Friends, you’ve been lied to. I mean, probably in many ways, but especially if you had any kind of sex-negative health classes. Today we’re going to set the record straight on all the false and misleading “facts” you may have learned about condoms.
Between 1996 and 2010, our federal government dedicated a billion and a half dollars to sex education promoting abstinence. Some abstinence-only curricula didn’t mention contraception at all, while others were permitted by state laws to only mention failure rates without any discussion of benefits. A congressional committee report in 2004 found that 80 percent of abstinence-only curricula contain “false, misleading, or distorted information” about reproductive health, including contraception and condoms.
If you had a good sex ed class, or if you skipped class and learned about safe sex from well-informed playground buddies, you’re free to read this post and laugh. But these myths were, and in some places still are, taught to kids and young adults. Here are the facts.
Condoms Do Not Have Abysmal Failure Rates
No birth control method is perfect, so it’s fair to talk about failure rates. (Of course, even abstinence has a failure rate. Teens who get abstinence-only sex ed are actually more likely to get pregnant than their peers.)
You may have heard that condoms have a failure rate of around 18 percent, but that doesn’t mean what you think it means.
There are two different kinds of failure rates for birth control: perfect use, where you use the method (say, condoms) consistently and correctly; and typical use, which is the number you get when you intend to use the method but maybe don’t follow through all the time.
Condoms have a typical use failure rate of 18 percent, meaning that 18 percent of heterosexual couples who use condoms will end up with a pregnancy after using them for a year. With perfect use, though, that rate is only 2 percent. So if your teacher tells you that abstinence is “100 percent effective,” know that by the same metric condoms are 98 percent effective.
if your teacher tells you that abstinence is “100 percent effective”, know that by the same metric condoms are 98 percent effective.
Condoms Don’t Break or Slip Very Often
Once you’ve got the erroneous idea in your head that condoms fail all the time (they don’t!) it’s easy to assume that they fail by breaking, by slipping off, or by not putting up an effective barrier against sperm or diseases. We’ll address the barrier question in a minute, but let’s stop and talk about breakage.
Condoms break or slip off between 1.6 percent and 3.6 percent of the time. That sucks when it happens, but it’s not the catastrophic rates that bad sex ed teachers push. (Google around and you’ll see talk of 40 percent breakage rates; you would have to be using a condom very, very wrong if you’re seeing it break four out of ten times.)
What is the rest of the failure rate about, then, if not breakage? Mostly, it’s failing to actually wear a condom, and/or using it incorrectly. One review of condom mistakes found that they included these:
The most common errors included
not using condoms throughout sex
, not leaving space at the tip, not squeezing air from the tip, putting the condom on upside down, not using water-based lubricants and incorrect withdrawal
That’s my emphasis. Guess what, condoms don’t work very well if you don’t use them. The other factors here are important, though, and they contribute to those breakage and slippage rates. Make sure you know how to use and put on a condom before going at it.
Even If the Condom Breaks, You Will Not Automatically Get Pregnant
That 2 percent or 18 percent failure rate is in heterosexual couples who use (or intend to use) condoms for a full year. It does not mean that you have an 18 percent chance of getting pregnant on any given day.
And yet, some teachers have their students do a simulation where you roll dice, and if your number comes up your condom “failed” and you get a baby. This is not how getting pregnant works.
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In fact, without any birth control at all, your chances of getting pregnant are between zero and 10 percent depending on where you are in your cycle (and assuming that you have a fully functioning uterus and so on).
Condoms Are Not Full of Tiny Holes
Some sex ed classes teach, incorrectly, that viruses like HIV are small enough to pass through microscopic pores in condoms. The only problem with this theory is that there aren’t microscopic pores in condoms, and studies that have looked for them have turned up empty-handed. (One hard-to-kill myth states that 5-micron pores exist; this turns out to come from a study of rubber gloves, not condoms.)
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People who use condoms are 80 percent less likely to contract HIV than people who don’t. But that doesn’t mean condoms fail 20 percent of the time, just that this is a typical use rate. People forget to wear condoms, and people are exposed to HIV in ways other than having sex.
For studies that measure HIV transmission more accurately, we should look at this one that followed 245 couples for 22 months, in which one partner had HIV and the other did not. Nobody contracted HIV in the course of the study. In another study of 305 couples followed for three years, there were three new cases of HIV in the couples who used condoms consistently, compared to 16 cases in couples who used condoms sometimes but not always.
Bottom line: condoms may not be perfect, but they are very good at their job. For HIV prevention, they are an effective (but not the only) way to protect yourself.
Condoms really do reduce your risk of pregnancy and of HIV transmission. (They reduce the risks of some other STDs, too, although they can’t do anything about STDs like herpes that can be transferred through skin-to-skin contact.) If you learned about high failure rates or holes in the rubber, you were lied to—but now you know the truth.