On September 10–11, 2026, Australian condom brand Moments published the 2026 Moments Sexual Wellness Study, a national survey of 1,111 Australian women, with coverage in Man of Many on September 10 and Mashable on September 11. The design is what makes it land: respondents were shown an identical list of assumptions about a woman carrying condoms and then about a man carrying condoms, in consecutive questions. Same respondent, same object, two readings.

Why It Matters

Caveats about brand-funded research aside, the within-person survey design is methodologically stronger than the usual sexual-wellness press release, and the finding has a real commercial dimension. The barrier here is not distribution — condoms are on the shelf at Coles — it is the social cost of being seen with the product. That is a packaging, merchandising and marketing problem, and it is one the pleasure and sexual-wellness sector has repeatedly proven it can move: discreet shipping, unbranded packaging, and mainstream-aisle placement all exist because purchase shame was treated as a design constraint rather than a consumer failing. There is also a category-growth argument buried in the numbers. A market where 46.8% of women use condoms but only 40.1% ever carry them, and where two-thirds have gone without because nobody had one, is a market leaving volume on the table for reasons that have nothing to do with price or availability. Brands that can make carrying feel as unremarkable as carrying keys — the explicit thesis of the Moments campaign — capture that gap. Finally, the consent framing deserves attention from anyone writing product copy in this space. The study's most useful contribution is the flat assertion that a condom in a bag signals nothing about consent, in either direction. Removal without agreement is a sexual offence in several Australian jurisdictions including New South Wales, Victoria and the ACT. That is a message the category is unusually well positioned to carry, and it costs nothing to say correctly.

The gap is wide and it runs one direction. Asked what people assume about a woman with condoms, 38.6% said "sleeps around" versus 23.0% for a man — a 15.7-point spread. The positive descriptors invert: "is prepared" reads 29.3% for her against 43.9% for him, "is responsible" 26.1% against 39.7%, "is confident" 20.7% against 29.0%. Mashable adds that the single most common assumption about a woman carrying condoms was that she is planning to have sex (45.4%). "It's one woman reading an identical object two completely different ways depending on whose bag it's in," said Christina Zafirov, marketing and brand manager at Moments Wellness.

The perception is also a lived experience, and the study checked. Asked directly, 63.8% of Australian women said women are judged more harshly than men for carrying condoms, with 30.8% saying "much more harshly"; just 2.1% thought men had it worse. And 44.1% reported actually hearing someone make a negative comment about a woman for carrying or buying condoms — 24.8% more than once. Per Mashable's summary of the findings, three in four Australian women have hidden, disguised or abandoned a condom purchase, and while comfort with buying condoms has improved over the past decade, the sense of being judged for carrying them has gotten worse.

That stigma converts directly into a public-health outcome. The reasons women gave for not carrying condoms are all downstream of the same misread: 21.1% didn't want to seem like they were expecting sex, 18.7% would be embarrassed if someone saw them, 13.7% worried what people would assume. The largest single reason, at 29.5%, was assuming a partner would have one — and only 40.1% of Australian women ever carry condoms against 46.8% who use them, with 25.6% carrying regularly. Two-thirds have gone without a condom because neither person had one. Somatic sex coach Eleanor Hadley's line, quoted in Man of Many, is the cleanest framing available: "Nobody reads a first aid kit as an expectation of injury."

Moments is an Australian brand making natural rubber latex condoms certified vegan by The Vegan Society, alongside lubricant and pleasure toys, sold online and through Coles and Chemist Warehouse from around $10 a pack. The Women Carry Condoms Too campaign runs through September for Sexual Health Month. Readers should note the obvious: this is brand-commissioned research with a commercial campaign attached, and the Mashable piece is marked as sponsored by Moments Wellness.

Sources

Update — 2026-09-12

Initial entry — story first created.