. Closer still to the male version, there was the halved, hollowed-out pomegranate shell, which served as a barrier. But what did the men use?

STRAP-ON PENISES, LOIN CLOTHES, AND PAPYRUS

Their exact origins are unknown, but early penis sheaths undoubtedly developed out of the clothing styles favored by Egyptian men. Pharaohs and gentlemen of the upper ranks in Egyptian society wore short skirts, which were designed to project far out in front, emphasizing the wearer's anatomy with a triangular pleat, but it was the laboring classes who unintentionally designed the modern condom.

Worn for protection against sunburn, sand, and bug bites, working men's loincloths and girdles were little more than penis sacks, held on by a strip of cloth or a leather thong and tied around the waist. These were especially comfortable because they gave the workers freedom of movement as they fished, worked on their boats, and did laundry along the shore of the Nile. But by the Twelfth Dynasty (1350-1200 BCE) of the Middle Kingdom, there were written descriptions of men who were not common laborers wearing what were many years later dubbed glans condoms, small sheaths that covered only the top of the penis. These were made from oiled animal intestines or bladders, materials that remain popular even today. The fact that they were so small and made of such fine fabric meant they would not have been intended as a garment, or to be worn for an extended period. The tiny bit of fabric would not have stood up to long-term wear and tear, sweat and sun, so even though the chronicler who described them did not come out and say just what the point of the diminutive garment was, the glans sheath would surely have been worn while having sex.

Even better examples are actual artifacts found in the tombs of aristocrats. These have yielded stashes of form-fitting penis sheaths made from soft animal skins and decorated with fur, some dyed in bright colors. Judging by what they packed, the men must have been deeply concerned about their sex lives in the Netherworld; along with their fancy condoms, they were also careful to include a supply of strap-on penises made from fine tortoise shell and mother of pearl. Some of these tools were carefully...