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| There's such a fine line between freedom and ignorance. |
NOTE: This article continues my coverage of Ed Wood's When the Topic is Sex (BearManor Media, 2021).
The article: "Sexual Freedom & Sexual Ignorance." Originally published in Roulette (Pendulum Publishing), vol. 6, no. 1, January/February 1972. No author listed.
Excerpt: "Today's typical young couple is sexually liberated in the extreme. They practice premarital intercourse, or they dispense with marriage entirely. They practice fellatio, cunnilingus and anal intercourse. They take part in communal sex, wife-swapping and troilism. They fancy that they know all there is to know about sex. But do they?"
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| TLC during the Golden Age of Condoms. |
Reflections: I grew up during what I'd consider the Golden Age of the Condom. The AIDS crisis of the 1980s genuinely shocked America, and suddenly the prevention of STDs became a top priority in this country, more so than even the prevention of unwanted pregnancy or the promotion of abstinence. The condom, an effective deterrent against both pregnancy and disease, took center stage. Gone were the days of prophylactics being hidden behind the pharmacist's counter. Now, they were on display with the rest of the merchandise at your local Walgreens. As The Fat Boys put it on their 1987 song "Protect Yourself":
Now there's somethin' real old but still hot news.
Been around since Lincoln but out of view.
You stuff it in your wallet so your mom can't see.
It's called a condom, baby, and you better believe.
It ain't under the shelf, now it's on display
With all these diseases going around today.
You need a piece of mind when you do the wild thing,
So a condom, brother, don't forget to bring.
If The Fat Boys are rapping about it, that's about as mainstream as it gets. (Lest you think the Boys were getting too serious, "Protect Yourself" morphs into a song called "My Nuts.") Just a few years earlier, in 1982, Madness had a song called "House of Fun" about a teenage boy's extreme, embarrassing difficulty in purchasing condoms. A lot changed in just those five years.
The condom maintained its high profile in the '90s. Kids in sex ed classes across America slipped them on over zucchinis and cucumbers. Lisa "Left Eye" Lopes of TLC wore a one as sort of an eyepatch. Condoms even began to be advertised on cable television. I remember those incredibly annoying Sheik commercials being ubiquitous on Comedy Central in the '90s. Network TV was a bit slower to catch on. The sitcom A Different World, for instance, was allowed to mention condoms in a 1990 episode ("Time Keeps on Slippin'"), but NBC wouldn't allow them to actually show one. Eventually, everyone in America must've gotten the message, because Condomania subsided a bit in the new millennium.
In "Sexual Freedom & Sexual Ignorance," Ed Wood tells us how it was in 1972 in regards to condom use and prevention of sexually transmitted diseases. Obviously, AIDS hadn't happened yet, but syphilis and gonorrhea were around, and then there's pregnancy—perhaps the most destructive sexually transmitted disease of them all, depending on how you look at it. According to Eddie, America's young people knew a lot about group sex and swinging, but they were woefully ignorant when it came to birth control and STD prevention. Who knows? Maybe this Roulette article saved some lives... or at least prevented some lives, if you get my drift.
Eddie's in professorial mode here, so "Sexual Freedom & Sexual Ignorance" isn't exactly a laugh riot. In short, he's more interested in addressing the ignorance part rather than the freedom part. Things were a little different 50 years ago. For one thing, a rather sizable chunk of this article is about how many times you should reuse condoms. I guess, back then, it was fairly standard practice to wash them off, powder them, and roll them back up for later use.
And I guess people were less trusting of condoms than they are now, because this article spends a fair amount of time discussing various stress tests you can perform on condoms to see if they work. Here's how he explains that:
Various authorities continue to maintain the long-held opinion that testing is a necessary part of use for the individual. The chief methods of testing are filling the condom with air or water. When air is used, after the condom is blown up like a balloon, it is inspected before a bulb that has been covered with a sheet of white paper. Tiny holes then appear as light spots. When water is used, the condom is placed over the tap and the flow turned on. After the condom fills and expands to several times its normal width, the water is turned off and the outside is carefully dried. Then the condom is gently pressed to make water exit from any holes.
This is one of those articles in which Eddie cites no sources, so we'll never know who those "various authorities" were. But this sounds like it could make for a hell of a Mr. Wizard episode.
Next: "To Produce a Lovely Creature" (1971)