In the interest of public service, today’s blog is an informational treatise on everyone’s favorite pleasure thief, the condom.
Everyone knows what a condom is, and if you’re like me, you’re not a huge fan of them. After all, nothing beats the raw, frictional pleasure that unprotected sex provides. However, in this day of rampant, uncurable sexually transmitted diseases, such as chlamydia, AIDS and pregnancy, it’s often hard to come across (so to say) sexual partners that will engage in unprotected sex. Luckily, space-age designs and materials have advanced condom technology to the point where one can wear one and almost–if they get totally lost in the moment–forget that they are in fact protected. And, after all, isn’t sex more important than whether or not you might be missing a fraction of the pleasure? “Poon with a condom is better than a condom with no poon” goes the ancient Mycenaean proverb, and I tend to agree. If I’m going to have sex with a strange girl (and why do I always seem to attract the strange ones?), I’ll err on the side of caution and wear one…no point in getting a disease the first time you have sex with a partner–it’s much better to wait until you’re in a committed relationship and no longer using condoms for that! So, really, when getting some random sex, guys, put a condom on–women don’t fall for “don’t worry, I’ll pull out” anymore and you yourself don’t fall for “We don’t need to worry about protection, I’m already pregnant!”. Besides, you never know what STDS your random hookup is hooked up with (just check it at www.STDAware.com/STDs/gonorrhea/symptoms, you may be surprised). You don’t want to have to worry about importing cheap Valtrex from Manitoba for the rest of your life, do you?
The condom’s first modern description was recorded by Italian scientist Gabrielle Fallopius (inventor of the Fallopian Tube) in the sixteenth century. He claimed to have invented a condom made of linen for the protection against syphillis. Somehow, I don’t think this quite worked–if the stuff soaks through your sheets as easily as it does, it’s probably going to go right through cloth it’s shot at at point-blank range. Around the same time frame, the Japanese are said to have been experimenting with two types of condom–the Kyotai, made of thin leather, and the Kabutogata, made of tortoise shell. These might’ve been “bulletproof” so to say, but they sex a moot point–you’re not going to feel anything at all with a turtle shell strapped onto your dick. The modern latex condom, mass-produced on glass molds in the finest condomology labs in the world, were introduced in the 1930s, just in time to prevent helpless French maidens from giving our fighting men their evil diseases, such as the clap, while the Allies liberated Europe.
But I digress. I’m here to talk about condoms and how they relate to our modern world. First off, what’s up with the “reservoir end”? Obstensibly placed to provide semen some place to go upon ejaculation, I think it’s a total misnomer. Assuming that the average load is 4 cubic centimeters, this is hardly enough liquid to call it a reservoir. Lake Mead is a reservoir. Lake Powell is a reservoir. A tablespoon of semen is not enough to go waterskiing on.
Many condoms are supposedly “ribbed for her pleasure”. What about my pleasure? I’m the one wearing the damn thing…what about me? She’s getting plenty of clitoral stimulation while I plow away, hardly feeling anything. Oh, sure, you can get mylar condoms that are much more “feeling intense”, but I can’t help but think about those silver balloons you get for your birthday when I think of “mylar”. And I really don’t want to think about birthdays when I’m trying to prevent a birth. They also have lamb skin condoms. Another misnomer, but I guess “lambskin” sounds better than “lamb intestine” condoms.
In the last few years, they’ve come out with flavored condoms. What’s up with these? Supposedly marketed to prevent the spread of disease during some good old fashioned knob-slobbin’, they’re just weird. In the interest of science, we tasted (and I can’t believe I’m admitting this) a vanilla-flavored one at a party a couple of years ago that I’d received as a freebie in a package of more normal Durex condoms. It tasted like a balloon dipped in Adams Extract then dried out. Nastiness…
Trojan…Ramses…what’s with these names? Trojans were citizens of Troy and are most well known for the Trojan horse, wherein the Greeks used a giant wooden horse to surprise the Trojans. What does this have to do with condoms? The last two things I want a woman whom I’ve finally convinced to hop in the sack to being thinking about are 1) surprises and 2) horses. And then there’s Ramses–great Pharaoh and, supposedly, the father of 400 children. Probably the last person in the world who should have a condom named for them. Another popular brand is Lifestyles. Personally, I think it should be called “Preventing-of-Life Styles”, but that’s just me.
