Shower of Love



""Shower sex is always an explosive orgasm machine in movies. In Real Life, shower sex invariably results in both parties emerging insufficiently washed and sexually unsatisfied.""

- Nathan Rabin, reviewing Color of Night

Two people have sex under a running shower. Since shower windows have a tendency to get steamed up, this allows for literal Censor Steam. Wall-Bang Her is a possibility, but there is the likelihood of injury from slip and fall (which hardly happens in fiction, unless one was to write a screwball romantic comedy and turn that scene into slapstick). Two-Person Pool Party is similar to this, only it's two people having sex in a bathtub, Jacuzzi, or a pool (public or private -- dealer's choice).

Often an example of Hollywood Sex, although Your Mileage May Vary.

See also Shower of Angst (when a character showers to wash away shame, misery, and/or embarrassment), Shower of Awkward (when Hilarity Ensues when one character walks in on another showering), and Shower Scene (Exactly What It Says on the Tin).

Advertising

 * This is the point of every advert ever created for Herbal Essences shampoo. Most shampoo commercials knowingly hint at it, but these ones take it Up to Eleven with lashings of Double Entendre and scenes of women in the throes of very Immodest "Organic" experiences.
 * When you apply Axe's Sex for Product marketing scheme to their line of body wash, you get this.

Anime & Manga

 * A Girls Love example can be found in one of the scenes of the erotic Manga, Hanjuku Joshi.
 * The Hentai movie Countdown starts with one of these. Needless to say, the artist didn't bother with Censor Steam.
 * Bible Black only had one with Saeki and a lot of men.
 * Boku No Sexual Harassment
 * Sensitive Pornograph
 * Such a scene happens in Hyakujitsu no Bara, but decidly not the Good People Have Good Sex sort.
 * Full Metal Panic: The Second Raid has a Twincest scene involving the two girl assassins.

Comics

 * XXXenophile story "The Spirit is Willing" (sex with the ghost of a woman that died in a shower).
 * In the Jay and Silent Bob comic book mini-series, Jay tries to have sex with Tricia in the shower but she kicks him out.
 * In a 2009 issue of Wonder Woman, she returns from a battle dirty and sweaty. She asks her boyfriend Nemesis if he'd like to shower with her.
 * Used (like just about every other sex trope) in Cherry Comics. See "Beach Party" for one example.

Films

 * James Bond in A View to a Kill and Thunderball.
 * An American Werewolf in London's shower scene is one of the best examples of this trope.
 * In Apollo 13, the back up for the flight was interrupted in such a scene to be informed (via telephone) that he was bumped to main crew.
 * Subverted in the movie White Sands (1992). Lane Bodine (Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio) offers herself to (married) protagonist Sheriff Ray Dolezal (Willem Dafoe) while he's in the shower. The next scene has an FBI agent listening with amusement to the sounds of passionate sex over his hidden microphones...until Dolezal kicks down his door, whereupon we see Bodine faking the sounds as a distraction.
 * Averted in Life as a House. At one point, Jena Malone steps into the shower with Hayden Christenson (apparently with no intention of sex). He makes a pass at her, and they eventually start kissing. He then prematurely ejaculates, and she amusedly tells him that he'll be cleaning the shower.
 * Creator shower sex between Virginia Madsen and Vincent Spanno.
 * Crazy/Beautiful
 * St Elmo's Fire has Andrew McCarthy and Ally Sheedy breaking the shower screen.
 * Color of Night featured one of these.
 * The movie The Specialist features such a scene between Sharon Stone and Sylvester Stallone.
 * A Kiss Before Dying has one with Sean Young and Matt Dillon.
 * Common in pornographic movies.
 * A couple tries to emulate one such scene in 500 Days of Summer. Hilarity Ensues.
 * Subverted in the 70s horror comedy Arnold, where a corpse's gold-digging wife (don't ask) hops into a shower with her lover...only to have the walls close in, crushing them to death.
 * Happened in part four of the Friday the 13 th series where the "innocent girl" lost her virginity.
 * Parodied (with bare boobies) in the "Catholic High School Girls in Trouble" segment of Kentucky Fried Movie. With each thrust, the woman's (Uschi Digard) breasts are briefly pressed against the shower stall glass.
 * Heartbreakingly rendered in Snow Falling on Cedars, when the young new widow, in the middle of a courtroom scene to determine the guilt of her husband's accused killer, flashes back to one of the last times she saw her husband alive: having Good People Have Good Sex in the shower with him. What a tearjerker...
 * Ana and her briefly-seen husband do this in the Dawn of the Dead 2004 remake. Below the neck you just see outlines.
 * In Daywatch the protagonist chooses this way to reveal his feelings to his Love Interest (no sex, though, just heavy snogging). Bonus points for him residing in a woman's body in that moment. Hell, yeah!
 * And then they end up in a tropical lagoon. Because that's what happens when you surprise an archmage in the shower.
 * Right after the infamous line in Shark Attack 3: Megalodon, the main character invites a woman over for one of these.

