NEWS: Femidom: Sex Aid of Choice

"Fun with a windsock" is how 30-year-old marketing executive Louise Sandler recalls her first and only Femidom experience, in 1993, at university. "They were being given out in the student union. My boyfriend was up for it because it meant he wouldn't have to wear a condom. But once was enough; first off, I couldn't get it in. The instructions said, 'Squeeze inner ring together and slide to cover cervix.' I mean, what sort of woman has the capacity to slide her entire hand inside herself - and in front of her boyfriend?"

By the late 90s, the product was in the hands of an American firm, the Female Health Company (FHC), and business was so bleak that they were on the verge of throwing in the towel. Then Mary Ann Leeper, the firm's president, took the first of two phonecalls that would change everything. "It was a woman called Anna, from Harlem, New York," recalls Leeper. "She said: 'I just called to thank you for doing this. If I asked the man I live with to wear a male condom, he'd beat me up and throw me out. Me and my sisters, we use this and we thank you greatly.' "



The second call came several months later, from a woman called Daisy at the Ministry of Health in Zimbabwe. "She told me that, on her desk, she had a petition signed by 30,000 women wanting us to bring the female condom to Zimbabwe," says Leeper. Sniggering at the Femidom, it seemed, was a privilege only for those lucky enough to have a choice about whether or not to sleep with a man who wouldn't wear protection. FHC subsequently struck a deal with the World Heath Organisation to sell the female condom at a discount to education programmes in more than 80 developing countries, mainly those hit hardest by Aids.



Its reception was unprecedented. "It's very hard to reverse negative preconceptions," says Anne Philpott, who worked for FHC, introducing the female condom into sexual health programmes for three years until last February. "But in Colombo, Sri Lanka, where I was working with female sex workers, their clients hadn't heard of a female condom before. So there were no preconceptions, and rather than saying, 'This is a condom, this is going to protect you,' [the women] marketed it as a sex toy, allowing the client to insert it - a real thrill, because seeing a vagina up close, or touching one, is a huge taboo in Sri Lanka."



The design held a further unexpected thrill, as the plastic ring inside rubs against the tip of the penis during intercourse, intensifying the man's orgasm. Subsequently, the prostitutes started charging more for sex with a female condom. Suddenly, FHC had tapped into a whole new approach to marketing.



In Senegal, the condoms are sold with noisy "bine bine" beads; an erotic accessory that women wear around their hips. The rustle of the polyurethane during sex is now associated with the clicking of the beads - and so, a turn-on. Senegalese women have also cleverly suggested that the large size of the condom reflects that of their partner's penis.



In Zimbabwe, where 930,000 of the 1,600,000 adults infected with HIV are women, a new word - kaytec-yenza - has entered the vernacular to describe the "tickle" created by the inner ring rubbing against the penis. Women too are gaining extra pleasure from the condom. "In India," says Philpott, "women told me they had become so excited inserting the condom that they didn't want to have sex. I couldn't work it out - were they doing it wrong, hurting themselves? Then I realised they'd been having orgasms just from putting the condom in. Probably because they'd never touched themselves before."



In the developing world, the Female Health Company's strategy is to raise the quantity of female condoms sold from 10m to around 200m - staggering when you consider that 6-9bn male condoms were bought and distributed last year in the developing world.