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I’ve gotten to take a long sabbatical from these guys, but the endless round of business trips has now claimed yet another casualty in my life; my hormonal contraception. Impressively, in spite of being away from home on short notice on a regular basis for days at a time for more than a year now, I hadn’t yet managed to forget to pack my pills…til about two weeks ago. Sadly, a three-day hiatus is enough to render the reliability of said hormonal contraceptive dicey at best, so I dumped the rest of the month down the toilet upon my return home and informed the boyfriend that we were going to get to relive the earliest days of our romance til I could restart a new pack next month.

We’ve had a few adventures since then–like my boyfriend discovering that by far the best place to buy condoms is the grocery store, where they are openly and innocuously stashed next to the disposable razors in the toiletries aisle; drugstores lock ‘em up next to the “Nicorette” at the prescription counter and glare suspiciously even at a man who is clearly well beyond the age of consent who expresses an interest in purchasing some. He also neglected to read the varietal descriptors on the box and, for anyone out there who is curious, “Climax Control!” condoms do indeed work, to the point where the poor sucker who innocently put the thing on may never achieve one. (I’m still trying to figure out who thought that the icy numbness which results after inserting your penis into a condom filled with lidocaine-spiked lubricant was some kind of brilliant sexual invention, and if anybody ever buys these twice.)

Oh, the joys of condoms! And apparently I’m not the only one who wishes they were anywhere near as conducive to fun or even efficient sex as they are to pregnancy- and disease-free sex. There’s a guy out there who has spent a lot of his adult life working on just that–Jan Vinzenz Krause, a German sex-ed instructor. Actually, he sounds like a very cool and useful guy–

As a teenager, Krause, now 30, had trouble finding the right size condom, which set him on a quest to aid other similarly befuddled young men. In 2001 he developed an online condom adviser, which provides printable measuring tapes and instructions to help men determine which condom, out of all the brands available in Germany, will fit the best. According to Krause, more than 300,000 people have used the free service.

This really is a problem–I have had in the past both a boyfriend who could barely keep the condom on, obviously not a reassuring situation, and another who lost his erection every time he put one on because they were so tight they literally cut off the blood flow to his penis. So among other things, this guy has invented spray-on condoms, which I think I actually did read about in the fairly recent past:

The prototype, which began testing last year, consists of a hard plastic tube with nozzles that spray liquid latex from all directions, much like the water jets in the tunnel of a car wash. According to Krause, there are numerous advantages to his spray-on condom. “The condom fits 100% perfectly, so the safety is much higher than a standard condom’s, and it feels more natural.”

Unfortunately, there are still a few bugs in the system. I’m not too worried about the first few bugs mentioned–

The men who tested the spray-on condom had a few hesitations, Krause says. Some were “a little bit afraid to use the tube” and would only try it on their fingers. Others worried that the mechanism, which hisses as it sprays, might ruin the mood.

Dingalings with this level of “techno-fear” probably have a multitude of other issues that dwarf this one and possibly don’t even use condoms at present due to the level of technical difficulty and intimidation presented by the packaging and unrolling phases of the operation so we can discount them, and unless you or your partner has some kind of snake phobia, I really doubt that a brief hissing sound is going to make anybody incapable of functioning. However, the next bug is a little more significant–

But the most serious problem with the design — which is what has kept the product off the market thus far — is that the latex takes too long to dry. Liquid latex currently takes two to three minutes to vulcanize, making it impractical. “For people to buy it,” Krause says, “it needs to be ready in five to 10 seconds.”

Well yeah. Three minutes is a long time, especially if you can’t touch anything to help it maintain its, er, turgid state and have to be super-careful not to move around and accidentally bump into or brush off the drying latex, and of course the are-we-there-yet?-are-we-there-yet?-how-bout-now?-well-how-bout-now? mindset is a mood-killer even when all you’re doing is driving to Grandma’s. So hopefully some genius chemists out there will figure out the secret of fast-drying latex soon. Of course by that time I’ll be back on the pill…