Perhaps it’s fitting that just when the results of a recent study announced that a certain sort of abstinence education within a very select group of very young kids (sixth and seventh graders) kinda sorta might work a little bit (to the overwhelming and disproportionate glee of the religious right), that NYC’s Museum of Sex mount a condom exhibit. (Oh the puns.)
Yes, there is now a curated ode to that pesky little piece of latex the Vatican loves to hate so much. It’s titled, “Rubbers: The Life, History & Struggle of the Condom,” it opened on February 4th, and yes, Trojan is one of its sponsors.
The New York Times had this to say about the exhibit in its review, “Unrolled, Unbridled and Unabashed”:
“[T]heir history is what is extraordinary. These commonplace objects — widely used and rarely spoken of, often seen but infrequently displayed — are icons of far more than the phallus. . .But the last half of the exhibition is [ ] preoccupied with controversy: the condom becomes a political instrument in long-running cultural and religious debates. A 1915 edition of Margaret Sanger’s once-controversial book, “What Every Girl Should Know,” is here. (Her birth-control advocacy led to the creation of Planned Parenthood.) So is a 1989 poster of deliberate crudity attacking the pope and the Roman Catholic Church for opposing the use of condoms for birth control and disease prevention.”
Apparently the condom exhibit is heavy on the dark side but it plays to the light, too, including the way it lends itself to “sophomoric humor.”