Tag Archives: mcmurdo research base

Condoms for Everybody! No?

Deep, deep, deep down in the world’s frigid underbelly of Antarctica, a last crucial ship bearing supplies for the dark, cold winter months ahead has landed. And now the serious work of the next few months of frigid, brutal winter can begin.
According to Reuters, the 16,500 condoms provided to the scientific community of 125 at the McMurdo American research base are given matter-of-factly and free of charge by the bigwigs in the government. Bill Henriksen, the manager of the McMurdo base, says “Since everybody knows everyone, it becomes a little bit uncomfortable” to buy the evil pieces of latex rumoured to protect individuals from pregnancy and STDs 99% of the time.
If you’ve broken out your trusty calculators, you know that it works out to, if every single person had to use a condom for every sexual act, that it would mean each of the 125 people would have sex 132 times in six months. But since only one condom is required per 2 people, I figure that means 264 sexual encounters. In six months. That’s a lotta double-headers and triple-plays, methinks, or sex every day with 80 bonus plays.
Six months of freezing total darkness, no sun, nada, and locked behind the walls of the United States’ most remote outpost, living on cafeteria food, monthly flown-in supplies, and luck.
Those condoms should come in handy. Thank god for the government!
Hey, wait a second! The government that is worried about embarrassment for a bunch of parka’d science geeks stuck in frozen world of ice, rock, snow, wind, and total darkness is the same government that prefers, back on the mainland, a mandated education of abstinence-only in high schools and discourages teaching that condoms are effective sexual protection, and never, ever provides them or makes them easily accessible?
What?
Kids are living in hotbeds of sexual activity, in the middle of a fast-paced real world not covered in snow, ice, and total darkness, but instead is alive with sexual advertising in the media, peer pressures, and, with more working parents than ever before, kids have more opportunity to shag themselves senseless than ever before. Yet they get abstinence education, and these people who are actually working for the government, being paid very nicely to live on government land and eat government food while they study frozen amoebas and whatever the fuck else, they get condoms given to them with the implicit understanding that, while sexual harassment of coworkers ain’t allowed, it’s understandable to fuck ’em when it’s dark and cold outside?
I say kudos to accepting the reality of the latter, and that they should extract their heads from their asses on the former. The reality is, people will have sex. Whether it’s a frozen wasteland or the teenage wasteland of high school, knees will be a-knockin’. Sex will happen.
So why not prepare for all eventualities and make condoms more readily available to teens and college students, too?
I mean, in Antarctica, you could try the whole “Sorry, folks, but you can’t fuck your co-workers, so no condoms for you” argument, but anyone with a brain will know the base doctor’s going to be seeing a whole lot of yeast infections in the coming months, you know? (Or any one of hundreds of other sexually transmittable diseases, from the clap to AIDS.)
So the bigwigs embraced reality and did what they could to work with it.
Too bad you’ve got to live in Antarctica before you’re governed with a little reason by the Conservative Bush administration, eh?