RedHanded - ShortHand: The Bizarre History of Birth Control

Episode Date: February 13, 2026

Valentine's Day is the perfect time to dive into the surprising, and at times horrifying, history of contraception through the ages; from crocodile-dung pessaries and mercury-tadpole concoctions to penis sheaths made of turtle shells, humanity has come a long way in its efforts to outsmart the stork. This is the ShortHand.--Patreon - Ad-free & Bonus EpisodesYouTube - Full-length Video EpisodesTikTok / InstagramSources and more available on redhandedpodcast.com

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Not to mention our rundown on the Black Death, that Gwyneth Paltrow Ski accident that turned into a musical, and lost civilizations like that of Glebeckley-Tepi to name just a few topics to get you all excited. And because we love you all so very much, this year, we are going to be releasing two episodes of Shorthand every single week into your feed. You heard that right, and you can thank us later,

but you can also thank us now by going immediately to listen to Shorthand and doing so every single week, twice. for free wherever you get your podcasts. And also please share those episodes far and wide. Thank you. Hello, hello. And welcome to your Valentine's Day special short hand.

It is, of course, Valentine's Day. And we thought, what better time than to take a look at this particular topic. Because from ancient civilizations to the Renaissance, humanity has thrown some seriously creative curveballs into the quest to outsmart that pesky. little stalk. From ancient pesseries to questionable potions in this shorthand we'll be diving

into the bizarre history of contraception. Join us in unearthing tales of mad concoctions, unconventional devices and the often wild superstitions that shape the landscape of contraception throughout history. Where the only thing more

surprising than the methods themselves is the fact that sometimes somehow they worked. Let's go. We begin our exploration of contraception through the annals of time with one of the oldest forms of contraception, the ancient art, coitus interruptus. I would say I know upwards of ten people who have fallen foul. May. And fucking rest.

I found out that one of my friends' pure forms of contraception was this, and I was like, you're baron. If that's been working for six years, you are barren. I know this girl at Costa Rica who is from Texas. And she, similarly, she was like, I just don't agree with hormones being in my body. So I just do that. And I'm like, you take Xanax every day. Why is that better? Because I just had an IUD put in and she was like, it was my first one and I was quite young and blah, blah, blah.

And I was just like, oh, I just feel it. I'll do it. And she was like, well, it's your own fault. Put it on yourself. And I was like, okay. people have very strong opinions about a hormonal contraception and like yes okay fair enough i wish i strongly wish i didn't have to do it i've got fucking raging endometriosis i went to the doctor and they're like um headaches weight gain skin problems of hair issues i'm like yes yes yes yes yes yes yes and they were

like oh my god do you want to stay on this pill and i'm like if it means i don't spend a week of the month lying on the sofa crying then yes i will happily take all of these issues let's go But, you know, to each their own. Yep, so if you haven't cottoned on yet, we are, of course, talking about the world-famous pull-out method. It's not an easy art to master. It does require near-perfect split-second timing and untold amounts of self-control,

which, when it comes to men, is often in quite short supply, if it exists at all. One of the earliest practitioners of Coitus Interruptus is Onan of the ancient Hebrews. For whatever reason, onanism is another term for masturbation, as well as pulling out. In the book of Genesis from 1400 BCE,

we are very much going back into the deepest history of contraception. I'm amazed they even had figured out that that's how it worked. Anyway, so after Onan's older brother was killed, their father, Judah, ordered O'nan to impregnate his deep. dead brother's wife so that she could have a son. An Arn, however, was really not into that at all, because not only would this child not be his legitimate heir, he'd also have to split his inheritance with this offspring. And this is a direct quote from the book. Whenever he slept with his brother's wife, he spilled his seed on the ground. And God didn't like that very much, and he killed Anon for

doing so. But the young widow did get her own later on in the story. She did so by dressing up as a sex worker and tricking her stepfather Judah into having sex with her and then she ended up having twin boys. Many rabbis today do still actually approve of the pull-out method. As Rabbi Eliza from 100 CE wrote, A man may quote. Can we start selling just rags with this on it? Socks. Thresh inside and winnow outside. Which is actually more forward-thinking than the fucking Catholics.

You can't pull out of your Catholic. Pull out? Rhythm method only. Wow. Well, there you go. See ancient Chinese, on the other hand, wouldn't have dreamt of spilling their precious seed on the ground. many men of the time believed that their sperm was limited

and needed to be dished out sparingly. However, they also believed that the more women they slept with without ejaculating, the more powerful they and their sperm would become the no fat method is what you have here, ladies and gentlemen. In fact, the ancient Chinese believed that even if you did this just once, your sperm would become stronger.

