It is important to Ben Wilson, the man in charge of the condom brand Durex, that he chews the condoms he sells. He likes to consider their flavour, to know the sensory experience of a customer engaged in oral sex, and to think about how it could be bettered. He makes other people sample them, too. In a car on the way to the Durex condom factory on the outskirts of Bangkok, as traffic vibrated in the heat along the highway, he told me with pride about the time he had laid out rows of bananas and condoms for a gathering of senior executives at Reckitt, Durex’s parent company. “I said: ‘If you want to work on condoms you need to put a condom on that banana and taste it.’”
Freshly promoted, Wilson is Reckitt’s global category director for intimate wellness, overseeing all the company’s sex-related products, including Durex condoms, lubes and toys. Sandy-haired, rosy-cheeked, nearing 50, Wilson has a kind of renegade energy, consciously uncorporate. He spikes his hair, never wears a suit and zones out to DJs Paul van Dyk and David Guetta while travelling. To prepare for his fortnightly DJ lessons, he is at his decks for up to 12 hours a week in a specially designated room in his house on the south coast of England, where he lives with his wife and two children. (Wilson’s retirement plan is fully formed: a second home in Ibiza, already bought. He would die happy, he told me, if he could play a set at the EDM festival Tomorrowland.)
In conversation, Wilson doesn’t even slightly adjust his upbeat tone when discussing the problems of anal lubrication. He’s spent most of his professional life talking about sex. He started out at Johnson & Johnson in the 90s, working on K-Y, then moved to Reckitt in 2007, headed up Durex in China for eight years, became the brand’s head of innovation and now finds himself perched at the top of the intimate wellness ladder. Over his career, he’s noticed how the conversation around sex has changed. At Johnson & Johnson, he recalled standing up in front of an all-male sales force and being met by nervous laughter. Now, he said, there is an openness in talking about sex, “right up to the CEO”. Early in our visit to the Durex factory, he warned me that we would be discussing sex often and candidly: “I hope you don’t mind.”
Wilson’s immersion in Durex is total. He’s been offered other jobs at Reckitt, which also owns Strepsils, Gaviscon, Nurofen and Dettol, but he’s always turned them down. Condoms mean more to him than Strepsils ever could. In his spare time, he scours eBay for vintage condoms. He recently paid £2 for a specimen from the 1970s that had been discovered in a binoculars case in a charity shop. (He would not recommend using it: “It would be like putting on a 50-year-old sock.”) With the heroic participation of his wife, he tries out all kinds of condoms and lubes – his favourite is strawberry – as well as alternative forms of contraception to compare. (The experiment with the non-Durex female condom, a sort of bag attached to a ring that is inserted into the vagina, was not a success.) At dinner parties, he likes to share titbits from the Durex sex survey, a research project the brand conducts every few years, exploring global sexual habits. Russians, for example, are the world leaders in anal bleaching. “People are like, ‘Wow!’”
Not long ago, in one of his regular archive trawls, Wilson found an old Durex press release from 1976, defending the brand’s sponsorship of a Formula One team, which caused the BBC to pull the broadcast of a race. Durex went into sport, the release explained, to destigmatise and modernise condoms: “We’d like to be seen in the human happiness business.” Wilson describes his mission similarly. He wants to “normalise” the brand: to make the use of sex products open and universal. He also fervently believes that each of the nearly 3bn Durex condoms sold (and hopefully worn) every year is doing good. After all, as he often reminded me, the condom is the only form of protection that prevents unwanted pregnancy and sexually transmitted infections, which are generally on the rise. (The US reported a 32% rise in syphilis infections from 2020 to 2021, and in 2022 England recorded the highest level of syphilis in 75 years and a 50% rise in gonorrhoea diagnoses.)
At the same time, according to population surveys, condom use has been declining in recent years. The pandemic didn’t help: people had less casual sex. Even in 2022, Reckitt reported “weaker demand” for intimate wellness products in China due to ongoing lockdowns. According to a BMJ Global Health report, access to sexual health services also fell globally, and then there’s the ongoing competition, in the form of other types of contraception, the coil and pill, and alternative STI protection such as the HIV-prevention medication, PrEP. According to a US government survey, the percentage of high-schoolers who said they used a condom the last time they had sex fell from 63% in 2003 to 54% in 2019.
