Rebecca Root
Thu 9 Jun 2022

From hosting vasectomy festivals to condom-blowing competitions and using sheaths as shoe shine, the activist has become a national treasure through his work on destigmatising contraception in a historically conservative culture.

Out of these animals, which has more sex: the elephant, gorilla, cat, rabbit or honey possum?” asks Mechai Viravaidya. Posing the question from his office in Bangkok, the octogenarian explains how, over almost 50 years, he has used humour to tackle serious and sometimes taboo topics in an attempt to address the serious issue of birth control. That’s why he is known as Thailand’s “Condom King”.
In the 1960s, the average woman in Thailand gave birth to six children and population growth stood at 3%.

Establishing an NGO called the Population & Community Development Association (PDA) in 1974, Viravaidya’s team began promoting family planning – recruiting neighbourhood residents to share key information as well as contraceptives. He then opened a string of restaurants aptly named Cabbages and Condoms as well as the Birds and Bees Resort, to fund the foundation.

There were initially pockets of resistance, Viravaidya says, with some suspecting the work would “corrupt the youth”. And when PDA began campaigning for condom use to tackle the Aids epidemic in the 1980s, some thought it would make people “more susceptible to early sex”, he says.

In the decades since, population growth has dropped to 0.3% and the average family now has two children and poverty levels have decreased to 6.8% as of 2020. The country also saw a 90% decline in new HIV infections from 1991 to 2003.

Yet, at 81, Viravaidya says his work isn’t done. A lack of sex education in schools, he says, is contributing to a high number of births among teenagers today – in 2019, 23 births out of every 1,000 were by adolescents – while poverty and food insecurity persist in some areas.

Today, Viravaidya’s method sees students teaching each other sex education in schools across the country, including in the Mechai Pattana bamboo school, which he established in the north-eastern province of Buriram in 2008. The flagship school gives students a leadership role and aims to teach empathy and compassion while empowering them to improve the economic development of their villages.

There’s a mandated one day a month in a wheelchair for all students, phones are banned except for an hour a week and a meal is missed once a week in order to experience hunger

Viravaidya’s only regret, he says, is that he didn’t start the school initiative earlier. And the answer to the question? The honey possum who, he explains, as popular prey, “has to have sex all the time”.

full.https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/ ... ondom-king