Those of you who had thought it had been a while since I'd gone off a book rant are in luck. So, a male and a female make plans to meet later for sex. They each arrive at appointed time and place, clothes are removed, things are progressing and she turns to him and asks where the condoms are. He says he assumed she had them, that in his country females take care of that stuff. She says in her country, males take care of that stuff. And then he turns out to be joking and he has them and I close the book (okay, turn off the ereader) in frustration.
First, let me grab my sex educator hat here. Okay, the job of birth control and or contraception is the job of anyone who wishes to participate in sex and does not wish to contract a sexually transmitted infection or end up with an unplanned pregnancy. Now sure, after discussions, some couples who either do not have pregnancy as a concern or have addressed the birth control aspect in other ways and are confident that there are no infections to be concerned with may forgo contraception as well. But those things require trust, and ideally conversation.
Not everyone remembers to have these conversations ahead of time, and, quite honestly, I suspect this author actually intended the exchange (of words, people, still talking about the words) to be humorous but, as you might suspect, it annoyed me and made me mad at both characters. Also, while I don't think it affects the exchange, the countries of origin in question here are the US and the UK. It would have been equally as humorous and/or real for one character to think that after all that anticipation they had forgotten a crucial piece and to try to scramble to fix it only to have the other character reveal they had them all along.
Rants About New (and old) Things
