Hector's People, and the First Alternative

I take a bunch of meds every day. I take a pill for my asthma, a pill for allergies, a nasal spray for my allergies, two inhalers for my asthma. Oh, and a vitamin D pill because I am a skinny white boy who is perpetually vitamin D deficient. So perhaps you can forgive me for not wanting to talk about another pharmaceutical. Well, sort of.

One of the finest professors at the U, Elaine Tyler May, wrote a whole book about the birth control pill, and what a game changer it was, and still is. I want to briefly talk about two hybrids, the latex condom, and the morning after pill (Plan B) because I think they are interesting windows into our ideas of pleasure and gender in our sex-saturated world.

OBJECTS

Let's start with the objects themselves. I went to the drug store, and bought a package of condoms. The sheer variety alone speaks to the capitalist and economic forces, tugging at our preferences, trying to convince us that there really is a difference worth paying sixty cents for. I went up to the checkout, and the male university student who rang me up was visibly and obviously pleased for me, and practivally give me a fistbump. I didn't have the heart to tell him it was for a school project. It cost me five bucks for a pack of three. Notice the question of access. Latour briefly mentions this, and I think it's essential to consider. I interacted with one person who was more or less a peer, and paid the price of a latte. That's not a big barrier to entry.

On the package, it says “Latex condoms are intended to prevent pregnancy, HIV/AIDS, and other sexually transmitted infections.” Notice the all important “intended”. This is a liability issue. Trojan can not not make guarantees, for fear of a thousand lawsuits raining down upon their heads from incompetent university co-eds. Otherwise, fairly self explanatory. No chemistry lessons here. Not even much medicine. On to Plan B!

Levonorgestrel seems like a good drug, in my relatively uninformed, humanities geek opinion. Some cursory research reveals a pretty good success rate (i.e. its good at its job), and while it doesnt do anything to protect against STI’s, I did not see any horror stories of side effects (or just effects) run amok. The intrigue begins when we look at accessibility. Until very recently, in 2013, you needed to interact with someone in a lab coat, and show some ID, and/or have a prescription to get Plan B. Today, the standard Plan B is over the counter and has no age restrictions, but this is a new development. Also, it costs 50 bucks. This is a drug that is on the WHO’s List of Essential Medicines, and it costs something in the realm of 23 cents in bulk in the developing world. That's less than the buck and a quarter the condoms cost. We see substantial barriers to access, and it is no coincidence that of the two forms of contraception we’re looking at, the one used on the back end of sex is 30 times the price per unit. When unplanned pregnancy is at stake, price gaugers can't be far behind.

Now, let's wade into the world of advertisements for contraception (after putting our browsers in private mode), and how the presentation helps make these hybrids.

MARKETING

I don’t watch much network television, mostly because I like Netflix and my Premiere League gold pass much more than anything on NBC or CBS, but even I can recall seeing a Trojan add or two in my time. If you look at them, you see some interesting motifs, and some notable omissions. One, particular in older ads, there is little to no dialogue, with everything communicated via sheer phenomenological telepathy. Obviously, affirmative consent is not high on the ad writers priority list. Another common theme is the lengths men will go to get laid. In one particularly amusing ad, a young man’s girlfriend moves to Sri Lanka right before they do the deed, and he uses a rope of condoms to swing over chasms, for rivers, and eventually make it to the South Asian Island, only to find his lady friend ensconced in the arms of another man with a swankier (and thinner) condom. They managed to turn a piece of latex into a status symbol and a swiss army knife of functionality in 30 seconds. Professor May lectured on how Playboy and other men's magazines extolled the virtues of the condom, because it was conducive to a bachelor lifestyle. There are even hints of proto-feminism in some Trojan ads in ads like this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UWC1AHioF7I, where the existence of female pleasure is acknowledged (the irony flag is proudly waving). Of course, Trojan’s business depends on men getting laid, so it is in their best interests to evolve with social norms about these things. The final thing that needs to be mentioned is that there aren't any disclaimers. No fast speech talking about side effects. Condoms are marketed as a pleasure enhancing device, that is a curious hybrid of quasi-medical packaging to give it legitimation, but not so much as to induce any anxiety about side effects, with lots of subliminal messages about men being captive to their need to get laid, and the incredible sexyness of good latex. All of this despite the fact that they spend no time convincing you the product works. Curious, when you think about it.

On the other hand, I have never seen a Plan B commercial until I looked it up on youtube. It felt like an antidepressant commercial, with lots of cool lighting, slow motion shots of people stretching, and a helpful voice describing a problem and a way to get help. They go into detail about how effective the product is and how it’s going to fix what’s wrong. All of this is followed by the FDA mandated warning. It’s a drug commercial, this much is unmistakable. It’s also notably not sexual. No men are in the ad at all. If you go to the Plan B website, it’s got a very steril feeling with lots of pastels. They spend lots of time convincing you that it works here too. Contrast this with the Trojan website, where they have a whole page addressing FAQs such as how to deal with being aroused at the sight of your partners friends, and why women don’t give as many blow jobs as men would like. These are actually on the website, Scouts Honor (as Robin would say).

This all sets up a nice juxtaposition between hybrids of hedonism/medicine, and medicine/anxiety. We’ve got men who are trying to get laid, and a company that wants to convince them that they are more likely to get laid if they have a condom. They want some medical legitimation with their pseudoscientific talk of scanning all the condoms electronically and preventing disease, but when you drill down, we’re looking at a device that they want you to believe enhances pleasure and its acquisition more likely.

For women, anxiety at getting pregnant is rebuffed by the reassuringly implacable force of MEDICAL SCIENCE. We see radically different approaches at marketing products that have the same teleological goal of preventing the creation of more pinkish brown monkey because the hybrids are made of very different things. In essence, men are sold pleasure and women are sold security. I’ll save the lecture about patriarchy for another time (and hopefully someone more qualified than I can speak to it in the meantime) but it’s worth meditating on how subliminal messages of power, pleasure, fear, and medicine make their way into every aspect of our private lives.