A couple of weeks ago, while enjoying an adult beverage at a local pub, I had a

rare opportunity to feel pleased with a marketing campaign. And no, it wasn’t

the Lone Star beer campaign that employs a little tongue-in-cheek

Texas chauvinism to hawk its wares.

This one was for Trojan condoms. First, you see the posters in

the bar’s bathroom: A picture of a barful of pigs hitting on reluctant women,

with one man talking to one very interested woman. It’s a reference

to the TV ad campaign that compares men who

refuse to use condoms to barnyard animals.

To reinforce the message — "Evolve: Use

a condom every time" — the bottom of the pint glasses had little

pictures of pig noses in them, with the Trojan branding and slogan on

the reverse.

It’s a brilliant strategy,

and could only be better if they had condom machines in the bathrooms.

This pub isn’t cruise-y, but a lot of people go there

on dates. So Trojan is still grabbing people with a safe sex message

right before they get into a situation where unsafe sex often happens–after

a date that involves drinking alcohol. The ads use humor to take

the edge off, but also bluntly address one of the most significant unspoken barriers to getting people to use condoms every time: a lot of the time, women are afraid to request or men actively resist condom use. The uncomfortable

fact is that men have more of the responsibility for use with condoms, but

women run a greater risk in unprotected sex. (I’m sure it works the other way around, but I suspect the responsibility/risk

ratio means that it’s more common that men resist and women cave.)

All I could think while examining

this marketing campaign was, "Why haven’t we seen more of this?

Campaigns like this should be in high school buses and coffee shops,

too. Plus, this should have started long ago." But America is in short supply of the sort of common sense that says that

condom ads should be located where people are in danger of having unsafe sex,

and that said ads should bluntly address barriers to using condoms properly.

When the first ads from this campaign came out, CBS and Fox balked

at showing them.

You can’t blame prudery.

Fox aired this blunt advertisement

for Victoria’s Secret lingerie during the 2008 Superbowl. The meaning–this underwear

is a preliminary for the Hawt Sex right after the game!–couldn’t

have been more explicit. I’m not a prudish person by any means, but

watching model Adriana Lima flop around and spread her legs while wearing

skimpy underwear in front of my friends, and suffering the knowledge

that this was supposed to inspire middle-aged sports fans around the

country to rip off their team jerseys and hump their wives atop king-sized

beds, well, it all made me blush pretty hard. To Fox, that was acceptable,

but a Trojan ad where everyone kept their clothes on and innuendo was

employed more effectively was somehow off-limits.

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Of course, Fox explained the

decision in bluntly anti-woman tones, arguing the use of condoms

to prevent pregnancy offended their network standards. Presumably, the Victoria’s

Secret ad is acceptable, as long as the viewer thinks she’s posing

half-naked as if to say, "Oh you hot football fan studs, impregnate

me now."

I shouldn’t be surprised.

Obvious double standards like that fly under the radar of far too many

people. I’m thinking specifically

of the popular right wing blogger The Anchoress, who in a bizarre

tirade that was

presumably about how everyone should shut up about sex, made it clear

she meant, "Everyone but me because it’s different when it’s me."

But maybe she should have re-thought sharing information like this:

I like various positions!

With the lights on and off! In the daytime and the nighttime! In the

ocean and in the windowseat! I like sex on Sunday mornings! Can I get

an "AMEN" for Cunnilingus? AMEN for cunnilingus! Can I get a "You

know how to whistle, don’t you" for Fellatio? "You know how to

whistle, don’t you?" Can I get a "Ride’em Cowboy" for my husband?

Yippeekayae! Can I get an "arghghghghg" for Readi Whip and maraschino

cherries? Arghghghghghg! What, no brownies?

Which just made everyone wonder

if she’s so right wing because she suffers from a staggering lack

of imagination. Contrast her entitled attitudes about her own

sex life with her brutal lack

of generosity for others. If you can follow: if you’re an American married right wing nut,

then you get to have sex in various positions with extremely silly nicknames

and you get to pat yourself on the back for it. But if you’re

from Myanmar and your community has been ravaged by a typhoon and your

access to health care is limited, then you deserve to die of AIDS for

"Ride ‘em Cowboy." Got it.

This double standard–where

explicit sex is fine but explicit discussions of safety make people

squirmy–must play a huge role in inconsistent condom use.

The squeamishness around the Trojan ad is just one example. For

once, we have an ad that has the potential to help educate people about negotiating for condom use as well as sell a

product.

Another example that comes

to mind for me is the role of lubrication in condom usage. A

recent episode of "Sex Is Fun" alerted me to this problem.

Many people, women especially, think they are allergic to latex who

aren’t because they had bad reactions to condoms, including pain or itching.

In fact, many of them simply aren’t using enough lubrication.

So now you have a situation where women are shunning condoms because

of these side effects, when a bit of accurate, straightforward, and, yes, explicit education would go a long way.

But even the more explicit

lubrication ads for companies like KY dance around the nitty-gritty

of how you should use their product with a condom. This is not because they don’t see the sales potential in that,

I’m sure. It’s because of the double standard. You can

talk about sex explicitly, but you can’t talk about safety.