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The Sex Blog Of Record
Wednesday, February 18th, 2026 -- by Bacchus
I’m reluctant to share this story at all, because the woman who put it on the internet framed it on both ends with misandrist generalizations about male hygiene. More on that, below. But first the story, which comes from clinical sexologist Danielle Kramer, talking about a time when she was under contract to provide sexual health clinical services for the military:
The base I was associated with…had barracks full of 18 to 24 year olds. A young enlisted guy comes in, tested positive for gonorrhea and chlamydia. Classic combo. Easy enough, we treat it, safe sex talk, you’re done. But the next day, two more guys came in with the same combo. And the day after that, three more guys. At this point, I’m like, okay, there’s either one very busy person on this base or something else is going on.
Then this one guy comes in, he tests positive, but he swears he is not sexually active. And I hear this all the time. So I’m like, hey, no judgment. I don’t care who you’re having sex with, but we gotta talk about this. And he’s like, no, there is no way. I’m not having sex with anybody.
Where do you live? The barracks? Who do you hang out with? And slowly, slowly, the truth comes out.
Turns out, a not small group of men in the barracks were sharing a Fleshlight. Two of them, to be exact. And none of them had been washing it for weeks. They were literally passing around a communal petri dish of gonorrhea and chlamydia like it was a Nintendo Switch.
Yes, I had to tell their commanding officer. Yes, I had to do an emergency Powerpoint about this. Yes, every single one of them had to get treated.
Not quoted are several sex-negative generalizations about men and cleanliness and safe sex, none of which are supported by the facts of the anecdote. I don’t prefer to share misandrist propaganda, especially when young men under military discipline in barracks are by no means a fair sampling from which to extrapolate general male behavior.
So why share the story at all? Because it ties in, conceptually, with the public Fleshlight art installation at Burning Man that’s gone viral in a hundred internet places over the years. Everybody who sees that installation or hears about it or talks about it feels a certain kind of way about public masturbation and/or shared sex toys, and a lot of those conversations include phrases like “nobody would” or “that’s too disgusting for anybody to…” or… you see where I’m going with this. The anecdote about young men under authoritarian control, in a sex-segregated barracks with very little privacy, establishes a sort of outlier of human behavior that I think is useful to that conversation.
That’s why, even though the story came wrapped up in sex-negative “men-are-filthy-beasts” packaging where I found it, I thought it was worth scraping it clean (as best I could) to bring it here.
Update: While curating the list of similar posts to appear beneath this one, I was amused to discover a prescient post from the very first year of ErosBlog’s publication, all the way back in 2003. (Am I allowed to call my own posts “prescient”?) In responding to a conversation outside the sex blog community (which was then very small) about why sex toys for men (male masturbators, pocket pussies, Fleshlights, and such) were considered much more taboo and icky than sex toys for women such as dildos and vibrators, I pointed out that men don’t have any sort of hygiene problems at all when it comes to cleaning things they care about, like, say, guns and military equipment:
[I]n objective terms the hygienic concern is arrant nonsense. Men have mastered cleaning tasks of a far more intricate nature, and will even voluntarily indulge when the object of their cleaning affections is, say, a much-beloved rifle. Nor is it implausible that a truly decent technology for assisted orgasm would command every bit as much gadgeteering enthusiasm as gun guys lavish on the contents of their gun safes.
So there! You can be sure that the very same military guys who supposedly passed around these dirty Fleshlights have been taught to field strip and clean a complicated rifle under challenging conditions, when given supportive social conditions for that cleaning task. The problem in that barracks was the social conditions, not the filthy-beastliness of the men.
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Wednesday, April 19th, 2023 -- by Bacchus
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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Thursday, December 1st, 2022 -- by Bacchus
Long ago, in the first flush of the “safe sex” era that arose during the AIDs epidemic, there was an attempt by various parties to rehabilitate the unsexy connotations of condom use. One of the tactics employed was to suggest (usually with chastely-abstract graphics, but sometimes with explicit and attractive photos) that a woman might “encourage” her partner to wear a condom by putting it directly on his dick with her mouth, without much use of her hands. It’s a skill of dexterity, apparently, like the old cowboy trick of rolling a cigarette one-handed while holding the reins with your other hand.
And somehow via that deep history we have arrived at Sakura (a character from the Street Fighter video game franchise) using this method to put a condom on her partner:
The artist is Makinaru.
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Thursday, March 10th, 2022 -- by Bacchus
Have you been wondering When Is It Safe to Have Sex after COVID? Scientific American has got you covered:
Nelson Bennett, a urologist at Northwestern University School of Medicine, and Justin Dubin, a urology fellow specializing in male sexual medicine and infertility at Northwestern University School of Medicine, both say that while they hope to see more research in this area, the risk of transmitting COVID via sexual activity is “very low.”
The virus has been detected in stool samples of patients with COVID-19, and more studies are needed to determine whether one might spread the virus during anal sex or such sexual activities as rimming (placing the mouth on the anus).
Even after 10 days and even after vaccination, “there is some risk of viral transmission via air or saliva,” says A.J. te Velthuis, a virology and molecular biology expert at Princeton University. But if you’ve tested negative after a lateral flow assay — a rapid antigen test — that risk is limited, and “sexual activity should then also be no problem,” he adds.
…
According to NASTAD, the National Coalition of STD Directors, you should make sure three things have happened after you have recovered from COVID before you resume sexual activity with a household partner: no fever for three days without the use of fever-reducing medications; improvement of other symptoms; and the passage of 10 days since your symptoms began.
Michael Mina, an expert on rapid tests and chief science officer at EMed, says that if you had COVID but then posted two negative rapid tests 24 hours apart, you’re “very, very unlikely” to pass the virus either through kissing or by having sex. “I’d argue it is not even necessary to wait the full 10 days,” Mina says.
There is, of course, much more nuance and detail in the full article.
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Friday, April 30th, 2021 -- by Bacchus
I don’t have a source for this, but a vintage magazine, surely. The hygienic kissing screen never caught on, for which we all are, I do not doubt, suitably grateful:
It does rather seem to prefigure the latex dental dam, which enjoyed (if I may use the word loosely) a certain currency among sex educators for a time. (How broadly it was actually adopted is a fact I don’t possess.)
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Sunday, February 14th, 2021 -- by Bacchus
There’s an amazing winter storm warning in place for an enormous swathe of these United States, and though the Nymph and I are lucky to be snug as two bugs in a rug, in the midst of the Valentine’s Day near-blizzard, my thoughts are with those who are not. Be safe out there!
The cute condoms/heart/pussy image was circulating on Tumblr ten years ago and made it into one of my themed image directories. But if I had any attribution then, which I doubt, it hasn’t survived my rough curation.
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Thursday, November 5th, 2020 -- by Bacchus
If we don’t get a handle on the pandemic, this is gonna be the future of “safe sex” for the foreseeable future:
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Wednesday, February 2nd, 2011 -- by Bacchus
A rare pre-20th-century image of condom use, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons:
Die vorsichtige Geliebte (“The Cautious Lover”) c. 1860 by Nicolas François Octave Tassaert.
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