Sensible Erection | Official Condom Design: New York's New Sex Symbol

Wednesday, 10 March 2010

Official Condom Design: New York's New Sex Symbol

quote [ New Yorkers have a new sex symbol. The international sign for the power button (the circle with the line thrusting out the top) will grace the wrappers of millions of New York City condoms. ]

computers and sex. how can it not be an SE post? NSFW just cuz.

[by stinkmop@2:50pmGMT] [+4 Informative]

Comments

KingPellinore said @ 3:35pm GMT on 10th Mar [Score:2]
Does that make AIDS the Red Ring of Death?

Baxter_UK said @ 5:54pm GMT on 10th Mar
It seems to me that one could experience the red ring of death during sex without having AIDS.

theolypse said @ 9:07am GMT on 11th Mar
Perhaps if were to let you demonstrate...

Baxter_UK said @ 9:47pm GMT on 11th Mar
Certainly: bend over, and I'll demonstrate.

f00m@nB@r said @ 3:57pm GMT on 10th Mar [Score:2]
tattooed and pregnant (and nude):

http://mondoporno.tumblr.com/post/438989752/by-cringlover

Mr. Langosta said @ 3:58pm GMT on 10th Mar [Score:2 Informative]
The IEC 5009, is not really the power symbol, but the standby symbol -- which is really quite spot on. I can think of nothing more apropos with putting on a condom than, "standby!".

mrcucumber said @ 6:01pm GMT on 10th Mar [Score:1 Insightful]
I think it's a cop out. Graphically, there are so many opportunities and they copied an already existing symbol. I saw some of the other entries and I think this one is lame.

Jewbacchus said @ 9:52am GMT on 11th Mar
Super lame. I have to assume 1) The manhole cover was deemed unsavory and 2) Whoever designed this knows someone.

mrcucumber said @ 8:05pm GMT on 11th Mar
It must have sounded clever to those that made the decision - "on" meaning put one "on" regardless if it means standby or whatever. Still lame.

Misanthrope said @ 7:57pm GMT on 10th Mar
Alternatively, under IEEE 1621, this symbol simply means "power".

ScoobySnacks said @ 4:02pm GMT on 10th Mar [Score:4 Informative]

f00m@nB@r said @ 4:35pm GMT on 10th Mar
http://www.applegeeks.com/lite/index.php?aglitecomic=2010-03-08

quaint said @ 10:48pm GMT on 10th Mar
Great. Looks like they're completely doing away with the bits that made the first Iron Man good and are massively expanding the bits that made it bad.

This could in effect be Transformers 3, judging by the seasick camerawork and difficult to follow cgi wankfest of the trailer.

jackbnimbler said @ 12:14am GMT on 11th Mar
Could you be more specific about what those points would be?

max_damage78 said @ 1:33am GMT on 11th Mar
I assume seasick camerawork and cgi wankfest

Could be wrong tho

quaint said @ 1:47am GMT on 11th Mar [Score:2 Underrated]
Good points of Iron Man 1:

Pretty much everything up to the Big Final Battle.

Bad points of Iron Man 1:

The Big Final Battle.

The CGI setpiece battles just don't interest me. The fight scene between Big Scary Robot Jeff Bridges and Iron Man is indistinguishable from the fight scene between The Abomination and The Hulk in The Incredible Hulk, which is in turn indistinguishable from any of the fight scenes in Transformers.

The problem is that most of the time they're just that - setpieces. You know what the outcome is going to be. There's no human involvement in the process, there's no vested hope that something actually interesting will happen. It'll just be showcasing for the technical crew.

I could still be pleasantly surprised by the film. Hell, I was pleasantly surprised by Iron Man 1, but I was surprised because the setpiece battle was right at the end of a good film. From the trailer it looks like the setpiece is going to be the whole film, what with the spectacular car wreck that happens near the start and then the spectacular battle with lots of Iron Men, before (presumably) the spectacular final one-on-one showdown battle at the end between cgi-RDJ-suit and cgi-MR-suit.

