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Condoms, if used properly, have been shown to help prevent the virus from being transmitted. But Dr. Marcus Conant of the California department of health task force on AIDS cautions against thinking of condoms as a panacea. "They are not a surefire way to avoid pregnancy," he points out, "and it is probably just as easy to catch AIDS ((from a carrier)) as to get pregnant."
Nonetheless, after ten years of declining sales, condoms are experiencing a boom in the U.S. Revenues have increased 10% in the past year. With the promise of profit comes an infusion of ingenuity. Japanese manufacturers offer a wide variety of styles, from condoms embossed with flowers to multiscented brands. For homosexuals there is a new, more durable brand in the works.
AIDS is a "condom marketer's dream," says John Silverman, president of Ansell Americas, the sellers of LifeStyles condoms, whose most startling magazine ad, directed at American women, features a young woman resolutely proclaiming, "I enjoy sex, but I'm not ready to die for it." Mentor, a new line, is marketed directly to women, who purchase nearly half the condoms sold. It comes in a tiny plastic cup designed for women's purses (the traditional flat packaging is for men's wallets).
What does all this leave to the imagination? What quarter remains for fantasy, for risque comedy or high melodrama? Do big-screen heroines engage in safe sex? Bisexuality was a popular metaphor in '70s entertainment, but it is hard to picture a film like Sunday, Bloody Sunday being made now. Its sexually ambivalent central character would clearly be a villain. Five years ago, Beyond Therapy, an amiable stage comedy about bisexuals, was well received in London, but audiences at screenings of the forthcoming movie version are uneasy with it. Even to blase sophisticates, bisexuality is becoming ethically questionable.
When Health Secretary Bowen called for a change in life-style, he was asking a great deal of human nature. Throughout history, even in straitlaced cultures or eras of inhibition, sex is always the genie that cannot be % contained in the bottle. Its heedless imperatives mostly seize the young: the least disciplined, least knowledgeable and least likely segment of society to take any thought for the morrow or have any intimations of their own mortality. And there are those in any society who are forever young, or venturesome, or lonely or simply careless. To pause on the downhill slope of passion, to call time out from rapture and contemplate that this single act could be fatal, is only marginally more imaginable than the pause that too seldom occurs to consider whether this single act will create an unwanted life.
Coping with the specter of AIDS is particularly difficult for the heirs of the American sexual revolution, probably smaller in numbers than advertised but nonetheless vehement in the assertion of a freer, more open set of mores for sexual conduct. Should AIDS spread in the most pessimistic proportions projected, there may finally sound a general alert, resulting in an increase in monogamy, in abstinence, in widespread acceptance of tough new rules of the game. But unless and until that point comes, the casualties may needlessly mount.