Amazon's Button for Condoms Is a Bigger Deal Than It Might Seem

I moved to New York City in the fall of 1999. I started having sex (well, sex with other people) not long after. As a result, my entire sexually-active existence has been defined by easy access to condoms. They were plentifully and freely available at my college student health center and served up in a candy bowl at the entrance of the frat house I briefly lived in. Even after graduation, condoms were never hard to find, no matter the time of day.

And things only got easier in 2007, when the city unveiled the NYC Condom, a rebranded Lifestyles condom distributed for free at a variety of locations (okay, mostly bars) around the city. Finding NYC Condoms only got easier in 2011, when the city unveiled NYC Condom Finder, an app designed to connect residents—or horny tourists—to safer sex.

In other words, condoms have always been there for me whenever I wanted or needed them, making safer sex a pretty easy option. But that's not the case for everyone. While city dwellers like myself have easy access to prophylactics through ubiquitous drug stores, 24 hour bodegas, and even Amazon Prime Now (for those whose condom needs are both time sensitive yet not urgent enough to require a trip out of the house), those in rural or suburban areas aren't always so lucky. That's especially true if they happen to be teenagers, who may be deterred from purchasing condoms by theft-prevention measures like locking them behind the counter.

Most conversations around condoms and tech tend to focus on the theoretically unpleasant act of condom use itself. "Condoms! They're the worst!" we're told. "What if we could science a better condom to make your penis happier?" If condoms sucked less, the rationale goes, people would be more likely to use them, and STI and unwanted pregnancy rates would plummet.

And a good deal of money's already been sunk into efforts to make condoms physically better. In 2013, the Gates Foundation awarded millions of dollars in funding to projects promising to improve the condom. That same year, the press fell in love with the Origami Condom, which has yet to hit the market.

What if condoms themselves aren't the actual issue, but instead, a lack of access to them?

After all, there's already a great deal of variety and innovation going on in condom design. If you're willing to spend some time and money in your search for prophylactics, you can definitely find something far better than the free condoms available at your local clinic. (In some parts of the world, you can even get custom-sized condoms.)

And—as the unfulfilled promise of the Origami Condom proves—even the fanciest condoms in the world are useless if you don't have them readily available. So why aren't we devoting more resources and tech to question of condom access?

A number of studies have shown that when condoms are easy to get, people make use of them. Thanks to the NYC Condom program, New York City's Department of Health and Mental Hygiene distributed 38.5 million free condoms in 2013–way, way up from the 5.8 million distributed in pre-NYC Condom 2004. But programs like NYC's only make sense in high density areas; even places like Planned Parenthood (where condoms are available for free) aren't much use if there's no nearby location.

So what's to be done to make condoms easier to get, no matter where you live? Last week, Amazon added Trojan condoms to its Dash system of one click ordering, meaning that Amazon Prime members can now get a shipment of Trojans delivered to their door with no more effort than the press of a button. (Well, after they've done all the work of setting up the Dash system and indicating which specific iteration of Trojan they're into.) It's a seamless, near effortless way of restocking your condom supply—provided, of course, that you don't mind having a dedicated Trojan button hanging out in your house (and that you're a fan of Trojans to begin with).

Of course, the Trojan Dash button only works if you've got the funds for an Amazon Prime membership and the credit card to pay for it, which means it's unlikely to help teenagers or low-income people get easy access to prophylactics. But it's still a good start.

Because even if no one ever orders their condoms through Dash, Amazon and Trojan are creating a conversation around condoms. When I reached out to Dr. Leslie Kantor, the vice president of education at Planned Parenthood, she expressed enthusiasm for the product, telling me that, "It is a way to…position [condoms] and normalize them along with other common household products that have Dash buttons, like detergent and toilet paper."

Which is actually a bigger deal than it might initially seem. Because even in 2016, stigma around sex is remains one of the biggest barriers to accessing safer sex and condoms. Making condoms better, more fun, and easier to use is still an important mission. But making sure that condoms actually get into people's bedrooms–and that we're comfortable enough with them to actually use them—is a mission that can't be overlooked along the way.