The central challenge of Wilson’s professional life is that condoms remain a tough sell: an article in the Harvard Business Review, The Marketing of “Unmentionables”, once declared that the condom shared “marketing characteristics with napalm, drugs for terminal illnesses and funeral arranging”. People don’t want to talk about them. Worse, as Wilson put it: “No one wants to use a condom.” They interrupt the moment; they get in the way. People loathe the things. It’s not hard to understand why. For centuries, condoms were made from the lining of sheep guts, and there is still something distinctly intestinal about the condom now. Open the foil packet and you discover a gelatinous membrane, an object that seems to ooze, as if it might have been recently alive or only just been born, a large yellowish grub that should have been left alone to germinate into something more beautiful. Martin Amis once called it “a greased wafer”. And that’s before you even reach the hurdle of getting the thing on, or “donning”, as they call it in the trade. Amis: “You seem to need three hands.”
Donning, a five-second task that can seem to take an eternity, is a delicate act, easily bungled. For Wilson, perfecting that five-second window – making it not just easy but an enjoyable part of what those working in intimate wellness insist on calling “the sex occasion” – is the key to encouraging more people to use condoms. His challenge is to convince people, in whatever way possible, that condoms are about pleasure as much as protection. He has a way to go. It is difficult, in the presence of the crumpled ick of a condom, to find anything appealing about it apart from what it represents, which is a barrier between you and a baby you don’t want, or a disease. And yet that is precisely Wilson’s task: to make sexy the most unsexy item imaginable.
* * *
On a recent morning in a beige monolith on an A-road in Slough, Wilson gave a presentation on the history of Durex to a team of European Reckitt executives. Surrounded by pressed jackets and polished shoes, Wilson wore blue jeans and luminous yellow trainers. He delivered the presentation – one of his favourites, cut down from the usual virtuosic two hours to a mere 30 minutes – with the bouncing energy of a children’s entertainer equipped with a box of tricks: a golden box containing a 1940s Durex reusable condom, a tiny model of the Durex-sponsored Formula One car and a 90s Durex keyring (“Don’t be silly, cover that willy”).
The history of the condom is really a history of gradually diminishing pain. Rubber condoms started replacing sheep’s guts from around 1855, after Charles Goodyear (of the tyres) had discovered the process of vulcanisation, when rubber is heated to make it more malleable. In 1877, mass production began of “vulcanised crepe rubber sheaths”, as Jessica Borge unappetisingly describes them in her history of condom manufacturing, Protective Practices. The earliest rubber condoms were impressively awful, made from sheets of latex rolled around a mandrel (a large tube) and then stitched together, creating a seam that must have been agonising for “user and receiver”, as Wilson sometimes calls people having sex.
By the end of the 19th century, condoms were being made by “cement-dipping”, a process where the mandrel was dipped into rubber heated with petrol solvent. This got rid of the seam, but the factories occasionally blew up due to the petrol, and the resulting condom was thick, heavy and designed to be reused. During his presentation, Wilson brought out his 1940s specimen, bought on eBay for £300. Inside was a brown rubber sheath, as thick as a verruca sock, and a set of instructions: after use the condom should be washed and then dusted with “French chalk”, whose dry residue you imagine had a certain chafing effect on any genitalia that encountered it.
The brand Durex was registered in 1929 by brothers Lionel and Elkan Jackson, founders of the London Rubber Company. Durex – standing for durability, reliability and excellence – used new latex-dipping technology developed by a 17-year-old Polish immigrant, Lucian Landau, who had studied rubber at the Polytechnic of North London. The Jacksons had previously been selling imported condoms out of a tea chest in their hairdresser-tobacconist shop on Aldersgate Street (the barbershop was apparently the birthplace of the phrase: “Something for the weekend, sir?”). By 1952, London Rubber reported a 95% market share for condoms. (The company was later investigated three times by the Monopolies and Mergers Commission.) With the 1957 introduction of the “Gossamer” condom – the first to be pre-lubricated – consumers discovered that using a condom didn’t have to be appalling. Durex Gossamer soon made up 70% of the business. After that, London Rubber began to expand globally, becoming London International, before it was taken over first by SSL International, then Reckitt Benckiser in 2010.