If you did it twice, your hearing and your vision would improve. If you did it thrice, you'd cure all of your diseases. And if you did it four times, if you managed to have sex with a woman without ejaculating four times, your soul would achieve peace. And five times your blood circulation would improve. So come backwards a bit there, it feels like. And six times, your loins would strengthen. Seven times, your butt and thighs would strengthen. Eight times, your body would become glossy.

I don't know what that means exactly. and nine times you'd reach longevity. And if you did it a whopping ten times, you, my friend, would become immortal and glossy. So obviously nobody in the history of China has ever managed to do it ten times. Well, there is another catch within this because you also have to do it ten times in one night.

Ah. Exactly. Different women or... Snogling. And they believe that the best trick to achieve this was to imagine the women you were sleeping with were all ugly and hateful. Some ancient Sanskrit texts from India, however, suggest that a man grip his testicles tightly, inhale deeply and gnash his teeth ten times to prevent ejaculation. Sexy.

It would work on me. I certainly wouldn't ejaculate if you did that. This is called Coitus Obstructus or fucking mental. A number of ancient Arabic texts also detail the usefulness of Coitus Interruptus and refer to the method as Azal. The ancient Greeks and Romans didn't bother too much with pulling out. They much preferred infanticide and abortions. They did love a bit of infanticide, didn't they? Yep, yep, just nail those ankles together, leave them on the side of the road.

Good luck, good luck, baby. To this day, despite... failing 18 out of every 100 couples, the pull-out method remains one of the most popular forms of contraception in the world, with many preferring to follow in Onan's footsteps, then use the pill. Red-handed, does not, has not, will never endorse coitus interrupters as a method of contraception because, my friends, it doesn't work. It is very much Russian roulette of baby. Yes, exactly.

So now we come onto a shaky proposition. made by Hippocrates, the most famous of all of the Greek physicians, who lived between 460 and 377 BCE. Of Hippocratic Oath fame. Mm-hmm. Now he wrote that a woman who didn't want to get pregnant should make, quote, semen to fall outside. Hippocrates didn't go into detail about how exactly women should do this,

but another Greek physician, Sorinus, did. And this is what he said. When the man ejaculates, the woman should immediately get up and sit down with bent knees and sneeze. The Talmud of the ancient Hebrews were also a game for this method, as it mentions that violent twisting movements can prevent pregnancy. And this idea made it all the way to the 9th and 10th century Islam too. As the physician Raises, who was around from 865 to 925C.E. wrote, after ejaculation, the woman should rise roughly and sneeze and blow her nose several times, scream,

and jump backwards nine paces. It's like all of those things that you used to talk about on the playground if somebody thought they were pregnant, be like, oh my gosh, you just need to go on a trampoline and jump up her down 10 times and then eat an ice cream and then cough immediately and then you definitely won't get pregnant. My older sister's friend, Becky, told me that. Now, Bishop Albert the Great,

then brought this questionable method to Europe in the early 1200s and its use has been documented from Indigenous Australians to Native Americans. Once again, just for anybody out there who might be wondering, red-handed does not endorse the squat, sneeze, jump and scream method. I don't think I can make myself sneeze. I was going to say, can anyone make themselves sneeze? Or is the thought enough? The, etchoo!

I did feel some cramping. Spilling one seed on the ground or trying to shake the persistent little swimmers out once in are both arguably pretty rudimentary strategies to avoid pregnancy. However, letting them in and trying to either slow them down or stop them reaching the cervix altogether is definitely a more sophisticated approach. And that brings us nicely onto the occasionally surprisingly effective, yet mostly disgusting, world of the ancient pestery.

A pessory in the context of contraception and also thrush is a device that inserts into the vagina and acts as a physical barrier to prevent sperm from reaching the cervix. The concept of using pesseries for contraception dates way back to ancient civilizations, and it's tough to pinpoint a specific individual or culture that first used this method. And the use of pessories likely evolved over time, influenced by trial and error cultural beliefs, and the availability of material. Various ancient cultures, including those in Egypt, Greece, Rome and India independently developed their own methods of creating and using peccuries and they were usually really disgusting. Some of the earliest evidence of peceries comes from ancient Egypt. The petri papyrus, which dates back to 1850 BCE,

details how crocodile dung was rolled into a paste and mixed with a pint of honey before being inserted into the lucky lady. I don't think I'd ever want to have sex that much. No, no. Definitely. Infinitely not. I'd rather have the baby.

I'd be like, okay, let's just risk it. I'd rather live as a nun. I mean, like, yes, honey is antibacterial, but is it antibacterial enough? For actual shit, I don't know. To not give you some sort of raging death infection. My God. Now, as you can imagine, this likely wasn't super effective.

