Herb Caen, Bloody Sheets & the Lost Condom

A book I've long admired is called Sex Disasters and How To Survive Them by Moser and Hardy, Greenery Press, 2002.

Two of the more mainstream disasters that this book tackles are what to do when a condom gets lost inside a woman's vagina, and dealing with blood stains on the sheets after a night of mid-period lovemaking.

As for the sheets, try soaking and resoaking the stained part in household-strength hydrogen peroxide. Do the same for your panties on days when there's unexpected bleeding or your monthly flow becomes a category 5.

For a condom that doesn't come out with the penis it rode in on, take solace in knowing there's no place for it to go. The condom might play a mean game of hide'n'seek in the space behind the woman's cervix, but that's about it.

The first step in finding an unmoored condom is to wash your hands and make sure your nails are well-trimmed. The woman might try lying on her back with her knees up, like when she's at the gyno's. This is no time for modesty: the farther apart her legs, the better. Explore her vagina with your index finger. If lube is necessary, use just a little. Extra lube might make it difficult to grab the condom. If you don't have lube, try spit.

If female sexual anatomy is one of life's great mysteries for you, click here.. You can see how the cervix is at the far end of the vagina on the roof side. It might feel like the tip of a nose.

Try exploring the space in the back of the cervix with your finger. If the condom is there, try to dislodge it and edge it into a more accessible part of her vagina, like where your penis was when it jettisoned the thing.

Once you have a good handle on the condom, you might try inserting two fingers in the hopes of snagging it between them. Condoms are stretchy, so pull it out slowly but firmly. If your partner clamps down when you are trying to insert two fingers, go slowly and gently. It's not like her vagina is going to suddenly implode if you take an extra ten minutes searching for the buried Trojan treasure.

If you have any questions or concerns, call your healthcare provider or visit an emergency room. And if you were using the condom for birth control, call your healthcare provider or pharmacist right away. The operative words are "Plan B" or "Emergency Contraception."

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As a writer, it never hurts to study different ways of writing, and a good place to start is with people who have done it better than you. On that score, the man who comes to mind is Herb Caen, a former columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle.

Caen wrote about his beloved San Francisco—or "Baghdad by the Bay" as he called it—from 1938 to 1997. He didn't write about sex, but he loved sneaking in the occasional zinger, such as the one about a man who went to the FAO Schwarz toy store in search of a Barbie doll for his daughter:

'Does Barbie come with Ken?' he asked the perky saleswoman.

'Actually no,' she answered slyly, 'Barbie comes with G.I. Joe—she fakes it with Ken.'

The Age of Aquarius sprung up around Herb Caen during his nearly sixty-year watch. He referred to the beatnicks as "beats." In a 1965 column, Caen quipped:

Herb the Furrier overhead one beat ask another:

'Hey, you gotta TV set?'

'Not me, man,' came the reply. 'I take LSD and watch the wallpaper.'

Time marches on, as Caen's term 'Baghdad by the Bay' would be anything but endearing today. Still, you'll be hard pressed to find a better study on the art of column writing than Herb Caen. And if you know about the landmarks and landscape of San Francisco, you'll appreciate how Caen immortalized the Coit Tower's romantic longing for the Broadway Tunnel.

Thanks to "The World of Herb Caen—San Francisco 1938-1997" by Barnaby Conrad, Chronicle Books, 1997, for the old Herb Caen columns.