Now, Durex occupies about 40% of the global condom market – a market worth an estimated $4.6bn. It is the leading brand in Europe and much of Asia, including China. A handful of other brands have a significant presence in certain regions, such as Okamoto in Japan, Skyn in the US and parts of Europe, and Trojan in the US. (The latter is not the only testosterone-fuelled name of Durex’s rivals: there is also Jissbon in China, apparently a phonetic rendering of James Bond, and Manforce in India). Despite Durex’s pre-eminence, however, there remains the significant problem of all those people having sex who will do anything not to buy or use condoms.
Wilson isn’t easily deterred. When he moved to China in 2010, Durex had a negligible presence. He had to figure out how to sell condoms in a place where you couldn’t mention them on TV or in print. Initially, this involved finding out how the Chinese had sex. Mutual pleasure and technique, he told me, were both important (which you would hope might apply anywhere), as was Japanese porn, because of the lack of a porn industry in China. Due diligence complete, Wilson got creative. “We did some crazy shit,” as he put it, including putting a condom in space, and roping in a blogger couple to travel around China and trade sex toys for food and accommodation. (Wilson loves telling his marketing coups, like the time he launched a World Aids Day campaign called Give a Fuck. “A lot of people who said we shouldn’t do it,” he told me, “but I was in charge at the time, so we did it.”)
The challenge in China was an extreme version of the one he still faces: how to make condoms something people want. In the Reckitt meeting room, Wilson framed the task in terms of cultural relevance. He harked back to Durex in the 90s when it partnered with MTV, ran a magazine advert of men dressed as sperm holding guns to their heads (“for an incredible bang”), and launched its first website in 1996, just a year after Amazon and Coca-Cola, and only a couple of years after Apple. “That’s the sort of mindset we need in terms of digital innovation,” he declared. “We have to be up there with the likes of Apple.”
Durex, after all, can claim a certain global stature. Thanks to the sex survey, they know more about the world’s sexual habits than anyone. The survey is not made public – “it’s a goldmine” – but Wilson let me peek at a couple of slides. Who’s having the most sex? Colombians and Indonesians (86% of respondents said they had it once a week). And the least? The Japanese (26%). Wilson proudly recalled the time he’d told a conference in Thailand about the anal sex habits of different countries. As he put it: “There’s not a lot of people who go around collecting anal sex data in the world.”
Armed with such data, Wilson’s ambition, alongside making the condom sexy, is “category penetration”. (Innuendo is never far away.) That is, to make condoms available where they’ve never been before. Back in the 90s, Durex convinced Cardiff city council to let it put a vending machine in the central bus station. (Wilson, inevitably, has a massive 70s condom vending machine in his home office; his wife despairs.) Now, Durex runs sex education programmes in schools in India and South Africa. In Italy, it has worked with regulators to soften the rules around advertising. Still, it’s not enough; it’s never enough. To his mind, it should be possible to find a Durex condom in stores in every corner of Earth, its cellophane-wrapped packet as reassuringly familiar as a can of Coke.
* * *
Condoms are like wine. It is one of Wilson’s many maxims. Most Durex condoms are made from “natural rubber latex” extracted from rubber trees, mostly in Thailand, the world’s largest producer of rubber. As with wine, the quality of the latex is affected by the terroir: the climate and soil conditions. A few hours south of Bangkok, in the wooded, rural region of Surat Thani, we visited the vineyard equivalents: rubber plantations where latex, a milky sap, is extracted in the darkest hours of the night, when it flows most freely.
