No one knows where condoms got their name — theories include bawdy King Charles II's Irish physician Dr. Condon, or the town of Condom in Southern France — but they've been around long enough to accumulate a storied history. Gabrielle Fallopius first mentioned using linen sheaths as protection against VD in sixteenth-century Italy, and they quickly became popular with aristocratic libertines who wanted to avoid the fun of having their noses rot off from syphilis. (Showing that men have been ever mindful of their partners' pleasure, early models were tied on with a pretty ribbon.)
The only problem with the beta version of the prophylactic was that it was out of most people's price range. Thankfully, Charles Goodyear's discovery of the vulcanization process fixed that, and by the 1850s, rubbers were cheaply mass-produced. This, however, only replaced one
problem with another: using these early préservatifs was like fucking though a tire, and even worse, you had to wash it out and re-use it when you were done. But by 1912, Julius Fromm had invented the modern disposable prophylactic by dipping molds into the rubber solution; he quickly took over the market.
Today, thanks to the advent of AIDS and the resulting safer-sex campaigns, condoms have replaced birth-control pill dispensers as the standard
nightstand accessory. Yet the Coney Island whitefish was an endangered species in the United States from the late 1800s until the 1920s. The reason why is a fascinating and instructive bit of cultural history.
It was in 1873 that "Secretary and Special Agent for the Society for the Suppression of Vice and Post Office Inspector" Anthony Comstock, a Civil War veteran and former dry-goods clerk, succeeded in persuading Congress to pass the so-called "Comstock laws." These laws forbade the trafficking of any material judged obscene — including any sort of advertising for, or public discussion of, "devices or techniques meant to provide protection against conception or venereal disease." Comstock was backed by the New York City-based Young Men's Christian Association, an evangelical organization founded by businessmen for the spiritual uplift and material benefit of the city's young professional men. Left to their own devices, the urban missionaries feared, single men would fall into citified vices like playing mumblety-peg, hanging around saloons, and conversing with harlots.
But World War I brought America face-to-face with the results of the stupidity of the Comstock laws, causing a significant change in the nation's attitude towards condoms. “Once they've seen Paris, how are you going to keep them down on the farm?” was the question asked in towns all across America, but fond memories were not all that sexually naïve American soldiers, let loose in wartime Europe, had brought home. America was the only combatant nation to deny condoms to its troops. The result was that 383,000 American soldiers contracted venereal disease — about 60,000 more than were killed or wounded in battle. The nation had learned its lesson. Comstock laws or not, condoms — three to a brightly illustrated tin — were stocked under drugstore counters from coast to coast.
Most prominent was the Ramses brand, manufactured by the German-born "condom king," Julius Schmid. He had initially worked as a sausage-stuffer after he landed in New York in the 1880s, but soon found that selling empty casings for customers to stuff their own meat into to be a far more profitable business. Another New Yorker, Merle Young, started the wildly successful Trojan condom company, while Sheiks capitalized on Rudolf Valentino's reputation as a lover and the title of his most famous movie. The Society for the Suppression of Vice never recovered from the blow, and Comstockery in America began a long period of decline. (As for the Society's YMCA backers, they were given their just desserts in 1978 by the Village People.)
