Didn't See
This Coming
Hi, my name is Marina. When 2025 started, I had no idea that in the coming weeks my life would take a full turn and I'd end up talking about oral sex and gonorrhea with everybody I meet.
Later in January 2025, I was biking home from a Berlin nightclub and the idea hit me: at that moment I could see how it would be possible to hold a protective sheet with one hand in a way that enables internal stimulation while giving protected oral sex. That night I could barely sleep. I just wanted to wake up and test whether it would actually work. The first prototypes were clunky, made out of moldable plastic and cut minigrip closures, but the idea worked.
One may wonder why I was thinking about this in the first place. The thought stemmed from a simple observation: safer sex is often the ideal, never the practice. We're told protection matters, then everyone quietly treats "this one time" as the exception. Using protection somehow reads as a mood-killer for many people, especially when it comes to oral sex. I'd also witnessed, and heard, too many stories of situations where protection was belittled.
Around that time I was reading articles about gonorrhea becoming resistant to antibiotics, and how unprotected oral sex is playing a role in rising STI numbers. What annoyed me was how the doctors interviewed seemed almost put off that people are having oral sex at all, and then kept pointing out that protection (a dental dam) already exists, and everything would be fine if people just used it.
Here are five reasons why the doctors' statement had so little connection to reality:
- 1.Having oral sex is not marginalized behaviour.
- 2.No consideration for how the solution works in practice: it requires two hands, is slippery, and only enables external stimulation.
- 3.Oral sex barriers are hard to find: they're almost never stocked in any drugstores, when condoms are often even handed out for free at events and schools.
- 4.When you manage to find dental dams, a single sheet can cost €2, and the material itself isn't exactly impressive.
- 5.Many people don't even know about oral sex barriers, and if they do, they are most of the time too shy and ashamed to use them.
The finger position came from a random reel on Instagram, in which a lesbian woman teaches how to finger properly, information every straight man should know too. Sadly I never saved it, as I never expected how much it would shape the coming years.
Since that nightly bike ride: I managed to get the EXIST Women stipendium (spring 2025), learned to 3D model and print to make the first working prototypes, filed a patent (summer 2025), and now we're part of the Berlin Startup Stipendium at SIB, where Vera joined the journey. We're now making the leap from project to company.
