Oh, please tell me those aren’t used!
“Oh, please tell me those aren’t used,” said a frumpy little woman who declined to be named for fear of association with something she considered so unseemly.
She gazed at a shovel full of blacked condoms, most likely used, collected from the trash cans and floors of London’s notorious gay and fetish club, FIST, and encased in resin by Franko B. B’s found-artifact sculpture is one of the first works visible upon stepping through the door to the Museum of Sex’s recent and self-explanatory exhibit, “Rubbers: The Life, History and Struggle of the Condom.”
The exhibit, occupying half of the museum’s second floor, is composed chiefly of curios—half-century-old condom tins and prophylactic propaganda through the ages—and a handful of artistic pieces. Progressing along the wall, the artifacts trace the historical and social evolution of the condom from a Papua New Guinean penis sheath mounted on the wall, through the linen condoms of the 1500s (after the 1493 syphilis outbreak, graphically depicted) and animal intestine wrappers of the 1700s, and straight to the Obama/McCain/Palin novelties of today.
