Elite Daily
Apr 12, 2019
Conversations about consent are critical for ensuring that everyone is engaging in safe and healthy sex. In light of today's discussions surrounding consent, many companies are beginning to build products that can further the conversation — including Argentinian company Tulipán, which recently developed the world's first "consent condom." Elite Daily reached out to Tulipán for comment but didn't hear back by the time of publication. You might be wondering: what's a "consent condom?" According to CBS, it's a condom that cannot be opened unless four hands are touching it. While the idea of creating tools to enable the discourse around consent is a wonderful in theory, I wasn't sure how this condom would play into the prevention of sexual assault in practice.
According to Bustle.com, consent condoms also have the potential to be used to help people prevent accusations of sexual misconduct or to shift towards victim-blaming. Issues related to victim-blaming have occurred with products ostensibly designed to prevent sexual assault in the past, such as the rape-drug detecting nail polish. According to Newsweek, this nail polish, which would turn a different color if dipped in a beverage containing a rape-drug, caused a controversy in 2014, because it put the onus to defend against date rape on victims. One argument against them was that if a person did report being roofied, they might be guilted for not having worn or used the nail polish, instead of focusing on the person who put the roofie in their drink."I can only imagine two types of people using consent condoms," Remy Kassimir, the host of How Cum podcast, tells Elite Daily. "Partners who are comfortable with each other who think this would be a fun activity in their sex life, or one person in a duo who wants to do some really disgusting sh*t and just want a consent condom as a receipt that they were allowed." Of course, this in no way means that using a consent condom is wrong in and of itself — it just suggests that the nature of a consent condom can enable someone to engage in inappropriate sexual behavior.