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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Alzrius" data-source="post: 9822704" data-attributes="member: 8461">I just finished reading C. Knutson's 2003 work <a href="https://historicgames.com/ocart2/index.php?route=product/product&path=63&product_id=100" target="_blank">A Short History of a Delicate Subject: Condoms through the Centuries.</a>This eleven-page pamphlet (which only has nine pages of writing) is, naturally, an exceptionally short product; reading it took me about ten minutes, and that was at a relatively casual pace. Still, it goes into fairly surprising depth on the topic in question, covering (albeit only very briefly) numerous facts about the development of condoms. For instance, it notes that while the obvious use of preventing the spread of diseases and pregnancies are presumably why condoms were used in antiquity, we can't rule out the use of religious or ritual possibilities as well. In more recent times, it notes several humorous anecdotes, such as <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Boswell" target="_blank">James Boswell</a> going to a brothel in Amsterdam and just drinking with a prostitute there, having forgotten his "armour" (one of the slang terms for a condom from that period).Surprisingly, after the talk about the condom's history, it then spends several pages talking about more contemporary issues, such as how condoms are tested for reliability. In addition to the types of tested conducted, ranging from filling them with water to check for leaks to "air burst" tests (which involve inflating them like a balloon to see how they stand up to pressure) to tests involving the transmission of microbes, it also notes that such tests are conducted by the government, private organizations such as <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bruce_Voeller" target="_blank">Bruce Voeller</a>'s Mariposa Foundation, and even Consumer Reports; and here I thought they only ranked cars!Overall, this didn't get too deep, and ended much too quickly, but was still quite intense while it lasted. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" /></blockquote>

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