However, Norman Edwin Hines, the author of Medical History of Contraception, a book from the 1900s, did find that crocodile dung was very alkaline, which may have been enough to kill a lot of sperm. So, there you go. Now, the ebarrus papyrus, dating 300 years on, however, detailed a more advanced pessori recipe. This involved soaking lint in a mixture of fermented tips of acacia plants and honey, creating a sort of tampon.

And we know that fermented acacia produces lactic acid, which is used in contraceptive jellies to this very day. And using this in tandem with a physical barrier of lint would have been probably pretty effective. So hats off to the ancient Egyptians on this one. If only they'd managed to get the word out, because the other examples of ancient pesseries are nowhere near as palatable. if we can say that, or at least rational. The ancient Greek history of Pesseries is full of mind-boggling fuck-ups.

The Greek physician Dioscrates unfortunately had enormous influence over Europe. After printing was invented, his works were published in over 70 editions. His main fuck-up involved his belief that a Pessori should be inserted after sex, and he believed that pepper was the most effective ingredient for this. Other physicians from this time also claimed that smearing the penis with various tinctures was the way to go and Saranis who we mentioned earlier with the old twist and shake method wrote about inserting pestries of fruits but removing them after sex and the whole before or after in the vagina or on the penis confusion just continued

to get a lot worse for centuries to come in ancient Greece but things did get slightly better namely in the heart heart-shaped form of the sylphium plant, a sort of giant fennel, which used to grow on the coasts of North Africa. And we say used to, because sylphium was so effective that the ancient Greeks and Romans of 500 BCE harvested it to extension. Cheers! I blame the thick hairs that grow on my face because of my IUD, specifically on you, Greek and Romans. but look at your great eyebrows. They've always been great.

I was born with great eyebrows. Apparently all other attempts to grow the plant in other lands and areas completely failed. But they were so obsessed with it that they even stamped silver coins with the plant's heart-shaped seed pod on one side and the plant in bloom on the other. Funnily enough, at the height of its popularity, sylphium was worth more than its weight in silver. And there's science behind its effectiveness. Silfium belongs to the ferulogenus, whose plants contain a substance called Ferrujol,

which, in low doses, is almost 100% effective in preventing pregnancy in route. The women of 900 BCE China didn't have it quite so good, however. One now infamous tincture, they believed to prevent pregnancy at the time, involved frying 16 tadpoles in a solution of mercury, and then drinking it. That will do it. And it probably did work in stopping pregnancy because mercury is highly, highly, highly toxic

and would have almost certainly caused organ failure and then death. Can't get pregnant if you're dead. The idea of the women drinking toxic substances to prevent conception isn't just limited to China though. Ancient Greek women of 700 CE are also documented to have drunk blacksmith's water, which contained lead, immediately after having sex.

This method actually persisted well up until World War I, where many women volunteered to work in factories for free exposure to let. But say what you will about the lunacy of these ideas. At least they were somewhat practical, which is something we can't say about the countless methods involving nothing but superstition that came later. Because many European women, during the Middle Ages, so we're talking 500 to 1,000 CE,

believed that tying a pair of weasel testicles to their leg during sex would prevent conception. While others opted for the equally useless method of tying a bone taken from the right side of a black cat to their arm. Where does the mighty condom come into all of this, you might be wondering? Well, it's actually been around for, for quite a long time. Just not quite in the form that we recognise it,

and in the beginning they were certainly not ribbed for her pleasure. They were also mainly used to prevent STDs and not pregnancy. One of the earliest records of the use of a kind of condom dates back to 3,000 BCE in Greek mythology by King Minos of Crete, son of Zeus and Europa. His wife, Pacify, put a goat's bladder in her vagina to protect herself from the king's sperm because it was said to contain

scorpions and serpents. And presumably that's why she ended up shagging a bull. Anyway, apparently all of his former mistresses died after they slept with King Minus. So maybe these scorpions and serpents were a metaphor for some sort of awful venereal disease. There's a bit of dispute around this story because after Pacify used the goat's bladder,

she gave birth to eight whole children. But then we left the bladder's behind and moved on. Records dating as far back as 1000 CE indicate that ancient Egyptians may have been the first to use an actual sheath on the penis, similar to condoms today. These sheaths were fashioned from linen, but we used to specifically prevent tropical diseases like bilzaria. Bilzaria is a disease caused by parasitic worms.

