There are countries that will either send you home before you unpack and get busy with a buzz, jail you, or fine you for coming to their shores with business too naughty for their liking. Picture: iStock
Condoms can take a rough ride, but deep down they are delicate little numbers that require a good measure of care before any rodeo. And when it comes to sex toys, did you know that they could land you in handcuffs, but without the pink fluffies and fun. It’s real bondage, the policing kind.
Condoms keep you safe from disease and from unplanned pregnancies, but in return, it’s important to take good care of life’s little saviours. Handle with care and they will give you careless abandon in return.
The first rule of thumb, according to online condom site condoms.uk is to never, ever pack your rubbers in your hold luggage when you fly. Slip them into your carry-on luggage. The reason? Well, the cargo hold of a plane is not pressurised, so your luggage gets battered and bruised by mighty cold temperatures, changes in air pressure and so on. You wouldn’t want to be at the receiving end of that, and if your condoms are, they’ll be weakened and more susceptible to breaking when you really want them at hot under the collar temperatures.
Wallets and purses are also not the ideal spots for rubbery friends to hang out. It can end up being a tight squeeze between credit cards, cash and all kinds of slips and nonsense. And then, we stick them into tight pants pockets or handbags full of stuff. These tight spots can cause damage to condoms, with friction and pressure damaging its delicates. Condom integrity can be further compromised with foreign objects like loose change, keys and other sharp troublemakers that could easily perforate it and, well, create unintended consequences.
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Then, of course, there’s the really stupid way of being cute. Stapling a condom or using a paperclip or any kind of object that may inevitably cause damage is just not a good idea. Yet thousands of people still consider stapling a rubbery suggestion to a greeting card, inserting it in a thorny bouquet of roses or paperclipping it to a teddy bear on an anniversary is a sexy and cute thing to do. Your condom is not into BDSM for itself, and it cannot speak its own safe word to stop you.
Other sexy items, beyond condoms, must also, always be cared for. And sometimes it’s best to leave them at home altogether. From the humble vibrator and dildo through to kink, there are countries that will either send you home, before you unpack and get busy with a buzz, jail you, or fine you for coming to their shores, with business too naughty for their liking.
Surprisingly Thailand, a country with a reputation of superhuman ping pong balls and unrestricted aspects of lust, has illegalised sex toys. If you are caught with a sex toy, you can spend up to three years in jail or pay a fine up to R 25 000, or both.
When you visit Saudi Arabia, make sure you pack zero contraband. No naughty magazines, not lingerie, bikinis, or toys. Anything that might be deemed inappropriate could get you banned or punished with jail time. The UAE, with Dubai and Abu Dhabi two popular destinations for South Africans, either as onward travel or midway stops, are as strict when it comes to packing anything phallic or naughty. You can be prosecuted.
Paradise, or the Maldives, will send you home if they find sex toys in your bags. Otherwise, they’ll seize and destroy it. Same amounts for Vietnam. And while it’s not illegal in India, revealing that you have them, or accidentally packing it in a way that it might be shown publicly or that customs would have to handle it, could land you in hot water, too.
It might be a good idea to buy your condoms locally, too. In places where at the very least, they acknowledge that people do have sex.
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Curiously, in Spain, one of the most enlightened territories in the world, packing or even publicly displaying an inflatable sex toy will earn you a whopping €600 (about R12 000) fine and you can get into a sport of bother too for wearing your underpants or any other inappropriate clobber in public, especially if it has a picture of, or could be mistaken for genitals.
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