To commemorate international AIDS awareness day on 1st December 2005, a 67-metre pink condom was made and placed over the Obelisco (obelisk) in Buenos Aires, Argentina.

On 1st December 2003, Benetton in collaboration with ACT UP Paris placed a giant condom (22 metres high and 3.5 wide) on the obelisk in Place de la Concorde in Central Paris.

Manufactured by Church & Dwight Inc., Co., Trojan Magnum XL condoms are 30% larger than standard condoms.

Coitus reservatus, whereby a man puts his penis inside a woman's vagina but aims not to ejaculate, has been practised for a variety of religious, moral, contraceptive and other reasons.

According to one authority it was first advocated by Dr Alice Stockham of Chicago at the end of the nineteenth century, and later by Dr Marie Stopes. Stockham can be quoted "Manifestations of tenderness are indulged in without physical or mental fatigue; the caresses lead up to connection (coupling) and the sexes unite quietly and closely. Once the

The chemist W. J. Rendell began making up quinine and cacao-butter pessaries in about 1880, which he distributed among the poor who lived around the Clerkenwell area of London, where his shop was situated. The demand soon became so great that producing the suppositories became a full time job. Rendell, in common with many of the conception pioneers in the nineteenth-century, was a convinced freethinker: when he advertised himself in Bradlaugh's National Reformer in 1885 he styled himself "M.N.S.S." (member of the National Secular Society).

It is one thing to devise a means of contraception, quite another to get people to employ it. In some circumstances they can be bribed. The payment of inducements for vasectomy was first introduced in Madras State (Tamil Nadu) in 1956, where thirty rupees was paid to each man agreeing to submit himself for the operation. Later, payments were even made to anyone who successfully induced a man to undergo vasectomy.

The British Family Planning Association was founded in 1930 on a voluntary basis. A number of other countries had already set up similar organisations.

The most persistent critic of the pill in Britain has been the Australian-born specialist in human metabolism, Professor Victor Wynn, head of the Alexander Simpson Laboratory for Metabolic Research at St. Mary's Hospital, London. His concern over the subject grew out of his study of the pill's effects on how the body handles carbohydrates, and on the pattern of blood fats in women. His studies in this area have been extensive.

The single most famous case of self-emasculation is that of Origen who severed his own genitals in a fit of religious devotion. Whole sects grew up to practise self-castration and the emasculation of all men and boys who fell into their clutches. In one of the "Dialogues" of Lucian there is a famous tale of self castration. A young Syrian nobleman named Cambobus, ordered to accompany the queen on an extended journey, decided to castrate himself so that he would not betray the king en route. He had his testicles placed in an ornate casket, which he

Casanova, one of the first men to use a condom as contraception rather than to prevent VD, seems to have never sired a child.

Vasectomy, normally achieved by tying or cutting the vas deferens to prevent sperm being ejaculated in the seminal fluid, is by no means a foolproof method of birth control. The sperm ducts have the astonishing facility, in some rare circumstances, of joining themselves up again, so hard will Nature struggle to thwart efforts to tamper with its processes! Spontaneous recanalization of the divided vas has been known since it was first reported by Rolnick in 1954.