A Bit of a Moan: Part 1

There's nothing British people like more than a good moan.  Whether it's about our crappy weather, crappy national football team or pretty much anything crappy about our lives in general, give us the opportunity and we're there laying out our woes to anyone who'll listen and expounding our views on how to make things better.

I'd just like to thank the readers of this DIK blog for giving me the opportunity today  :).

In fact, it's not just today, but over the next three days I'm going to have a moan about certain things that crop up, mainly in contemporary romance, which makes me roll my eyes a little, at best, or gnashing my teeth in annoyance at worst.  Most of my contemporary romance reading is m/m, but I think some of what I'm going to talk about about applies to m/f contemps too.

Let's start today with something which mostly makes me roll my eyes:  Sex in the shower.

Nearly every contemporary m/m book has a sex-in-the-shower scene.  When I first began to read the genre, I found this a bit of a novelty, after all, I'd come from reading m/f historicals when showers weren't invented (except in that Lisa Kleypas book, and I'm still slightly sceptical about the accuracy of that).  However, as I continued reading the genre, and realised that nearly EVERY m/m contemp was going to contain a shower scene, I began to get a bit tired with the whole thing, mainly because it sparked off several of my 'worry' buttons.  What worry buttons, you may ask?  Well let me draw up a list:

1. Aren't showers a bit small for fitting in sex?
Now this is possibly a cultural thing.  In Britain, showers tend to be quite small and cramped and the thought of fitting two great big blokes in one is, frankly, rather laughable.  I know that showers in the US are possibly roomier, but surely not that much more.  Yet all sex shower scenes are a master-class in sexual choreography and not once do they bang their elbow/knee on the tiles or catch important parts of their anatomy on the shower hose or taps.

2. I worry about the slippy bath/tiles.
I've come to the conclusion that all US showers have industrial strength rubber matting because these guys can seem to manoeuvre themselves into a vast array of positions and never once do they slip.  The worry is there though, in the the back of my mind, as to whether one of them will end up with concussion after slipping on the tiles and banging his head on the shower screen.

3. Water deadens taste/touch.
Now this maybe TMI here, but I've had sex in a shower.  It was bloody uncomfortable and not an experience I'd care to repeat.  One thing that I noticed during that little 'experiment' was how difficult it was to taste the skin of the the person in the shower with you.  The water deadens the taste, washes it away leaving everything tasting of...well...water.  Yet time after time the authors of the sex shower scene tell of how wonderful the skin  tastes.  It's also quite difficult to breathe when the shower is pounding down on your head, so how these guys don't pass out from lack of oxygen is anyone's guess.

It's not just these worries that affect my enjoyment of the sex shower scene.  Mostly I'm just bored with reading them because they crop up with such regularity.  It's gotten to the stage now where when it comes up I'm thinking 'oh here we go, time for the shower sex scene'.  After all they've done it on the sofa and in bed, it must be the turn of the shower.

So what about you guys?  Are you bored with the shower sex scene?  Do you have the same worries about damage to body parts as I do?  Or am I just weird and it's all in my head?