“Like Eating With Saran Wrap on Your Tongue”
Slate
By L.V. Anderson
In 1993, Danny Resnic was having anal sex during a casual hookup in Miami Beach when his partner’s latex condom broke. Resnic had been using condoms ever since the man he describes as “my best friend and love of my life” died from AIDS in 1984. “I have always been looking for a monogamous relationship and was never really happy with casual sex,” he says, but in the gay subculture of Miami Beach, where he’d moved from California in 1991, casual sex was the norm. When Resnic slept with men he didn’t know, he insisted on condoms.
After several weeks of worrying about the broken condom, Resnic got tested for HIV. The test came back positive.
The odds of contracting HIV from a single act of unprotected anal sex are extremely low—experts put the risk below 1 in 100. “I couldn’t believe it,” Resnic says today. “‘Cause I was really vigilant. I lost all my friends during the AIDS crisis, and I used condoms religiously. And then when one broke, I thought, ‘How could that happen?’ ”
Resnic became obsessed with answering that question: He read everything he could find about condoms at his local public library in Miami. He learned how latex condoms are made (by dipping phallic molds into vats of liquid latex, which is peeled off after it dries), and how they are regulated (the Food and Drug Administration considers condoms medical devices and dictates how they are manufactured and labeled). He discovered that three publicly traded companies—the makers of LifeStyles, Durex, and Trojan—controlled almost the entire market. And he figured out that, since the introduction of the rolled latex condom in the 1920s, not much about condoms had changed.
I met Resnic for lunch in Los Angeles last September and was struck by his intensity all these years later. To illustrate his astonishment at what he’d learned about condoms, he gestured at the salt and pepper shakers and bottle of olive oil between us. “Everything on this table—these jars, these nozzles—every year they come out with a better product,” he said. “But not the condom! And I found that baffling. I couldn’t understand it. I was like, ‘I don’t get it. Why haven’t they made some crazy new design? Why is it still the same thing, and no one likes it?’ ”
Resnic decided to rectify the problem. He set out to build a better condom—one that he hoped would make protected sex feel as good as unprotected sex (a guy can dream!), and one that wouldn’t break like the one that broke on him. Resnic set aside everything he’d learned about latex condoms and tried to start from scratch, asking: What might a condom look like if it were designed with pleasure in mind, instead of mass production and profit margins? He had taken some product design classes in college, but didn’t know much about biomedical engineering. He spent years thinking, sketching, and researching patents. In 2001, Resnic bought some wood at Home Depot, carved it into a mold with a jigsaw, sanded it down, dipped it in liquid latex, and created the first prototype of his condom in his home, which was, at the time, a house boat on Marina del Rey.
But Resnic didn’t want to stick to latex. He began experimenting with silicone—the flexible, durable material found in spatulas and charity awareness bracelets. He found a silicone manufacturer to formulate a recipe with the precise combination of tensile strength and elasticity he was looking for, and then found a medical device manufacturer to make silicone prototypes. Using grant money from the National Institutes of Health, he conducted small clinical trials with condoms that fit much more loosely than latex condoms, designed to be pulled on like a mitten instead of rolled on, allowing freedom of movement inside, and to provide sensation for men from the interior of the condom, which is lubricated. (In 2014, a former employee accused Resnic of misusing NIH funds; Resnic denies the allegations.)
All the while, Resnic kept tweaking. He says he’s developed more than 127 versions of what he now calls the Origami condom, because it is folded rather than rolled. “The whole concept of the rolled condom is flawed,” Resnic told me shortly before asking our server for a Mediterranean lamb burger. “The premise is transferring sensation through the material. That’s equivalent to trying to taste your lunch with Saran wrap on your tongue.” …