On my keychain was a pink plastic dice that read “Don’t Gamble”. The keychain was vintage, well, from the Salvation Army. Before school, my friend and I slumped in the hallway. She pulled at the the dice “Stop”  I said. “But this comes apart” — “You are gonna break it!”.  Suddenly the dice flew apart–something popped out. “Ahh!!!” A baggy condom, from inside the dice, now sat between our lockers, yellow with age. “Oh my God. Don’t gamble!”

Aside from this moment, I really haven’t given much thought to condoms of the past. But rest assured, someone has. Researcher, Paula Treichler has made her life’s work from studying rubbers. And before they were ever packaged in keychains, condoms were prohibited in the U.S.  Here, Treichler shares some of that history and predictions on the future of “gentleman’s rubber products”.

As I’ve researched this topic, one thing has been made clear and that is that birth control has traditionally been thought of as a woman’s duty.

What makes the condom different from other methods of contraception is that it’s both birth control and disease prevention. You can’t separate them, and it’s historically made condoms easy to demonize, they were associated with prostitutes, promiscuity.

Birth control and condoms are very gendered.  When studying condom ads, I found that the exact ad, same picture, same headline might be in Playboy and Ms. but the copy would be completely different. In the women’s magazine, it was about feeling safe and secure, it was her sensitive feelings. But in the men’s ad it was his feeling of sensitivity, as in you wont lose any sensitivity.

The condom really is the only product that does both disease and pregnancy prevention. Why haven’t there been more?

There was this bio physiologist, maybe 25 years ago, who decided to change the nature of his research do something to help women. This was at his daughters death bed, something very dramatic like that. He began to develop a product that did birth control and disease prevention. But he couldn’t get funding for it. The birth control people said “we don’t know anything about disease prevention” and the disease prevention people said, “well we don’t have any interest in birth control.”

It should have been condoms 101 when AIDS hit. But actually, the religious right started a crusade against condoms. The far right argued it would promote homosexuality, all of the same anti arguments used throughout history were dredged up. The birth control and condom empires are still quite separate, we see that as AIDS and condoms move around the world.

So, is there a world history of condoms being prohibited?

The class, race and health of who has babies has always been of interest to a state. Various incentives are built in by government and society to influence that. After WW2, populations of young men were wiped out. European countries did institute fairly strong prohibitions against birth control because they wanted their populations to re generate.

Starting in the late 19th century in the Unites States, the Comstock act prohibited condoms along with masturbation, abortion and basically everything except  intercourse within marriage for the sake of having babies. (ed: until the 60′s and 70′s in some states.)

What were condoms even like back then, in the late 19th century? I mean who was using them?

Alot of them were made from animal skin or intestines, or from linen or silk. They were reusable, you’d wash them. In the U.S. certainly working class people preferred them because they were cheaper, more readily available and you didn’t have to go see a doctor to get them, like other forms of birth control. Which a lot of women, often immigrant women, were uncomfortable with.

There was a guy in Chicago who sold condoms, when he would get busted, he’d go underground, change his name and brochures and pop up somewhere else in Chicago.

What finally changed?

Starting at the end of the 19th century there was a huge syphilis outbreak and it wasn’t talked about. There was still this Victorian idea of silence is good and women especially shouldn’t know these things. As the epidemic spread and no one would talk about it, doctors began to change their minds about birth control and disease prevention.

During WW1 a lot of troops enlisted had syphilis and couldn’t give their manpower. So the military decided they weren’t interested in birth control but were interested in disease prevention. Although it was never really condoned, millions of condoms were distributed among troops during WW1. Plus our troops got to mingle with British and French troops and saw that the attitudes towards sex were different. Supposedly this is how American guys learned how to do oral sex on women.

What about the sexual revolution and condoms?

The 60′s were a whole generational change in terms of sexual practices and freedoms. Then around 1970 all of those Comstock prohibitions on the books were taken off. So by that point condoms could be sold in supermarkets, they could be advertised n magazines like Redbook and Ladies Home Journal, not to mention Playboy and Penthouse.

We learned during the AIDS epidemic that in the 60s and 7os no one was really thinking about STD’s anymore. There was penicillin, these things weren’t fatal. But also there wasn’t a big stigma around having a baby, it wasn’t considered a bad thing, like today when you have to be “ready”.

So where are we now? What is the future of condoms?

It’s been very hard to figure out actual condom usage. There was a city that hired people in the summer to go through the sewage system and count the condoms. Then they had a huge condom promotion campaign and went back to count them again, to see if people had actually changed their behavior and used more and they had!

Since the 80′s, scientists have been trying to develop a foam that injects in the vagina to kill both sperm and sexually transmitted pathogens. It would be completely under women’s control and men wouldn’t even have to know about it. Last year a German guy did invent a spray on condom but couldn’t get the drying time down. Condoms are a great product–cheap, simple but I think it’s back to the drawing board for them.

This is part of a feature Q & A that originally ran on Gapers Block