THE GUARDIAN 2022
Sex, laughs and the snip: an audience with Thailand’s ‘Condom King’Thu 9 Jun 2022 Thailand’s population growth has slowed dramatically since the 60s, with a little help from Mechai Viravaidya’s vasectomy festivals and condom-blowing competitions Mechai Viravaidya has become a national treasure in Thailand through his use of humour to teach family planning and promote sexual health. Photograph: Pornchai Kittiwongsakul/AFP/Getty Images “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”. 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. “We came up with a new alphabet. [We used] B for birth, C for condom, I for IUD [intrauterine device], V for vasectomy,” Viravaidya says. But it was the condom that seemed to resonate the most, and so it became central to his family planning work. Born to a Scottish mother and Thai father, Viravaidya studied in Australia before returning to Thailand in the 1960s where a job in economics at a governmental agency showed him how high population growth was contributing to rural poverty. Rewards are offered at the Cabbages and Condoms restaurant owned by Mechai Viravaidya. Photograph: Narong Sangnak/EPA Viravaidya has gone on to hold multiple governmental roles and acted as a UN Aids ambassador, as part of a résumé that lists him as a Time magazine “Asian hero”, and an awardee of the UN gold peace medal and the Bill and Melinda Gates award for global health, among others. Gates himself named Viravaidya as one of his “heroes in the field”, stating that his “extraordinary life and work in global health and development has helped improve the lives of millions of people in Thailand”. 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. The answer, he believes, lies in using schools as a “platform for changing lives” and letting the initiatives be driven by those they’re trying to help. |