Pre-dawn, birds screeching and farm dogs at our heels, a crescent moon bright above, I watched a farmer, Nittaya Kongsri, make her way from tree to tree, planted in long straight rows. At every tree, Kongsri carefully cut a foot-long ribbon of bark away from the trunk with a curved knife, as if paring a strip of skin from an apple. Immediately, the creamy fluid began to flow down the newly cut channel and into a small black bucket hanging below. It is called rubber-tapping, this process, but it looked more like the tree was being bled in a medieval ritual, each drop of white the fundamental ingredient for a condom.
Once the tapping is complete, vats of latex are loaded into a motorbike sidecar, taken to a nearby collection centre and weighed. A sample of the liquid latex is put in a microwave to dry out the water it contains, leaving behind a small strip of dry latex. By working out the proportion of “dry rubber content” in the sample, the manager of the collection centre can calculate how much the farmer should be paid for the full quantity of latex he has brought in the vats. On this occasion it was 42 bhat (94p) per kg of dry rubber – not enough, said the farmers I met, many of whom are in debt. (In collaboration with an NGO, Earthworm, Reckitt pays the farmers a premium of €0.50 (43p) per kilo on top of the fluctuating collection centre price, and supports their efforts to introduce modern agronomy techniques, such as crop diversification.)
The raw latex is then taken by lorry to the Durex factory in Bang Pakong, an industrial suburb east of Bangkok. As we pulled up outside the row of hulking white buildings, palm trees waving, Wilson warned me against taking photos. The technology inside was proprietary. “Mike would kill me,” he said. On cue, site director Mike Evans emerged in a pink Reckitt polo shirt, exuding the kind of house-pride of someone who had just upgraded their real estate. “This is one of the biggest factories in the company,” he told me. “One of the best.”
Around half the world’s Durex condoms are made at this factory, built in the early 90s, once condom manufacturing left the UK for good. A billion a year, shipped all over the globe. (The other half are made in China, mostly for the Chinese market.) A workforce of 1,000 people is spread among research and development, a testing laboratory and production lines capable of operating 24 hours a day and spitting out more than 200,000 condoms in an hour.
The first stop was the tanks: 51 vast cylinders into which raw latex is pumped and then combined with other ingredients. “It’s like KFC,” said Evans. “There’s a secret recipe.” After a week of mixing, the compound is then piped to the automated production line. Evans, I sensed, was excited to open the door to the factory’s piece de resistance: a large room containing colossal machines the length of blue whales, which operate night and day, shuttling a procession of glass “formers” – essentially overlarge glass penises – along the line to be dipped into the latex mixture below. As the former slowly rises out of the latex, a thin layer of white remains on the glass: the first iteration of the condom. The formers then whirl over a low metal barrier like a row of cabaret dancers’ legs, rise into an upper chamber to be dried, and are then lowered, dipped and dried again. The whole cycle takes about 15 minutes, before the condom is rolled off the former and sent to be washed in a giant laundry machine.
Given the safety standards required of condoms, the testing regime is elaborate. The thing has to work, and fundamentally, “it’s about a penis going into a hole,” said Wilson, “where there’s quite a lot of force and friction.” The condom has to be able to withstand the most vigorous sex, having survived a six-week journey on a shipping container from Thailand, a five-year shelf life in all possible climates, and the likelihood of being stuffed into the back of a sock drawer for an indefinite period of time.
In the research and development laboratory, run by Panadda Katikawong, a sample of 200,000 condoms a year are checked to ensure they meet regulatory standards for length and thickness, softness (known as “modulus”), burst pressure and strength. Katikawong demonstrated the test, inflating a trio of condoms – latex and non-latex – in a row of glass cases. The condoms filled with air, passed the prize-winning marrow stage and turned into something resembling a missile before they eventually burst in a thunderclap. A tensile machine nearby then demonstrated how far it was possible to stretch a condom before it ripped. (They are all unlikely somehow, these tests, it being hard to imagine what “sex occasion” could involve either inflating a condom or elongating one until it snaps.)