Another recent development in the condom world is Reality, the female condom. I’ve never encountered on “in the wild”, but it sounds unappealing. You have to insert it–carefully–prior to sex and a lot of people complain that it causes a peculiar “rustling” sound during sex because of its looseness. To me, Reality seems to be like shoving a garbage bag up there. I don’t know about you, but my reality doesn’t include messing around with Glad bags while I’m trying to get laid.
As an aside, doesn’t an unrolled condom look like a sombrero? You could draw a face on your penis and put on one the end and call it Speedy Gonzalez. Just thought I’d throw that in there–not that I’ve ever tried.
All this talk about condoms got me to thinking about something Minotaur told me the other day. We were talking about A&E’s Biography, as we are wont to do, and this, naturally, led to the subject of this fine program’s former host Jack Perkins. He informed me that Mr. Perkins now does commercials for Minotaur’s local cable company, Cox Cable. In one particular commercial for Cox Broadband Internet, Mr. Perkins states “Here at Cox <smirk>, we like to call it the fatpipe <double-smirk>”. Well, if that’s the case, I like to call my penis the big fatpipe. And not because of its girth, though that applies as well. No, I’m talking about the amazing bandwidth of the human cock. Allow me to explain: The human genome is roughly 3,120,000,000 base pairs long, according to the fine folks over at the Human Genome Project. Since a single sperm has half the base pairs (the other half being in the egg), that comes out to 1,560,000,000 base pairs. Since each of these pairs can either be a guanine-cytosine bond or a adenine-thymine bond (that high school biology finally came in handy (pun intended)), the pairs and their alignments can be represented with two bits of data. If you figure that the average load has about 200,000,000 sperm in it, the average amount of information per squirt is 1.56X109 * 2 bits * 2.0X108, which, according to my trusty TI-92, is 6.24X1017 bits. Or 78,000 terabytes of data. The entire text collection of the Libary of Congress would only take up roughly 20 TB. Now, if we assume that the average ejaculation lasts about 2 seconds, then we get a bandwidth factor of about 39,000 TB/s. My trusty cable modem maxes out at about .5 Megabytes per second. An OC768 fiber line (used for major Internet/telephony backbones) maxes out at 5 Gigabytes/second. Meaning that my dick, and probably yours, too, if you have one, is capable of carrying about 8 million times more information that your top-o-the-line Internet backbone fiber core. Fucking amazing. Of course, packet loss and whatnot are another question.
Coincidentally, this also reminded me of another sex-relate
d back of the envelope math problem I tackled once when comforting a friend who’d just broken up with her boyfriend and was worried that it’d be a while before she got laid again. I quickly calculated how many feet of dick were in the DFW area for her to enjoy, should she decided to become a whore. The basics went something like this: 5,500,000 people in DFW. Half are men, giving us 2,750,000 men. Assuming 10% (based on conventional wisdom) are gay, that leaves 2,475,000 men. Drop off that last 75,000 to account for rounding errors, the impotent, and those with strange fetishes she would never go near, and another 400,000 for school-aged kids, gives 2 million potential sex partners (assuming, of course, she could use her feminine mystique to lure them away from their current partners). I’ve seen figures stating that the average penis is between 5 and 6 inches long while erect, so I’m going to use 5.5 inches. Doing a little division, we get 916,000 feet of cock. Or, 173 miles of man meat in the immediate area for her to enjoy. That’s enough cock to reach from downtown Chicago (no doubt somewhere on Wacker Drive) to Indianapolis!
So, in short, use condoms when necessary, be mindful of how much informational power you wield in your pants and just think about how much dick is out there.