The history of the female condom
Did you know the history of the female condom? I didn’t either, so I did some research, and here’s what I learned.
So, the first recorded condom in general is said to date back to ancient Greece, when Queen Pasiphae had a goats bladder placed inside her vagina, to protect her from the serpent infested semen of King Minos. I’m still wondering how someone comes to have serpent infested semen so I may do some research about that too at some point.
What I find really interesting about this, is if you search for the history of the condom, male or female, this internal goats bladder is what comes up as the earliest example. But, if you really think about it, this seems to me like an early example of a female condom, because of the fact that it was an internal barrier, placed inside Queen Pasiphae, and not on King Minos. So this makes me wonder, did the female condom come before the male condom?
Okay, so that’s possibly a debate to be explored further in a different post. I scoured the internet, and apparently, after this internal condom used by Queen Pasiphae in 3000 B.C, the next development in the female condom wasn’t until 1923. This is when Marie Stopes, a birth control activist, made a thick rubber version of the female condom which, Sexual Health Alliance notes, looked similar to a sheath but was meant to sit inside the vaginal canal. And, like other condoms made from rubber at this time, it was intended to be washed and reused.
It wasn’t until 1993 that the modern female condom that we know today was released. It has the same advantages that male condoms have - it prevents both pregnancy and STIs. But one advantage that the female condom has over the male condom is the fact that it can be inserted hours beforehand, so you don’t have to pause your moment with your lover to unwrap it and put it in place. Despite all it had to offer, it was actually pretty heavily ridiculed by the media. The female condom was likened to a jellyfish, a firehose, gumboots, and a plastic freezer bag, to name a few.
This was not the only issue that the female condom faced. A 2005 study from the Guttmacher Institute found that 11% of women had the condom slip off the first time they used it. This number decreased the more times that a person used it - the more you use it, the better you get at it, but it’s not unlikely that if someone used it once and it slipped, they might not have gone back to try it a second time.
It’s clear that the female condom hasn’t always had the best reputation and it seems that this is what has contributed to it being left out of conversations about contraception and safe sex. I can’t speak for anybody else but I know that where I live, I can almost certainly find male condoms at dairies and supermarkets, but I don’t often see female condoms so easily accessible.
Now I also want to make a brief point about dental dams, which were created for use in dental procedures but which have been advertised to help prevent the spread of STIs. They were actually redesigned specifically for oral sex in 1994, and were quite insistently marketed towards queer women. But even though these dental dams were being redesigned to be thinner and larger for a more pleasurable experience, they never really gained traction. This article here talks about the fact that medical experts still aren’t sure how well they actually work, and because there have been so few reported cases of female-to-female transmission of HIV, so there isn’t much “evidence of need” for queer women. Professor Juliet Richters, sexual health researcher at the University of New South Wales, has even said, “why you would use dental dams instead of cling wrap is unclear to me.”
Make sure to check out our other blog post about the history of the male condom if you’re interested, and don’t forget to subscribe to our newsletter below if you want to read more blog posts like this one.