Fascinating.

Pop quiz: What is the item you can seek to purchase at an adult novelty (read: sex toy) store and feel the least amount of shame about?

Answer: Fertility friendly personal lubricant.

Nothing else even comes close. The lingerie is incredibly trashy, the bachelor/bachelorette party supplies are all patently ridiculous (for those of you resisting this one, picture bumping into your boss after this transaction and being forced to show them all the penis straws, penis candies, penis cake mold, and Pin the Macho on the Man game and tell me how you feel), and condoms are marked up to an absurd degree. I bought my first pack of condoms at such a place because I was in high school, which makes me both: a fool; and incredibly paranoid about bumping into someone I knew at the grocery store. They were 100% more expensive than grocery store condoms.

In the case of fertility friendly lube, you’re just an honest guy who’s trying to start a family with his wife. You’ve got a wedding ring and everything! So when the alternative lifestyle chick asks if there’s anything she can help you find, you proudly declare, “Yes. My wife and I are trying to start a family. Do you have any fertility friendly lube?” And then she shows you their selection, and because you’re a good little dorky square, you notice none of the brands they carry match up to those you found from a quick Google search earlier in the day. You’re disappointed because now you have to go somewhere else for this transaction, and this was likely the easiest place to do it.

But as long as you’re here, you might as well browse around the rest of the store too, right? Then you become paranoid that you only spent roughly two minutes looking at the lubes and are now squarely in the Pervertville section of the store. The alternative lifestyle chick now thinks you made the whole pregnancy thing up. That’s probably not even a real wedding ring, she’s thinking. The jig is up. You should just go. You don’t belong here.

Then you remember this person works in a sex toy store and you score roughly a 0.07 on the weirdness scale of what she’s probably dealt with today alone. So you look some more. And you find something. And you buy it. And you feel great about it.

Then you go to Walgreens, find the proper lube, go to the checkout counter carrying only that (“Wow, she’s just laying there naked at home waiting for you to return with this, isn’t she?” thinks the clerk in your head), realize it’s twenty goddamn dollars for a little 1.4 oz tube, and this is your first lesson that pregnancy (and attempted pregnancy) goods and services are a total racket.

You will overpay for everything. And you will not think twice about it. You will feel no shame.

2 comments on “Shame

  1. My first answer to your question was condoms, but your live theory plays out. Condoms are super expensive there.

  2. Lee S. Hart says:

    My first answer to your question was anal beads. Also, what is shame?

    If that Walgreens’ clerk is anything like the clerks in those Trojan commercials then what the clerk in you head said is most likely apt.

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