And in terms of impact, it's pretty bad. It's only second around the world to malaria as the most devastating parasitic disease. These linen condoms would also be color-coded to distinguish a man's social status. By the 15th century, China had come a long way since coitus obstructus and mercury concoctions. They began to fashion condoms out of oiled silk paper and lamb intestines. 13th century Japan, however, had a far less comfortable version. They'd started creating peaties. sheets out of tortoises shells and animal horns called the Kabuta Gata,

which I imagine, although it would be good at disguising a man's erectile dysfunction, it would have been pretty fucking painful for the woman. Still, I guess it beats drinking mercury and fried tadpoles. Does it? After the fall of the Roman Empire, many of the previously used methods of contraception fell out of favour in the West, largely due to the rise of pesky Christians, because what they do is separate the pleasure of.

sex from reproduction, because separating the pleasure of sex from reproduction would, of course, buy you a one-way ticket to eternal damnation unless, of course, you are rich enough to buy your way out of it. Numerous biblical teachers claimed that simply enjoying sex, whether or not you intended to conceive, was a sin in itself. But records show that during this time, the Darnes' method of coitus interruptus, aka spilling the seed, aka the pull-out method, came back in a big way, pun absolutely intended. Later on, although Europe did begin to see significant progression with the separation of religion and state,

the church had significant control over medicine and science, because they had all the money. And as for the modern idea of the condom, and the name itself, well, there's quite a lot of dispute about its origins. Funnily enough, Gabrielle Follopio, an Italian Catholic priest and anatomist, credited for describing the Philopian tube,

also made contributions towards the connoissexious. condom. In his book de Morbo-Galacio, or the French disease, he describes a sheath of linen used to protect against syphilis, which is of course the French disease, unlike football hoologonism being the English one. And in an experiment on 1,100 men, Philopio found that if they use the sheath, they were all protected against the disease. During the 17th century, the use of condoms is credited for reducing the fertility rate in England. But the general Jesuit, Leonidas, Lesias, and many others like him, proclaimed that the use of these sheaths was a sin and that it was unethical.

The Jesuits were part of the Counter-Reformations. They wanted nothing more than to re-establish the church's influence on personal, cultural and scientific matters in Christian Europe. In 1709, Tatler claimed that the condom was invented by a gentleman of Will's Coffee House in Russell Street, London. Tatler is that old? Fucking I. That's ancient, yeah. And this is what he said.

For he has invented an engine for the prevention of harms by Love's Adventures, and has by great care and application, made it an immodesty to name his name. Some speculated that this condom doctor was actually Charles II's doctor, Colonel Condom. Or the Earl of Condom. But given that he had 14 bastard children, that probably isn't true. They'd be fits condom then. Also, it's never been proved that this guy actually existed, but the story persisted for a long time nonetheless.

As for the name of condom, German writer Hans Verdi speculated that it came from the French village of condom in Gascany. But he later concluded that it actually came from the Latin verb, condu, which means to conceal, protect or preserve. Others wonder if it came from the purge. Kendo or Kondu, which means a long sheath made from animal intestines used to store grain. Funnily enough, the French referred to it as the English raincoat, and the English referred to it as the French letter.

In any case, whoever the modern West wants to hand the credit to in the whitewashing of history, as you now know, the condom actually goes back thousands of years. It's just the word that doesn't appear on record until 1708, in an anonymous poem, Armands for Parrots, which apparently... talks of a matchless condon, whose invention quenched the heat of Venus's fire. And according to this poem, people were already readily selling condoms all over London as defence against syphilis and later touted as a defence against big belly. These condoms were made of a very thin yet durable animal membrane fastened with a nice little ribbon.

And the instructions were to put it over the instrument of pleasure, and at the moment the gallant is ready to thrust forward, it will protect him like an enchanted armour. And we've got another description from someone called Roger Fewquil Esquire in his 1740 book, A New Description of Maryland. Maryland is another term for vagina. And he wrote that whilst visiting this territory, one should wear the proper clothing in order to protect oneself

from the dangerous heat of the climate, which presumably means virus. Is syphilis a bacteria or a virus? I think it must be a bacteria because we can treat. read it now, can we? Yeah, you can have antibiotics, can you? So it must be. Jemps. Big Jemmy jumps.

