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PaperclipPerfector  11mo ago (text post)   27877 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 27, 2023

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Good foreplay only makes it worse.

Also, regardless of whether the sex ends in orgasm or not, the sex is so much better without a condom. The goal is as intimate and pleasurable sex as possible, condoms are a major impediment to both, with or without orgasm.

But your initial claim was not merely that sex without a condom is better; rather it was that it was pointless: You said, "You might as well not have sex at that point." That was the claim that I was skeptical of.

That's not what I said and I don't see a contradiction.

I don't understand. I literally quoted you.

You literally didn't.

Well, I literally copied and pasted it from your comment, so perhaps you are employing an eccentric definition of "literally."

It's high-variance, but there are a subset of men (both straight and gay) who can't get very far with a condom on during penetration, sometimes up to the point of losing the ability to maintain a decent (or rarely, any) erection entirely. The exact causes cover wide ground, such as low-level skin sensitivity, mental overhead, performance anxiety, mumblemumbles-it's-not-just-soccons-afraid-of-jerking-it, or for... not entirely understood reasons (one fun hypothesis: American condom sizes are moronic).

This class of problem is less 'well, I guess I just have slightly reduced sensation and might just be edging with my partner today', 'it's time for a long oral session!' or even 'I'd rather bottom', and more 'this is going to be actively frustrating for everyone involved, and not even in a fun chastity cage sorta way'.

Contra some of the other posters, I don't think this is universal, or even disliking condoms is universal -- there are a surprisingly large number of people with condom-related kinks, for entirely unsurprising reasons. Some of these frustrations might even be solvable with practice and familiarity. But a lot of the mainstream model of the complaints is dismissive in unhealthy ways.

(one fun hypothesis: American condom sizes are moronic).

Please elaborate on this if you've a theory.

I don't endorse this, but the theory goes:

American condom sizes are established by the FDA, as a rule, partly for standardization reasons, and partly to simplify testing. Condoms must have a fully-unrolled length of at least 170mm, and has a narrow band of widths. Technically, the standard uses a 'flat width', as one-half the unstretched circumference. While this has somewhat expanded in recent years, from 50-54mm 'flat width' (100-108mm circumference) before 2008 to 50-57mm 'flat width' (100-114mm circumference) in 2008, and in 2022 with limited acceptance of more broad sizes for ONE-brand condoms, in practice if you go to a big-box store, chances are pretty good you're going to get something in the 52-54mm 'flat width' range (104-108mm circumference), and if your store doesn't sell ONE-brand, most of the sizing guidance is worse-than-useless or actively misleading.

And that works for the average guy, even if it's technically a little long.

Go much away from those bounds, and it doesn't work as well, and they're narrow bounds. For obvious reasons, this is a more popular cause celebre among the well-endowed. You can fist a latex condom if you want, but it gives a bit of a pinch, not even in the useful way that a cock ring would, and most dicks are more sensitive than forearms. There's people who can kink on pinched there, but there's a reason chastity cages don't work like that. Too-short condoms are prone to rolling off or breaking, and this can turn sex into the unfun sort of wrestling match.

But the problems are, if anything, worse on the shorter or slimmer sides: having a much-too-long condom leaves a bunch of cruft at the base, and having a too-wide one augments the whole 'fucking a plastic glove' problem. And for people who are nervous or don't have the hardest erections, there's a worse feedback loop, where a condom that's just a little loose when fully erect is a constant (and boner-killing) struggle to keep on and tight enough to get significant sensation from if not at full mast.

The UK/EU standards aren't much wider, but they're still at least better.

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