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| Can you guess what A.C.A.R. stands for? |
NOTE: This article continues my coverage of Ed Wood's When the Topic is Sex (BearManor Media, 2021).
The article: "The A.C.A.R. Revisited." Originally published in An Illustrated Study of Erotic Love (Calga Publishing), vol. 4. no. 1, January/February 1973. Credited to "Dick Trent."
Excerpt: "Rubber or not rubber (to quip) the skin of the animal is still used. These devices, much more expensive, are produced from a finely processed animal intestine. Of course the claim from those men who use this type, is that even the thinnest rubber can't compare. They claim the feeling is all there . . . and too there is a certain amount of status involved . . . costing much more, that perhaps makes them feel they are in a higher lovemaking position."
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| "That's the way it was and we LIKED it!" |
Reflections: If you're in the mood to read a brief history of condoms, you're in luck. The Ed Wood article I'm reviewing today is "The A.C.A.R. Revisited" from 1973, and it'll tell you more about the development of the humble but useful prophylactic than you probably ever wanted to know. I'm not sure why Eddie or his editors thought that the readers of An Illustrated Study of Erotic Love would care about any of this, but there it is nevertheless. This is already his second article about rubbers, so there must have been some demand for this material.
The titular abbreviation stands for "always carry a rubber," and Eddie starts the article with some rambling nonsense about what he calls the A.C.A.R. Club:
The story of the A.C.A.R. Club has been told before, but that was a long time ago. Perhaps you've read it . . . if you were in that particular generation gap. But if you haven't read about the A.C.A.R. Club then you don't know what the A.C.A.R. Club is all about. Actually it's a very clinical club; a very practical club; one to which the boy scouts motto, Be Prepared, is also their motto.
That excerpt suggests to me that Ed Wood had a shaky grasp on what the term "generation gap" actually means or how to use it in a sentence. He is correct, however, that Be Prepared is the motto of the Boy Scouts of America. Tom Lehrer had a whole song about it.
Ed Wood begins his history of the condom in the 1500s with the early, not-quite-successful efforts of Gabriel Fallopius and Hercule Saxonia. Legend has it that it was an associate of England's King Charles II, a "Dr. Condom," who gave the device its name in the 1600s. Eddie repeats this story in "The A.C.A.R. Revisited," although there is no evidence to suggest that "Dr. Condom" was a real person. But that's easy for me to say. I have Google and Wikipedia; Ed Wood didn't. He was doing his best for 1973.
Regardless of who invented or named them, the earliest condoms were made of sewn-up linen. But these leaked too much to be effective and were replaced by sheaths made from sheep guts. Better but still not perfect. Prophylactics weren't actually made of rubber until the 1800s, when Charles Goodyear (yes, the namesake of the tire company) and Thomas Hancock developed the process of vulcanization. Modern condoms are made of latex, though Ed informs us that some connoisseurs still use animal-based condoms. This, too, is accurate, even today.
Just as "Youthful Boobs" was Ed Wood's all-purpose thesis statement about brassieres, "The A.C.A.R. Revisited" is a repository of random information about condoms. Ed quotes French aristocrat Madam Sevigne (1626-1696), who expressed her dissatisfaction with the early condoms: "The device is armor against love, complained the good lady, and gossamer against infection." Isn't that a lovely way of putting it? Ed also tells us that condoms are (briefly) mentioned in James Boswell's The Life of Samuel Johnson (1791) and even gives us an early example of an advertising slogan (or "ad-poem") for prophylactics. Towards the end of the article, Ed discusses French ticklers and lubricated condoms.
So "The A.C.A.R. Revisited" starts out as a history of condoms and then degenerates into a grab-bag of (possibly dubious) information about them. Is there any point to it? Yeah, a little. Ed Wood wants modern readers to appreciate "that convenient aluminum foil packet with the life-saving (or life preventing) little balloon." All through this article, as I read about the early attempts at prophylactics, I was thinking of Dana Carvey's Grumpy Old Man character and his reactionary views on condoms:
In my day, we didn‘t have these thin latex condoms so you could enjoy sexual pleasure. In my day, there was only one kind of condom. You took a rabbit skin and wrapped it around your privates and tied it off with a bungee cord. And you couldn‘t feel nothing. Half the time, you didn‘t even know if your partner was there. And we used the same one over and over again because we were morons, just a bunch of hairless head kabobs standing around with rabbit skins on our dinks and that‘s the way it was and we liked it.
Comparatively speaking, Ed Wood is at least more progressive than that.
Next: "College Cherries" (1974)