/The Protection Ritual
Safety and fluids
Article by Chelsea G. Summers
Wrapped in latex, a cock gleams with all the glory of meat in the butcher’s case. It’s both a beautiful and a horrifying thing, the condom-sheathed cock. It’s a thing that announces sex, screams sex, keens with sexual immediacy, even as much as it is one of the most dead unsexy things known to man—or woman.
It’s the result of the moment that comes. That unmistakable square is taken in hand, teeth nip delicately at a corner, fingers pull in mirror opposite, and the chemical tang of latex wafts. A rubber is readied for use. Maybe it sits for a while, quiet and obtrusive as incense. Maybe hands immediately fumble with urgency and slide it down with an adolescent earnestness and lack of grace. A quick pluck at the tip ensures that the reservoir fulfills its design. If you’re doing it right—which is to say doing it as the sex-positive people preach—the condom moment always comes.
I admit I’ve played fast and loose with safe sex
I was fortunate enough to hit sexual maturity before the age of AIDS. I lost my virginity to this guy from my high school on one exceptionally cold January night in1978 in Vermont, while parked on a dirt road. I was drunk; he was fast; and it was over. I spent the next week praying until my period came. Prayer, of course, if you’re a heterosexual woman is the flip side of the ritual of protection, the ritual of the condom, of the daily pill, the quarterly shot, the weekly patch, the occasional sponge, the dust-gathering diaphragm, and the hail-Mary that is withdrawal. I have prayed early and often for the coming of my menses, and I am agnostic.
Ironically, I’d anticipated the ritual of the condom. At about fourteen, I’d taken one from someone somewhere and kept it in the front pocket of my nylon EMS wallet, hoping it would burnish its communion-wafer circle into my wallet, thus announcing my sophistication, autonomy and maturity to the world. It didn’t. Mostly, it disintegrated and did me no good that hymen-busting moment with that redheaded dude in the front of his truck, him pumping away above and in me while I looked at his gun-rack wondering whether he had his safety on. Whither then my sophistication, autonomy and maturity? I was drunk and foolish; would it were an isolated case.
I admit I’ve played fast and loose with safe sex—an admission that to some of my friends would be tantamount to telling a convention of vegans that I like to visit slaughterhouses on vacation. In my sluttiest days—and there have been many very slutty days—I was pretty good about abiding by the rule of condom. When leaving for a fuck date, I would pack a condom or five in my purse, along with a tube of lube, and dressed in heels and quirky fashions that may or may not have included oversized flowers, I would sally forth for sex in the city. I would pause at the proper interlude and pull the condom from my purse if my swain were not forthcoming with his own. I would tisk my finger back and forth like a schoolmarm, and if I was feeling generous, I myself would slide the fucker over his priapic cock. I took to the prophylactic with a totemic hope; it served as some kind of psychic prophylactic against all things that could go viral in the night.
I say totemic and I say psychic because I’ve never ever sucked a condom-wrapped cock, and I know the potential hazards. The condom is laden with hope and fears. It bears a great burden, the condom, it’s a good thing it’s so well engineered and so arduously tested. I remember reading this piece about the extreme privation in Soviet USSR, and only one or two things stick with me—something about how long you had to stand in line to get a bunch of bananas or shoes and how people would keep condoms, wash them out and reuse them. I imagined passionate lovers looking forlornly at their sad recycled rubber, finding it wanting, and swearing quietly in some Cyrillic tongue. They may only be a couple of inches in diameter, but condoms bear a lot of stress.
Lavonne
I sing this paean to the ritual of the condom and yet most of my life, I’ve relied on the Pill, a contrivance now so accepted that it seems almost weightless, yet it was huge, big, more massy than condoms even. Loretta Lynn once sang a song to legitimize it; now women dive into pools in birth control ads. The Pill today is more fun than a mojito and twice as slimming. My friend Anne Marie used to steal my Ortho Novum packs from the pharmacy where she worked. My swallowing of those little orange pills was spiced with a little larceny, which I liked.
