What’s that word again? …con…con…con…condom!

Wonders will never cease!

We all have our weird days, and I had another one of mine recently when my five girlies who are by the way in their early twenties, said to me, “We’ve heard about it, but have never seen one and… don’t really know how it works!”

Well, what is it?

….A Condom!

So they didn’t know the C of condoms. Now that’s a bit shocking, especially for someone who has been in the condom and safe sex promotion business for a while, talking about it all day and fetching a salary from it (yeah!). Their revelation almost had me knocked down and if ignorance is bliss, as some say, it can come with a baby or a deadly virus.

So why was I shocked? – Because we’re ladies, we have a uterus and it’s not 1924 anymore. If not anything else, we owe it to ourselves to take our lives in our own hands. If you decide to have sex, with whomever you want to, you should know the nearest supermarket or chemist shop, and definitely know how to put a condom on correctly. After all, what fun is sex if you’re left worrying afterwards about pregnancy and Sexually Transmitted Infections (STIs) –including HIV/AIDS!

Getting back to my story – Pushing my shock aside, we got straight down to business (the business of discussing safe sex) and I spilled the beans and cucumbers and bananas (Haa!); Consciously within the boundaries of friendly boasts, I threw a series of innocent banters at them and got them talking.

And so went the night when the Estro-Club revealed their outdated sex-ed status, and I felt like a sexed-up beacon. Thankfully with friends you can (and must!) take those few extra liberties and tell them what they need to know, before it’s too late. They will be embarrassed, but hey, who isn’t? Remember your first encounter with a condom advertisement? Or how you sat still when it flashed on your TV screen while you were having family time? Or even when you bought your first condoms?

In the end (or shall we say beginning?), why you need sex is definitely a no-brainer, but what you do before and during is something you might want to think about. And if you don’t know, please get to know. The deal is simple: know your sex stuff, be ready, use a condom and be on top (pun intended here!).

And by the way, I showed my girlies a condom... for starters. J

This article was published on the BBC World Service Trust website.