Getty Images / Graeme Robertson for the Guardian / Guardian Design
“The history of the condom is really a history of gradually diminishing pain. Rubber condoms started replacing sheep’s guts from around 1855, after Charles Goodyear (of the tyres) had discovered the process of vulcanisation, when rubber is heated to make it more malleable. In 1877, mass production began of “vulcanised crepe rubber sheaths”, as Jessica Borge unappetisingly describes them in her history of condom manufacturing, Protective Practices. The earliest rubber condoms were impressively awful, made from sheets of latex rolled around a mandrel (a large tube) and then stitched together, creating a seam that must have been agonising for “user and receiver”, as Wilson sometimes calls people having sex.
“By the end of the 19th century, condoms were being made by “cement-dipping”, a process where the mandrel was dipped into rubber heated with petrol solvent. This got rid of the seam, but the factories occasionally blew up due to the petrol, and the resulting condom was thick, heavy and designed to be reused. During his presentation, Wilson brought out his 1940s specimen, bought on eBay for £300. Inside was a brown rubber sheath, as thick as a verruca sock, and a set of instructions: after use the condom should be washed and then dusted with “French chalk”, whose dry residue you imagine had a certain chafing effect on any genitalia that encountered it.
“The brand Durex was registered in 1929 by brothers Lionel and Elkan Jackson, founders of the London Rubber Company. Durex – standing for durability, reliability and excellence – used new latex-dipping technology developed by a 17-year-old Polish immigrant, Lucian Landau, who had studied rubber at the Polytechnic of North London. The Jacksons had previously been selling imported condoms out of a tea chest in their hairdresser-tobacconist shop on Aldersgate Street (the barbershop was apparently the birthplace of the phrase: “Something for the weekend, sir?”). By 1952, London Rubber reported a 95% market share for condoms. (The company was later investigated three times by the Monopolies and Mergers Commission.) With the 1957 introduction of the “Gossamer” condom – the first to be pre-lubricated – consumers discovered that using a condom didn’t have to be appalling. Durex Gossamer soon made up 70% of the business. After that, London Rubber began to expand globally, becoming London International, before it was taken over first by SSL International, then Reckitt Benckiser in 2010….
“Now, Durex occupies about 40% of the global condom market – a market worth an estimated $4.6bn.
“Wilson isn’t easily deterred. When he moved to China in 2010, Durex had a negligible presence. He had to figure out how to sell condoms in a place where you couldn’t mention them on TV or in print. Initially, this involved finding out how the Chinese had sex. Mutual pleasure and technique, he told me, were both important (which you would hope might apply anywhere), as was Japanese porn, because of the lack of a porn industry in China….
“Durex, after all, can claim a certain global stature. Thanks to the sex survey, they know more about the world’s sexual habits than anyone. The survey is not made public – “it’s a goldmine” – but Wilson let me peek at a couple of slides. Who’s having the most sex? Colombians and Indonesians (86% of respondents said they had it once a week). And the least? The Japanese (26%)….
“Around half the world’s Durex condoms are made at this factory, built in the early 90s, once condom manufacturing left the UK for good. A billion a year, shipped all over the globe. (The other half are made in China, mostly for the Chinese market.) A workforce of 1,000 people is spread among research and development, a testing laboratory and production lines capable of operating 24 hours a day and spitting out more than 200,000 condoms in an hour…..
To avoid the doomsday scenario of a hole in a condom, meanwhile, requires the testing of every single condom destined to leave the factory…. In one 10.5-hour shift, one worker will test more than 22,000 condoms…. Back on its journey, the hole-free condom is rolled up, lubricated, closed into its foil case, joined into a pair, then packed into a box – Surprise Me, Pleasure Me, Invisible Extra Sensitive, Intense Ribbed and Dotted, Mutual Climax and so on. Even the packaging has to be tested. In a small room containing what looked like a series of mechanical torture instruments, sample packs of condoms are dropped and exposed to heat and vibration, to simulate the conditions of ocean-crossings and lorry journeys. “This one’s a simple squasher,” said Wilson, pointing to a machine that crushes the box, a re-enactment of the chaos that might befall it on a pallet. If a condom can survive all that, you’d think it could survive anything. But then, it hasn’t met a human yet….
‘Even getting condom-donning right can involve
a fairly sobering dose of logistics.’
Photo: Roman Merzinger/Getty Images/Westend61
…. After all, as Wilson once put it: “The ultimate condom is a condom that feels like it’s not there.” And there, somehow, is the fundamental contradiction of the condom: its ideal form is a negation of its presence. “Ting!” said Wilson, grinning, as this perfect and impossible product clicked into place.
SOURCE: Guardian, by Sophie Elmhirst, 27 June 2023 (Excerpts) ; Listen to the podcast (42+ minutes), 28 July 2023