An analogy about the Spectacular Final Battle thing might be if you imagine a war film involving battleships. If you're just looking at ships slugging it out with 12-inch guns, you're in for seeing a lot of explosions but nothing really capable of holding your interest for more than 2-3 minutes. If you start looking at the men loading, ranging and firing those guns, it starts to get a little more interesting.

fuck it. I'll sum up. Spectacular Final Battles are dull because they're so impersonal. They dehumanise the characters and because of this are reliant upon "Whizz! Bang! Kerpow! Spang!" - which gets very dull very quickly.

todde said @ 4:05pm GMT on 10th Mar
+0 meh

spite48 said @ 4:20pm GMT on 10th Mar
Putting a power symbol on the wrapper will discourage me from having unprotected penetrative anal sex with anonymous strangers, how?

Todomanna said @ 4:28pm GMT on 10th Mar
I'm going to hazard a guess and say you probably don't have to worry about that anyways... unless you're gay of course.

KingPellinore said @ 5:06pm GMT on 10th Mar
Straight people have anal sex, too.

sacrelicious said @ 10:30pm GMT on 10th Mar [Score:1 Informative]
in a recent Savage Love column, Dan Savage cited statistics that show that heterosexuals have about 27 times the anal sex of homosexuals, and on the basis of that argued that anal sex is primarily a heterosexual pastime.

badgerbaiter said @ 10:45pm GMT on 10th Mar
Amen.

Todomanna said @ 3:15am GMT on 11th Mar
Percentage wise, or simply straight numbers wise?

sacrelicious said @ 3:26am GMT on 11th Mar
straight numbers. but it's just possible that if we include lesbians in the homosexuals-engaging-in-anal camp, then straights may also win in percentage, as the numbers for homosexual men engaging in anal were not really that much higher than heteros.

theolypse said @ 9:12am GMT on 11th Mar
They suck a lot of dick, gays.

sacrelicious said @ 3:14pm GMT on 11th Mar
only half of them. lesbians, surprisingly, don't do so much of that.

spite48 said @ 6:08pm GMT on 11th Mar [Score:1 Funny]
That is not what I have been led to believe through the medium of pornography.

Todomanna said @ 3:14am GMT on 11th Mar
I was making a pseudo-disparaging commentary on his sexual attractiveness, or lack there of. I think I made it too technical.

And the second part was mainly because of something Malcolm Ingram (gay documentarian friend of Kevin Smith) says "If you have an internet connection and are gay, you're five minutes away from a blowjob." I assumed anal sex would be similar.

spite48 said @ 7:22am GMT on 11th Mar
If I were gay, I think I'd have even worse prospects... *sob*

sacrelicious said @ 11:54pm GMT on 11th Mar
if Harvey Fierstein can get laid, so can you.

if only by Harvey Fierstein

sanepride said @ 6:28pm GMT on 10th Mar [Score:1 Informative]
By opening the wrapper and putting the condom on your dick before having your penetrative anal sex, that's how.

Jeez, you have to explain everything to some people.

sanepride said @ 5:50pm GMT on 10th Mar
I see an erect penis and grotesquely inflated ball sack.

Silent said @ 5:53pm GMT on 10th Mar
I saw Ms Pacman giving head.

sanepride said @ 6:24pm GMT on 10th Mar
Uh, sorry dude. That's Mr. Pacman. I don't see no little red bow.

Silent said @ 6:34pm GMT on 10th Mar [Score:2 Funny]
I'm holding out that she striped...

Supreme_Coconut said @ 8:31pm GMT on 10th Mar
Striped? Did she reapply different lipstick colors for a rainbow party?

KingPellinore said @ 6:16pm GMT on 10th Mar
Is that a line from the Sexth Sense?

EPT said @ 8:44pm GMT on 10th Mar
The logo is cute as a passing joke. As a formal product, it's fucking horrible. The marketing-speak doesn't fulfil a productive hole, it's just trying to shoehorn coolness to fit a joke logo. Could have gone for something unique and meaningful, now a logo has to do double-duty.

monkeytooth said @ 9:51pm GMT on 10th Mar
I dunno. Some subjects require a bit of humor to reach people, and the associations with computer literate people seems like a good message as opposed to their runners-up like trains or manhole covers...

also seems quite literal as an image - if it wasn't the power button symbol it would still be apt as a universal and simple graphic - what more can you ask of graphic design?

