They’re obnoxiously expensive. They’re awkward as hell. They’re so intimidating to put in that there are actually educational youtube videos on how to do it. They were someone’s misguided attempt to create female liberation on the safer sex front by providing women with a “female-controlled” method of STI protection (sorry, folks, it didn’t really work out that way; female condoms definitely require a guy’s cooperation). They’re way too thick, and they occasionally make squeaky sounds when you’re fucking with them. I avoided them for years because they were so damned awkward-looking, and I only used them for the first time about a year ago. I can’t for the life of me imagine successfully having sex in the dark with one (but that’s not really my thing, so whatever).

And yet, here I am trying to shop for a remotely affordable 100-pack of female condoms.  The best I’ve found is on amazon.

That’s partly because my husband’s girlfriend/my play partner is allergic to latex, and the female condoms sold in the U.S. are all non-latex, and they both prefer female condoms to non-latex male condoms. But it’s also partly for me. Because I’ve discovered that despite their myriad disadvantages, female condoms can be handy. And being able to use female condoms or male condoms depending on the sexual situation turns out to be quite advantageous.

In case you’re wondering what advantages could possibly outweigh all those negatives above, I figured I’d write out a list of their advantages.

• You can put them in long before you have sex. No need to stop the sexy and make the condom happen. You can grind all up and down your partner before you ever fuck, and voila! There is protection.
• You can (and in my opinion, should) get your partner to put it in for you. Unlike putting a condom on with your mouth, putting a female condom in with a finger is something that pretty much anyone can do well. And thus the safer sex is naturally integrated with foreplay.
• A guy can keep losing his erection, and your female condom doesn’t care.
• One of the best parts: it’s easy to pop back and forth between fucking and oral sex. Female condoms don’t really taste much at all (I can’t taste them anyway), so a guy’s dick is just going to taste like whatever lube you used, not latex. This also means that it’s a cinch for a guy to pull out and cum in your mouth, on your chest, or whatever.
• They’re quite handy for multi-person sex. If two women want to fuck one guy, both the girls can use female condoms and he can pop back and forth between them. And they turn out to be pretty fucking fantastic for coitalingus–which is where a guy fucks a girl’s pussy and someone else goes down on the pair of them simultaneously. Again, there’s no taste of latex, and his dick is mostly exposed, and her clit is easily exposed.
• They’re great for hand-jobs, especially multi-person hand-jobs. You don’t have to keep changing gloves, because they pretty much already have gloves in their pussies! So handy! (Pun pun)
• You can stick one female condom in a girl’s ass (you want to take the ring out if you’re going to do that) and another one in her pussy, and then you can play hole-switching games without having to worry much about the nasty vaginal infections that can result if you fuck ass and then pussy.
• Unless you mess them up (which admittedly a lot of people do), they’re better disease protection than male condoms, because they’re better at protecting against skin-transmitted STI’s like herpes.

They’re definitely not perfect. I’ve heard guys complain that they’re like fucking a plastic bag. But sometimes they work so well that no one can tell they’re there (I actually once freaked a partner out because he didn’t know I had one in, and he said the sex felt naked enough he wasn’t sure I had a condom in).  So they’ve definitely got their uses.

Two cheers for female condoms!