Emily wrinkled her nose as she saw a man and woman walking down the street holding hands. She looked around to make sure there hadn't been any children watching and, satisfied that there weren't, breathed a sigh of relief. "Public displays of affection" as they were once called, now rightly looked down upon as advertisements designed to lure children into having sex, had almost become a thing of the past. Feeling twinges of irritation that the government still weren't taking action about such shocking and dangerous displays despite the fact hundreds of children take up having sex every day, she felt relieved as she reached the door to the safety of her office. She hurried up the stairs to find her colleagues hunched round a desk covered in papers, shaking their heads and muttering.
"Emily," said Alison, motioning towards the circular table where the office staff were sitting. Emily walked over, pulling a chair from one of the vacant desks, moving it to sit with everyone else.
Alison tugged her arm.
"ITV ran an advert for condoms last night," she spoke urgently.
"B-but why? People don't need condom-"
"And MPs are getting letters from constituents about how they can do sexual acts with much less risk of cervical cancer, throat cancer, tongue cancer, herpes, chlamydia, AIDS and all the other terrible things associated with sexual acts."
"So they say," Emily spat. "Condoms can still break. And we'd nearly stopped sex in its tracks. It's a completely unnecessary risk."
"What do we do now?" Martin chimed from the other side of the table, looking up from his papers.
Twirling a strand of her curly hair around her finger so hard it almost felt close to being torn out, Alison, almost hyperventilating gasped, "Why?!! Why won't Big Sex stop marketing killer products to people? Do they not have children? Do they not care if their grandmothers get gonorrhea and their children get AIDS? Is money so important to them that human life means nothing?"
"They say this new product makes it safer-" Martin began, but he was interrupted by Emily.
"Except that as we know, there's no such thing as safe sex. This will encourage more people to have sex meaning more people will die of illnesses related to sex, more children will start having sex. It will make children think there is such a thing as safe sex, just as it's been denormalised."
The staff of the Institute for a Healthy National Workforce all grimaced. They knew that condoms posed a serious risk to all the good work they'd done in denormalising sex. It had been a difficult road. Big Sex had of course opposed them at every step of the way, as businesses are wont to do - putting profit before people is their game. Then there were members of the public who had been tricked by Big Sex into thinking that there'd be a depopulation crisis if sex was banned. Of course, we were able to educate them that such scare stories simply wouldn't be the case, and millions of babies are happily born in the UK every year to couples who go, risk free, to the NHS Fertilisation Centres so that the sperm can be deposited in a tube, tested for risk and then implanted in the woman via a spatula. Many people now wouldn't dream of having sex due to the highly successful education campaigns. Emily's favourite was one that had been piloted at train stations nationwide in the previous year's festive season - actors dressed as giant, diseased vaginas ran up to commuters and began to envelope them, before giving them informational pamphlets on how sex kills. Britain was so close to being a sex-free society. But then there were the libertarians. Emily felt sick and anxious whenever she heard the word.
"So what do we do?" Martin asked again.
"We've got to get condoms off the market. Millions of people will die if we don't," Emily spoke, eyes almost glazed as she clenched her fists.
"There's no such thing as safe sex."
