In my Sex Ed. days of yesteryear, I heard a lot of talk about condoms. "Condoms do this." "Condoms prevent that." "For Christ’s sake, just use a condom." I was a regular Safe Sex Sammy from that point on. People would say "condom," and I’d giggle and cavort about the schoolyard without a care in the world. The other children would play kickball, but not me.

So condoms. Yeah. I was on board. And when they told me feminists wouldn’t do it without them, well, that just sealed the deal. Feminism is hot; I don’t care what you tell me. Ergo, so too was the condom.

Then I started having sex. Well, just once. Kind-of. Dutifully, I reached for the condom and fumbled around for what seemed like an eternity.

"What are you doing?" "Helane" asked lasciviously.

"Well, you know... getting ready for the sex... baby..." I answered. "Helane" promptly demurred, explaining she was a "stand-up triple" kind of girl.

"It’s all about non-verbal communication, Nate," resident sex-pert Hector Preciado ’01 gently scolded. "You have to pay close attention to what the body says about what is acceptable and what isn’t." Close attention? What the body says? I realized that fateful night with "Helane" and in its aftermath in Hector’s den that condoms aren’t all fun and games.

People I talked to also noted a downside. "Sex without condoms is more spontaneous and intimate, but the bonus to condoms is that they do all the cleaning up for you," said Susan Caplow ’03 while smoking a Parliament, in bed with this reporter, just after the two of us had finished not having sex together. Caplow, in a monogamous relationship for "over a year," is on the pill, demonstrating the axiom that if people don’t feel compelled to use condoms, they won’t.

"The idea of you having sex is amusing," said Jake Wolman ’03, our man in Scotland. Wolman then urged me not to attempt to work the image of two gigantic prophylactics sheathing the Twin Towers into my article. This awkward and disjointed paragraph, they’ll tell you in the news section, provides a neo-classically smooth transition away from my own sexy travails and into a discussion of the instructions on the cardboard packaging for one free sample Trojan brand lubricated condom (Carter Products).

The cardboard packaging for one free sample Trojan brand lubricated condom (Carter Products), in addition to one far too large condom, proved to contain a wealth of knowledge. Sexy knowledge, you ask? Well, dear reader, is there any other kind? Sadly, the answer is yes.

Nevertheless, the first thing that caught this reporter’s panoptic gaze was the silhouette of a man and a woman, who appeared to be very close to getting it on. Frankly, this turned me on. So, I slipped on the rubber and had at it with myself. You can never be too safe, right? Sadly, the answer is no.

Forty-five seconds and a trip to the hand washing basin later (I’m a big believer in hand washing basins, so what?), I picked up the cardboard packaging again and read on: "If you don’t need this sample, pass it on to a friend who does." Yeah, that happens a lot.

"Any use of Trojan Brand Latex Condoms for other than vaginal intercourse can increase the potential of damage to the condom," Carter Products continued. This seemed curiously heterosexist to me. Not so, resident sex-pert Preciado objected.

He explained that the vagina was a very special place. "A lubricated vagina is more conducive to intercourse than any other orifice in the body," he said. Well, that does make sense: biomedical sense. Thanks Hector!

Moving on, Carter Products was now telling me to "use a new condom...before foreplay, before penis gets anywhere near any body opening." Before foreplay? That seemed a little presumptuous to me, so I sought out Preciado for clarification.

"How do you define foreplay?" he asked. Tricky. Usually, I’d be asking the questions, but since Hector frequently employs the Socratic method to teach all of us in Lawry A3 about sex, I decided to ride this one out. Never really Mr. Foreplay myself, though, I was stumped.

But that was exactly Preciado’s point.

"I think [Carter Products] purposefully used those instructions because it is vague enough as to be open for various interpretations." Fair enough, I suppose. But why say anything at all? My suspicions were confirmed further down in the instructions: "Put condom on as soon as penis is hard." Now, come on. Anyone who puts a condom on as soon as "penis is hard" is opening himself up to ridicule and scorn. As for me, my penis is pretty much always hard. Oh God, I probably shouldn’t have just written that.

The best part of the instructions, though, is where it says, cryptically and with a vaguely reproachful tone, "Dispose of used condom properly, not in the toilet." Who are these people? It’s a point I employ less and less these days, but I’m an American, goddamnit, and the US of A has the best indoor plumbing in the world, thanks to the superiority of our labor-exploitation methods: I’ll throw whatever the fuck I want to down that toilet–condoms, fellow students’ research notes, human feces, you name it. If the Third Amendment isn’t about that, well then it should be.

Nevertheless, I conducted an informal survey of the Pomona community’s preferred condom receptacles. Surprisingly, "toilet" was way down the list, the most frequently cited locations being "the bottom of an at least half-filled trash can," "the late night return slot at the library" and "a prostitute’s stomach." To be fair, though, the only person I surveyed was Wolman (our man in Scotland).

So, condoms = word of God? That’s what society seemed to be telling me. Preciado was especially adamant about it. "Use a condom before any exchange of bodily fluids that is not of the mouth to mouth combination," he stressed. Now I’m no "critical thinker" or anything un-American like that, but an overwhelming body of critical theory does suggest that anything that claims to be always good is probably just an ideological state apparatus, or something similarly named, I really wouldn’t know.

So, to whom could I turn to find an informed viewpoint other than "condoms: we’re so advanced"? Like so many social science majors before me, I turned to the Anthropology Literature database on BLAIS. After a little background reading, I developed the following thesis for your perusal: that condom use in the "developing" world is used as a panacea by health organizations and Western political bodies to mask overarching political-economic inequalities such as poverty and the difference in power between men and women, which force women into prostitution and, ultimately, unprotected sex. Several other condom-critical theses are no doubt possible, but you’ll have to BLAIS for yourself to think of them. Condoms are good, but they’re not everything.

In my virginal, pre-anthropology days, I once participated in an intervention for one Leslie "Duke" Gray ’03, who, by some improbable glitch in the New England public health system, reached voting age with the belief that condoms were only for "the gays" and that "pulling out" was a viable method of anything. Now I kind of see where he’s coming from and you know, maybe it’s cool that public health has not yet saturated urban Massachusetts, but mostly I still just shake my head in stupefaction.