Nano Product: Spider Silk Condoms

Are we creating the penicillin or the asbestos of the 21st century? In the months preceding our Nano Supermarket Project, we share some speculative nanotech products with you. Here’s the third one in the Nano Supermarket Products series: The Spider Silk Condom.

You are madly in love with this girl who was in your year (2020). You dated her a few times and you’re totally in love with each other. This weekend she invited you over for a romantic dinner and for some reason, you just KNOW it’s gonna happen: you will end up in her bed. But since she wasn’t exactly your first girlfriend this year, you are well aware you should take some precautions. Rubber precautions, to be exactly…

How you hated these things! You always refused to wear 'm because… well… we needn’t explain do we? Asking your soon-to-be-bedpartner if he/she had any condoms while you’re both engaged in a spectacularly sensual foreplay is just, like, the Worst Thing You Could Do. Don’t even mention how the whole sensation of lovemaking was reduced to nothing. Wearing condoms was like smelling beautiful flowers above an ashtray. Like watching a movie through Night Vision Goggles. Like eating Pharma Sushi with gloves on. You just didn’t do it.

Until the Spider Silk Condom arrived: Odor- and colorless, extremely strong, and soft. And I mean SOFT. With the special nano lubrication film that comes standard with the product, sex feels better with than without. Just too good to be true. But although heavily biomimic-marketed, it WAS true. Your last steady girlfriend had to beg you to stop using them and make love to her in the old-fashioned way. Which you did only once, because it just wasn’t like the Other Thing.

Penetrating the market

Scientists had long been intrigued by the unique properties of spider silk, which is stronger than steel or Kevlar but far more flexible, stretching up to 40 percent of its normal length without breaking. Until the twenties of the 21st century, spider silk was extremely hard to mass produce: Unlike silk worms, which are easy to raise in captivity, spiders have a habit of chomping off each other’s heads when housed together. Part of the reason it has always been so hard to generate spider silk in the lab is that it starts out as a liquid protein that’s produced by a special gland in the spider’s abdomen. Using their spinnerets, spiders apply a physical force to rearrange the protein’s molecular structure and turn it into solid silk. “When we talk about a spider spinning silk, we’re talking about how the spider applies forces to produce a physical transformation from liquid to solid,” says spider silk expert Todd Blackledge of the University of Akron. But with some nanotechnology, it was easy to rearrange and mimic the protein’s molecular structure and turn it into solid silk.

Five years after it’s launch, Sub-Saharan Africa’s AIDS epidemic had been decimated and the Chinese went back to their one-child policy. After dozens seriously acclaimed appearances of the Holy Virgin during orgasm in Rio de Janeiro, even the Catholic Church promoted the distribution and usage of the Spider Silk Condom with the pope speaking his memorable words during his 2022 Urbi et Orbi easter speach: Just do it!

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PRODUCER: 3M

EXPECTED TO HIT THE SHELVES IN: 2020

PRICE: €5,00 PER 3