Female Condoms: Do Women Use Them?

In the early 1980s if a man had an STD it was stupidly considered a rite of passage amongst his peers. The only thing embarrassing for someone was going to the local clinic to get the dreaded penicillin shot which one got to treat syphilis.

In the 1990s HIV/AIDS made people really scared of sex because death was so real it surrounded us. Having an STD was not cool anymore. Condom and Protector became the buzzwords, and the cool thing was having a pack or two in your pocket. I remember carrying one even though I had not even kissed a girl. But carrying a condom was fashionable then, and im sure it still is.

When the female condom came there was a lot of debate about it and some people saw it as a tool for empowerment while others questioned the whole idea of a female condom. For all the noise that was made about the female condom I had never seen, touched, let alone use one.

In fact I don’t actually know of any girl who keeps one in her wallet, so today I decided to demystify the female condom for myself. I walked into a pharmacy and confidently bought one pack of female condoms.

I eagerly rushed home, went to the privacy of my room, sat on the bed and opened it. For a good 20 minutes I stared at it, trying to make sense of the nonsense that was before me. There is something unappealing about the female condom its huge, clumsy looking and even before reading the instructions on how to use it, it really looked like mission impossible.

It got me thinking if these female condoms really work, as in are they really practical given the task they required to do. Do women really use female condoms?