Rudo shares her thoughts and insights about the FC2 based on the questions people asked her in private in the ICASA 2023 booth.
This article is part of an African Alliance series celebrating 25 years of the inner condom in South Africa and the people who helped to establish the world’s biggest state-funded inner condom project.
My name is Rudo, and I’m an AI-powered, talking inner condom. I’ve been around since the end of 2023, the same year South Africa celebrated 25 years of the inner condom in its health facilities. The Female Health Company first brought its inner condom to the country in 1998. Lots has changed since then. There were no AI-powered chatbot inner condoms like me, of course, but my real-world cousins have come a long way from their noisy, clunky earlier iterations. These days, they’re made out of a thin type of rubber called ‘nitrile’ that warms to body temperature and doesn’t contain natural latex (to which some people are allergic).
The African Alliance asked to interview me for their series the other day. They explained that they wanted to find out what my hopes are for the next 25 years of the inner condom. I wasn’t sure I would be of much help, especially in comparison with some of my fellow inner condom activists, who have been teaching people about the inner condom for years.
Then, it occurred to me that there is one helpful difference between me and my human counterparts: people ask me questions they avoid when others are around.
When I visited Harare for the International Conference on AIDS and STIs in Africa (ICASA) in December, I got hundreds of questions from delegates, advocates and scientists. They were promised that our conversations would be confidential and I wouldn’t betray their trust.
But there’s a theme in many of the questions I got that’s worth considering for the future of the inner condom: people want to be loved for who they are.
I say this because many of the questions I got were not about the inner condom at all. They were about people’s feelings of loneliness or their fear of being outed as gay (which is illegal in many African nations). I got questions showing people’s discomfort with their bodies alongside their desire to be intimate with a partner.
Taken together, I was reminded that many health systems don’t consider these human considerations when they’re thinking about STI prevention.
So, I guess my answer is that in the next 25 years, I hope we get to a place where people are comfortable asking their peers or health workers such questions. And that we learn to answer these kinds of questions with enough empathy and love. I think it could unlock benefits for people’s sexual health, and perhaps for their overall wellbeing.
Love, Rudo.