A visit to the
Museum of
Contraception

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By SUSAN McCARTHY

Photographs by Janssen-Ortho/Toronto, Canada

The world contains many museums of erotica (the largest is in Amsterdam), but just one Museum of Contraception.

I was alerted to its existence by a paragraph in "Where TORONTO," a freebie magazine I found in a hotel room last May; the notice seemingly attracted no one but me. Skipping the Sky Dome, the CN Tower, and museums of ceramics, sugar, and shoes, I made an appointment to view the museum, located at the Janssen-Ortho Pharmaceutical Company, manufacturer of contraceptive products.

I was the only visitor that day, alone and captivated. Although the museum consists of fewer than a dozen display cases in a quiet hallway, the cases are full of unusual, impressive objects and labels with sonorous language, all testifying to the utter human determination to unlink sex from its most obvious end.

I took out my notebook and wrote "Occlusator Anticoncipiens et Prophylacticum." "Barbasco dioscorea composita." "Sanitary G.U. Bag."

There were actual exhibits of contraceptive methods outlined in the Ebers Papyrus (1550 BCE), by Al-Razi (860-930) and Avicenna (980-1037). Acacia. Crocodile dung. Queen Anne's Lace.

One costly item was represented by a photograph -- an 18th-century French, animal-membrane condom, painted with an explicit scene of a nun who clearly had not read the fine print in her vows, selecting from three priests with a similarly casual outlook. This sold at Christie's for $6,000. Perhaps it went to a museum of erotica, yet the artist's intent is so deeply anticlerical, the sexual content so clearly an afterthought, that it is unsurprising that no one in 200 years has been moved to use the thing.

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