Giacomo Casanova, the famous Italian lethario, adventurer, an author who lived between 1725 and 1798, wrote about his experiences with condoms. In his book, Histoire de Mavei, Story of My Life, he made it clear that he wasn't a huge fan of wearing animal skins on his penis. In his words, he didn't like shutting himself up like a piece of dead skin in order to prove he was well and truly alive. He referred to them as English overcoats and far preferred his own method of contraception,

cutting a lemon in half, hollowing it out, placing the lemon skin cup inside the vagina to act as a physical barrier and also banking on the acidity to kill any sperm that might get through. No mentions there on how these women felt about that. I'm also 99%

sure that Castanova died of syphilis. I mean, it sounds like yes. So the word condom only became an official word, appearing in an English dictionary in London in 1785. It wouldn't be until the good old industrial revolution when vulcanised rubber came along that condoms changed forever. In 1858, the American inventor Charles Goodyear created the first iterations of robber condoms. These new revolutionary condoms only covered the head of the penis and were known in Europe as American tips. It would be another whole decade until they became

full length. And although they were pretty expensive for the time, people were more than happy to wash them after use and use them again and again until they broke. Thousands of years of human trial and error involving mercury concoctions, crocodile poo-pesseries, and squatting and sneezing, led up to this game-changing invention. But then came along another one of history's prudish religious zealots to ruin the fun for everyone. This man was called Anthony Comstock, who was an anti-vice activist, United States Postal Inspector and Secretary of the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice. What a cool guy. He dedicated his life to upholding Christian morality and opposed abortion, masturbating, gambling, patent medicine, and of course contraception. And in 1873,

Comstock got the Comstock law passed in Congress. This law banned people from sending anything he deemed to be immoral goods, including condoms through the mail, because remember, he's a postal inspector. And this became punishable by up to five years in jail. It was also made illegal to advertise the sale of condoms. But that didn't end the condom industry. Like anything made illegal, it just forced it underground. Condoms began to be marketed as rubber safes, caps and gentlemen's rubber goods. But still, individual states in the US began to implement their own versions of Comstock laws, many of which were even stricter than the federal laws. Connecticut was by far one of the worst.

There, even a married couple could be arrested for using birth control within the privacy of their own bedrooms and jailed for a year. And it is wild to think that many women of ancient civilizations may have had far greater control of what they did with their bodies than Western women just a hundred years ago, or in Ireland like yesterday. And these mad laws remained in place for over 40 years until 1916, thanks to the heroic effort of birth control advocate Margaret Sanger.

After her mother died at the age of 50, after having 18 pregnancies, she confronted her father and said, You caused this. Mother is dead from having too many children. Sanger went on to be a nurse and actually coined the term birth control in her 1914 book Family Limitation. The book, along with the launch of her eight-page monthly newsletter, The Woman Rebel, promoting contraception with the slogan, no gods, no masters, led to her first arrest.

After her release, Sanger skipped bail and went to Europe, only to return in 1916. She then defiantly opened the first birth control clinic in the entirety of the US that same year, although it was shut down after just 11 days, and she was jailed for a month. Her arrest sparked such outrage that the case that grew out of it resulted in the 1918 crane decision to allow women to use birth control for, quote-unquote, therapeutic purposes. Sanger would go on to establish the American Birth Control League that eventually became the Planned Parenthood Federation of America. She died in 1966 and lived long enough to see the introduction

of the biggest game changer in the history of contraception and also women's role in society, the pill. The pill, named an Ovid, was invented by Gregory Pinkus and John Rock, with the help of Sanger's organisation in the 1950s, although it wouldn't hit the market until 1960. And even then, it was only legally allowed to be used by married couples. Nonetheless, it did arrive just in time for the sexual revolution. And good job it did, because a lot of American women

were washing their vaginas with Coca-Cola at the time, believing that that would be enough to stop pregnancy. Many states still upheld their Comstock laws, however, but in 1965 the Supreme Court of the US ruled that prohibiting the use of contraceptives violated the constitutional right to marital privacy. It was only in 1972 that this right to use contraceptives was extended to unmarried couples. And it was also around this time that IUDs rose greatly in popularity, although forms of them have been around since the 1800s made from silkworm gut,

but they also came with a very high risk of the woman developing. pelvic inflammatory disease. But in the 70s, they were made of copper and plastic and had a 95% efficiency rate, although they will give you the periods from hell. By 1990, the FDA approved Norplant, the first implant marketed in the US. And a decade later, the world was introduced to the morning after pill. In 1999, the economists named the pill as the most important scientific advancement of the 20th century, and for good reasons too. As Terry O'Neill, the president The President for the National Organization for Women puts it, there's a straight line between the pill

and the changes in family structure we now see, with 22% of women earning more than their husbands. In 1970, 70% of women, with children under six were at home. 30% worked. Now, that's roughly reversed. Over 100 million women around the world now start their day with the... So they have it. Don't interrupt us that coitus.

Figure something else out. Exactly. There's plenty of choice. Or, you know, a vasectomy is reversible. Talk about it. We'll leave you with that. And we'll see you next time for other things. Bye.