VictorTyne said @ 9:22pm GMT on 10th Mar [Score:1 Insightful]
New York City's health commissioner, Dr. Thomas Farley, unveiled the design in a ceremony featuring the five finalists.

"When I saw [the design], I said this is pure genius," Farley told the crowd.

Dr. Thomas Farley is a fucking moron.

This isn't "genius", it's "I have no creativity so I looked around my room and latched on to the first thing I saw."

It sure is a great time to be an artist in America! "Well, sure we had some real artists come up with some really great stuff, but let's pick the dumb fuck who copied the power symbol."

sanepride said @ 10:12pm GMT on 10th Mar
Don't you get it?

It's Post-modern genius.

sacrelicious said @ 10:52pm GMT on 10th Mar
I'd amend that to "it sure is a great time to be a hack artist in America". not so great a time to be a real artist.

f00m@nB@r said @ 12:12am GMT on 11th Mar
that sounds like a no true scotsman argument.

sacrelicious said @ 1:30am GMT on 11th Mar
fine, "it sure is a great time to be a hack artist in Scotland."

EPT said @ 8:39am GMT on 11th Mar
Warhol shot to fame with a soup tin...

theolypse said @ 9:10am GMT on 11th Mar
I think one could make the claim, strongly, that Warhol was more comedian than artist, but the art world never got the joke, which was on him.

sacrelicious said @ 11:16pm GMT on 11th Mar
yeah, but warhol drew that soup tin.

then separated the colors of that soup tin, transferred the resultant separations to a different screen for each color, and made 32 additional screens for the name of each flavor of soup. then he (and his assistants) pulled prints one color at a time, and made many cans of soup.

mrcucumber said @ 11:48pm GMT on 11th Mar
So what's your point? 0_o

sacrelicious said @ 12:09am GMT on 12th Mar
warhol drew a still life, and turned it into a series of silkscreen prints.

this guy just re-made a universally recognized symbol in adobe illustrator. it's two freakin' shapes. two freakin' shapes that a graphic designer for every single electronics manufacturer on the planet had already assembled for every new model they put out. and it took them all of two seconds to do it.

arctan said @ 4:00am GMT on 14th Mar
Warhol copied a ridiculously well-known and proliferated mass-produced design and he did so with meticulous accuracy, adding nothing creative to it other than putting it in a different context.

Even if you argue that what he did required more technical skill, it still wasn't the technical skill that was the point of what he did -- any "artistry" that existed in his work existed *purely* in the sense of taking familiar images and putting them in different contexts. The man said as much himself.

And sure, you could say there isn't all that much artistry in realizing that the power symbol looks dirty if you put it on a condom wrapper, but I'd say it's still more insightful than putting a soup can (or, for that matter, a urinal) in a museum and saying "Isn't that incongruous and weird".

dead_bob said @ 10:22pm GMT on 10th Mar
I would think there would be a trademark issue, guess not

arctan said @ 4:09am GMT on 14th Mar
It's not the trademark of any company; it's an international standard.

sacrelicious said @ 10:53pm GMT on 10th Mar
so, um, what the hell is that supposed to mean? that sometimes condoms are a turn on, and other times condoms are a turn off?

Jewbacchus said @ 12:08am GMT on 11th Mar [Score:1 Underrated]
I was hoping for eitherthis one or this one

ckfahrenheit said @ 2:32am GMT on 11th Mar [Score:4 Funny]

sacrelicious said @ 2:44am GMT on 11th Mar
took me a minute.

Baxter_UK said @ 9:46pm GMT on 15th Mar
Did it, indeed?

RuneLancer said @ 1:26pm GMT on 11th Mar
Hang on. They're using a logo associated with geeks on their condoms? The group that defines itself by having, among other things, a deficient or non-existent ability to interact with the opposite sex?

Nicely done indeed...

EPT said @ 9:42pm GMT on 11th Mar
Don't be silly. Geeks never turn their equipment off, think of the uptime!

z-angel said @ 4:52pm GMT on 11th Mar
Maybe they went with it because it has always looked a bit like Pac Man sucking a dick.

Ms. Pac-Man said @ 5:32pm GMT on 11th Mar [Score:1 Funny]
!!!

radioelectric said @ 8:03pm GMT on 11th Mar
If the line was shorter it WOULD look a bit like a condom.