Big Can Be A Problem

It turns out that size is important. In India, they have realised that condoms, constructed to western proportions, tend to fall off or tear during sex, adding to that noble country's woes with the spread of AIDS. A similar thing happened in Thailand years ago, during the 1990s as AIDS started to spread in that country. It was uniquely solved with a dynamic, progressive promotion of condom use, led by the great Mechai Viravaidya, who became so associated with the campaign that popular parlance still gives his name to the humble prophylactic - a Thai condom is called a "Mechai".

Early on, Mechai established that Thai men - who are no less proud, virile, and sensitive to suggestions otherwise than men anywhere - were resisting the condom for the perfectly good reason that they were too big, and so he initiated national research to establish the mean length of the Thai penis. He recruited women to do the measuring, who entered into the project in a spirit of great seriousness, and it was quickly found that, as in the case in India, condoms designed for bigger-framed Westerners had the embarassing effect of appearing to diminish the size of the erect phallus.

So, new condoms were manufactured to the size of the Golden Mean, resistance was overcome, and thus Thailand became the only country in the South Asia to slow infection rates where they fell steadily during the nineties, with 100% use among prostitutes and free distribution by the government. Mechai himself gave condoms out in his Cabbages and Condoms restaurants instead of after-dinner mints; which goes to demonstrate that Western remedies are often not instantly translatable to other cultures, and that when pride is booted out and people really focus on a problem and understand the underlying mechanisms, they can often fix it.

I wish the same was true of Blogger. Apparently, Blog of Funk is just too big to be inserted into the new Blogger right now. Oh, the perils of being manly!