Literature
"[Crusher] took a deep breath as if a weight had been lifted from her. "Okay, so... would you like to shower?" "You can go first." She smiled. "Who said anything about going one at a time?""
 * Used (and showerheads were, ah, utilised) in a certain Rei Shimura novel.
 * In The Dresden Files novel Proven Guilty, though not outright stated, it is implied that Michael and Charity Carpenter had one of these right before he leaves to go on another mission.
 * Turns up in Eric van Lustbader' novel The Ninja, with an unexpected masochistic turn.
 * In the multiple-parallel-timeline Star Trek: The Next Generation novel Q-Squared, it's implied that Picard and Crusher do this:

Live Action TV
"Gloria: Well, there was a cold shower in the house, you know! Mike: I know, I took one, it didn't help! Gloria: BECAUSE YOU TOOK IT WITH ME!"
 * Subverted in the premier of Alias, where Sydney lures her fiance into the shower with the implication she wants to have sex, when she really wants to use the noise the shower makes to hide that she's telling him about her real job as a spy.
 * In an early second season episode of In Plain Sight, Mary goes to her boyfriend's house and finds him in the shower. After they talk, he asks her for a towel. She opens all the cabinets and finds nothing but a washcloth. The next scene is the washcloth hanging on the door handle and her stepping into the shower.
 * Charmed had one between Leo and Piper. A later Time Travel episode had Phoebe walking in on this scene.
 * Kind of subverted in Criminal Minds, when Garcia's talking to JJ about showering with Kevin. "Sometimes a girl's just got to wash her hair alone, you know?"
 * Kevin and Toby have at least one steamy shower sex scene on Dante's Cove. Memorable in part because it was used in the opening credits of season three.
 * Shower Scenes in general are fairly common in Prison dramas like Oz, but a particularly notable Shower of Love subversion occurs in season three: homosexual Richie Hanlon has just come off death row and returned to the general population. First night back, he's in the shower when another man starts coming onto him. Both Richie and the audience are expecting some celebratory "off-death-row" loving, until.
 * The short-lived British sitcom The Savages had the main characters doing this, then wondering why it had been so long since they tried it. They remember it was because they could never agree on the water temperature.
 * Mentioned in the All in The Family episode "The Very Moving Day", when Gloria finds out that she's pregnant, and she and Mike blame each other for the time they had sex without protection:

Music

 * Alluded to in R&B group 112's song "Anywhere"

Webcomics

 * "Aaaaaaaand there goes my boner."

Western Animation

 * In The Simpsons episode Kamp Krusty, Homer and Marge have a scene like this after Bart Lisa leave for camp.
 * in Family Guy episode Family Goy, Peter makes love to a life-sized cardboard Kathy Ireland figure in the shower, in an example of taking Cardboard Pal (or perhaps Companion Cube) to its (il)logical extreme.