To avoid the doomsday scenario of a hole in a condom, meanwhile, requires the testing of every single condom destined to leave the factory. One pinprick and you’ve got an unwanted pregnancy and a fundamental failure of the brand. After washing, the condoms are taken upstairs to a large room where dozens of women sit in front of testing machines made up of a circle of rotating metal mandrels. Their task was a little like playing the piano, involving both hands working independently while they kept their gaze fixed on the mandrel in front of them. One hand would sort and pluck a condom from a pile on the table while the other, in a rapid wrist-flick, unrolled a condom on to the mandrel. An electric pad then touched the condom while a current passed through the mandrel: if it short circuited, it meant there was a hole and the condom was rejected. The rotation happened so fast, however, that the condom-donning seemed to occur in a kind of rhythmic blur. In one 10.5-hour shift, one worker will test more than 22,000 condoms. I wondered why there were only women in the room, given the task involved. “Dexterity,” said Evans. “We’ve had guys come in to do it, but women are better.”
Back on its journey, the hole-free condom is rolled up, lubricated, closed into its foil case, joined into a pair, then packed into a box – Surprise Me, Pleasure Me, Invisible Extra Sensitive, Intense Ribbed and Dotted, Mutual Climax and so on. Even the packaging has to be tested. In a small room containing what looked like a series of mechanical torture instruments, sample packs of condoms are dropped and exposed to heat and vibration, to simulate the conditions of ocean-crossings and lorry journeys. “This one’s a simple squasher,” said Wilson, pointing to a machine that crushes the box, a re-enactment of the chaos that might befall it on a pallet. If a condom can survive all that, you’d think it could survive anything. But then, it hasn’t met a human yet.
* * *
In isolation, said Christian Fiala, gynaecologist and founder of Vienna’s Museum of Contraception and Abortion, a condom is like a motorbike – well-designed and perfectly safe. Accidents happen when someone goes for a ride. Friends have told me stories of mishandled condoms breaking during sex, or, in their misguided youth, trying to use the same condom twice. One, still aghast 20 years later, recalled the time he discovered on withdrawal that the condom had disappeared, presumably lost somewhere inside his girlfriend. “There is nothing worse,” he said solemnly, “than taking your dick out and finding there’s no condom on there.”
Stories like this drive Wilson crazy. You have to get the fit right! But people make mistakes. During a discussion of ways to make condoms cool, I mentioned men ripping open the foil packet with their teeth. “Never do it with your teeth!” said Wilson, with a well-worn frustration that suggests he often hears about such wayward behaviours.
Even getting condom-donning right can involve a fairly sobering dose of logistics (well demonstrated by Claes Bang in Ruben Östlund’s film, The Square, who takes agonising minutes putting one on under the impatient gaze of Elisabeth Moss). It’s this inglorious wrangle that most preoccupies Wilson. The five-second donning window needs to be, as he put it, a “multi-sensorial experience”. The condom has to smell good, taste good, feel good. “It needs to be sexy to put on, part of the foreplay,” he said, “like having a tickling feather or a spanking paddle.”
The condom as tickling feather might still be a remote concept, but over the years, there have been many attempts at re-invention. In 2006, a German entrepreneur launched a spray-on condom, but was stopped short by EU regulation – and the fact it took two moment-ruining minutes to dry on the penis. In 2012, US inventors came up with a product called the Galactic Cap, intended to cover the tip of the penis, leaving the shaft exposed to improve sensation. (It is still not approved by the FDA, though ships internationally.)
In 2013, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation awarded 11 new condom design projects $100,000 to help bring their product to market. But the figure wasn’t realistic. One of the funded designers, Mark McGlothlin, came up with a plan to make condoms from the collagen found in bovine tendons to replicate the feeling of actual skin. Two years later, he told reporters that the project had stalled as it required more than $1m just to get through FDA approval. The Gates Foundation is now concentrating its contraceptive funding in developing countries on methods designed for women, such as a once-a-month pill or six-monthly injection. Women, they discovered, “want options they can control themselves”.
