Since, for me, puberty and the AIDS epidemic were more or less simultaneous events, I’ve spent my entire sexual life being bombarded with efforts to make condoms sexy. Not just condoms in particular, but also “safe sex” (later rebranded “safer sex”) in general.

It never really worked. Condoms are necessary, in many contexts; and there’s a public health argument to be made for positive depictions of condoms in porn and erotica, too. Especially when the absence of a condom in an erotic display will be jarring and unpleasant for some. It’s a no-win situation for adult creators, and most of them just deal with it as smoothly as possible, the way we’ve all been doing all our lives.

What about actually sexy depictions of condom use? I haven’t seen very many. In twenty years of sex blogging, these two are the only memorable ones.

And then, today, I encountered a genuine first: a condom reference in erotic fiction that was at least a little bit sexy, and actually made me laugh out loud when I got to the concluding simile:

“Now there was a condom, and he was tearing the wrapper. Rolling it down the blush of his length, and it was one of those fetish black ones. When he got it to the base, slacks only unzipped but belt intact, he looked glossy and threatening, like some intimidating new dildo she’d buy and then have second thoughts about.”

That’s from the BDSM novella Breathless by Eris Adderly, as seen in the anthology volume Black Light: Roulette War.

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