The Hang of a Safe Bang

The condom is still your best bet in ensuring that you don’t knock-up your partner – assuming she’s a woman of course. Before the condom came into the scene, people resorted to withdrawal, the rhythm method, douches and sponges. Save for coitus interruptus, or withdrawal, the other methods give considerably less assurance than the dick-sheath.

The condom is also the best known preventive against contracting some sexually transmittable disease from your partner. Naturally, the reverse is also true. You might be the one having those invisible but lethal pests in your system.

On a facetious note, we might also regard the condom as a beauty aid. You don’t get it? Think! Doesn't it help to prevent women's waistlines from thickening?

Of course there’s no absolute guarantee that the condom is a hundred percent effective in guarding against those two eventualities. The cock-sock (hideous term but so undeniably accurate) merely reduces the risks of pregnancy and infection. It does not eliminate them completely.

There’s no record of who invented condoms, or when it’s prototype was first used by humans. What we do know is that it’s no new thing under the sun. Let’s go back in time and see how the condom featured in the lifestyles of our forefathers.

In ancient Egypt, the penis was encased in a linen sheath as a protection against troublesome insects and tropical diseases. (I’m wondering how often those ancient Egyptians washed, that insects would develop a particular preference for buzzing around their genitals.) The Chinese, on the other hand, wrapped oiled silk paper around their members, while the Japanese used tortoiseshell sheaths. The ancient Romans, for their part, used condoms made from goats’ bladders. I imagine the cannibals of certain primitive tribes might have used human skin, though there’s no record of that.