In the UK, meanwhile, startups such as Hanx and Roam are trying to dent Durex’s dominance. As Alex Griffiths of Roam put it, “there has been almost zero innovation” in condom production for decades. (Wilson would object, but Griffiths is not far wrong: the rising and falling mandrels I saw in Thailand in 2023 looked extraordinarily similar to a photograph of a production line in 1949.) But the startups’ efforts to reimagine the form have mostly equated to alterations in packaging. Hanx, founded in 2017 by two women tired of male-centric marketing, packs its condoms in elegant white-and-gold foil and claim an ingredient mix that is more sensitive to women’s bodies. Roam, meanwhile, recently launched a new range of “skin tone” condoms in four colour shades to cater to a diverse population it felt were underserved by the “legacy” brand. But as Farah Kabir, co-founder of Hanx, put it: “It’s difficult to innovate without a shit-ton of cash.”
Durex, even with a shit-ton of cash, has only managed modest changes. In the US condoms are classified as a type 2 (higher-risk) medical devices, and they are intensively regulated in most countries. Durex’s condoms have become slimmer – Thin Feel, Ultra Thin, Nude. There are also non-latex alternatives, and condoms that are ribbed, dotted and flavoured. But these are cosmetic changes, and not always popular. A friend remembered investing in a colourful quartet in his teens: chocolate, banana, strawberry, mint. The chocolate, well, it had the wrong connotations, so near the anus. He tried the mint, and the burning sensation began immediately. “I was like: ‘Woah, something very weird is happening to my dick.’” He never made it to strawberry or banana.
Condoms are like wine, remember. Pour out a glass or open the foil and you get “an olfactory moment”. In their natural form, they emit the smell of latex, blunt and thick, a whiff of tyres and post-apocalyptic landscapes. Even when the smell is masked by scented lube, the slippery eel of the condom remains. “Most people want to forget everything during sex,” said Christian Fiala, who believes the best forms of contraception are those, like the coil, divorced from the act itself. “They certainly don’t want to bother with some rubber in between them.” Though it is the rubber, of course, that stops them getting syphilis.
* * *
Stuck, then, with the condom as it is, marketing the greased wafer requires some sleight of hand. (Until recently, this responsibility fell to the brand manager, known as Head of the House of Durex, a title I presumed was a joke until it was made clear to me that it wasn’t.) In his new position, Wilson is now charged with steering Durex through an ongoing transformation, seeking to shift the perception of the condom from a functional necessity to a lifestyle product, with close links to music and fashion.
The target audience for Durex is clear. The people who buy condoms the most, and could be buying them a lot more, are what Durex call the “open and curious”: typically under 35, experimental and having spontaneous sex, so most in need of multi-faceted protection. “If you talk to most young males,” said Wilson, with the weary look of a man who has sat in on a lot of focus groups, “they think they’re invincible.” (Their other key audience, labelled “romantics”, are more likely to be older, coupled up, no longer at risk of STIs or using other forms of contraception.)
The “open and curious” are not just the largest and most sexually active group: they’re the highest spenders in the category. According to the research, if someone uses a condom the first time they have sex, they are more likely to go on using condoms. “Getting that first experience right is really, really important to us,” said Wilson. It’s not just for the sake of teenage contentment. If Durex can attract consumers at the beginning of their sexual life, they might go on buying Mutual Climax for years.
To attract the open and curious to condoms requires a tonal shift. “Historically,” said Wilson, “it’s been about how do you make [sex] safe.” Not sexy. Now it’s about pleasure, and culture. So far the revamp has involved “artist integrations” with Lil Nas X and Sam Smith, a re-energised TikTok presence and a partnership with the fashion brand Diesel. During Milan fashion week in February, models stomped around a heap of boxes of Durex condoms (Diesel called it “an avalanche”) while a soundtrack of sex noises played in the background. “Jesus,” said a commenter on the YouTube livestream. “Bro,” replied another.
There has also been a change in language: Durex has removed any references to gender from its packaging. No more “speeds her up, slows him down”. As Wilson put it, when he grew up, “the definition of sex was penis and vagina sex”. Now, they need to talk about oral sex, gay sex, any kind of sex. Sex, after all, has changed. From the repressed euphemisms of the 1920s barbershop, to the Formula One machismo of the 70s, Durex now finds itself in a sexual world where images of choking and gang bangs swarm across people’s phones.