I also liked having sex without worry. I would dutifully pop a pill out of the case at the same time every morning, down it with a swig of coffee and go about my increasingly depressing day because if those hormones gave me orgasms so dreamily hallucinogenic as to make Walt Disney jealous, they also made me downright suicidal. Ditto the Depro-Provera.
And when I wasn’t popping pills and shooting hormones, I was pausing mid-sex stream to slip wafer-thin slips of spermicidal film up pussy, trying to get them to nestle happily against my cervix and not gunk up in recalcitrant little spit balls. Mostly, though, my parade of boyfriends and I relied on a mixture of math and withdrawal.
Facials, bukkake, come shots: the fetish is hardly surprising. Nothing so much embodies the mastery and the ritual as hot ribbons of ejaculate festooning naked flesh. Some lover spreading his seed like baker’s glaze over the twin humps of my ass is as much paying obeisance to the ancient ritual of birth control as it is reenacting a billion porn scenes and as much as it is marking territory and as much as it is reveling in the messy wonder of what a boy’s body can do. A come shot is the apotheosis of the ritual of birth control, the moment when protection becomes pleasure.
I have a new boyfriend. It has been a couple of years in the making; my last boyfriend and I broke up over two years ago, though the relationship lingered and lurched like a revenant. I’ve had a couple of lovers in the interim, but this is the first man I’ve had a yen for both body and mind. We did what people preparing to be lovers do: we went condom shopping. The man in question was a bit naïve about the prophylactic spectrum offered in today’s marketplace. We picked out a few condoms, brightly colored as candy, from the bar. We took them home.
We had sex. It was very, very good. We are both old and experienced on the outside and young and eager on the in. It’s a good match.
We fucked, but we didn’t use the condoms. They sit still in the bottom of my purse. One ritual forgotten with age, with testing, with trust. There’s another in the making. I’ll let you know what it is, once it’s settled in. Rituals take time to create.
I also liked having sex without worry. I would dutifully pop a pill out of the case at the same time every morning, down it with a swig of coffee and go about my increasingly depressing day because if those hormones gave me orgasms so dreamily hallucinogenic as to make Walt Disney jealous, they also made me downright suicidal. Ditto the Depro-Provera.
And when I wasn’t popping pills and shooting hormones, I was pausing mid-sex stream to slip wafer-thin slips of spermicidal film up pussy, trying to get them to nestle happily against my cervix and not gunk up in recalcitrant little spit balls. Mostly, though, my parade of boyfriends and I relied on a mixture of math and withdrawal.
Facials, bukkake, come shots: the fetish is hardly surprising. Nothing so much embodies the mastery and the ritual as hot ribbons of ejaculate festooning naked flesh. Some lover spreading his seed like baker’s glaze over the twin humps of my ass is as much paying obeisance to the ancient ritual of birth control as it is reenacting a billion porn scenes and as much as it is marking territory and as much as it is reveling in the messy wonder of what a boy’s body can do. A come shot is the apotheosis of the ritual of birth control, the moment when protection becomes pleasure.
I have a new boyfriend. It has been a couple of years in the making; my last boyfriend and I broke up over two years ago, though the relationship lingered and lurched like a revenant. I’ve had a couple of lovers in the interim, but this is the first man I’ve had a yen for both body and mind. We did what people preparing to be lovers do: we went condom shopping. The man in question was a bit naïve about the prophylactic spectrum offered in today’s marketplace. We picked out a few condoms, brightly colored as candy, from the bar. We took them home.
We had sex. It was very, very good. We are both old and experienced on the outside and young and eager on the in. It’s a good match.
We fucked, but we didn’t use the condoms. They sit still in the bottom of my purse. One ritual forgotten with age, with testing, with trust. There’s another in the making. I’ll let you know what it is, once it’s settled in. Rituals take time to create.
- 02/02/2010