Porn, inevitably, has “changed the landscape”, said Wilson. To make condoms appealing to young people means occupying a delicate space between dull responsibility on one hand and the frenzied churn of porn on the other. Hence the strategy of “normalisation”: Durex’s online shop states that it stands for “real sex”. In the foyer of the Slough office, a large screen displays Durex’s promise to help people “be their true sexual selves”. If you’re trying to sell as many condoms as possible to young people, it helps to remind them that sex is whatever they want it to be.
* * *
My friend who had the mint catastrophe texted me after we spoke. Not long ago he’d decided to have a vasectomy. When he went for the procedure, the doctor warned him it was one of the routine operations that resulted in the most complaints. Afterwards, men could suffer from bruising, blood clots inside the scrotum, infection, even long-term chronic pain. There were risks. And yet, as my friend put it: “I elected to put my dick under the knife to avoid condoms.”
Wilson is sometimes known by his colleagues as The Navigator, for his his ability to steer round commercial obstacles, even, perhaps, that of people hating condoms. For all those who will never be won over, he has another offering: lube. Lube is the future, Wilson insists, its growth potential greater than that of condoms. “We’re still barely scratching the surface,” he told me.
Recently, Wilson was in a Slough meeting-room examining new designs for lube packaging in China. Samples had been placed in rows on the table, like a little army in formation, ready to charge. There had been a major innovation: no more penis-shaped receptacles. For years, Durex’s lubes have come in bottles whose shape Wilson conceded had “phallic connotations”. (Alex Griffiths from Roam summed up the problem: “I don’t want a big, blue, dildo-shaped lubricant anywhere near me!”) These, however, were slim and rectangular, aspiring to look like a beauty product, something you might leave on a bedside table without feeling embarrassed, said Wilson. Though in reality, he added, “It still goes in the drawer because kids will ask, ‘What’s that, Mum? What’s that, Dad?’”
As the designers presented their work, Wilson stood very still, legs apart, fondling three of the little bottles in his hand. At the end, he offered his congratulations and a few minor comments. “The strawberry does not look delicious,” he said, pointing to the bottle of strawberry lube. “It’s got to look delicious!” It was his favourite, after all. He gave the designer full creative licence to make the strawberry look as delicious as possible, not just to sell more lubes, but because it deserved to look delicious: “Honestly, it’s better on ice-cream than the sauces you can buy. It’s fantastic.”
And yet, even with the most beautifully designed strawberry lube in the world, at the heart of the Durex business remains the condom, essential and unlovable. At one point, I realised that in all our conversations about sex, as open and frank as they’d been, Wilson had never quite articulated what his perfect condom experience would actually be like. We were on the terrace of a Bangkok hotel, Wilson had just given me a personalised version of one of his epic presentations, and he was in an expansive mood. He leaned back in his chair and gazed upwards. “It would be a couple in bed, in the throes of passion,” he said dreamily, “having something they want to introduce as much as a sex toy, because they know it will intensify the orgasm.”
And what about the condom itself? The ideal condom; no limits to the fantasy. I couldn’t help offering some suggestions. A condom that vibrates? He shook his head. Durex already made a vibrating cock ring, but for now it wouldn’t work with a condom: where would the battery go? We winced. What about a bespoke condom, made according to the wearer and receiver’s exact specifications? It would hardly be cost-effective, though, to make a billion couture condoms a year. We imagined, together, a condom being made on demand on a 3D printer in the bedroom, flying across the room before self-donning, somehow magnetised to the penis in a flourish of sensual bliss without anyone noticing. After all, as Wilson once put it: “The ultimate condom is a condom that feels like it’s not there.” And there, somehow, is the fundamental contradiction of the condom: its ideal form is a negation of its presence. “Ting!” said Wilson, grinning, as this perfect and impossible product clicked into place.
• Follow the Long Read on Twitter at @gdnlongread, listen to our podcasts here and sign up to the long read weekly email here.
