Sun Screen or Lube

The Paradox of Desire

Which came first — sunscreen or lube? Protection or pleasure? A bottle for the beach, a bottle for the bed. Both are slippery, both promise to make life easier, and both sit at the altar of human desire.

Sunscreen

Sunscreen is fear in a bottle. Fear of cancer, fear of wrinkles, fear of turning into your leather-faced uncle who fried himself on a Costa del Sol package holiday. You don’t rub it on for joy. You rub it on because the beauty industry has convinced you that UV rays are out to get you and only they can save you. White streaks on your shoulders, chemical shields in your pores — vanity dressed as science. A ritual of paranoia.

Lube

Lube is the other side of the coin. Fear of friction, fear of dryness, fear of admitting that nature didn’t always engineer things smoothly. You don’t reach for it to survive. You reach for it because the porn promise has seeped into the bedroom and now “good enough” isn’t enough. A few drops of silicone alchemy and suddenly biology works better, wetter, longer. Lube is denial in liquid form — the insistence that intimacy should never squeak.

The Common Thread

So what’s the difference? There isn’t much. Both products are goo in a tube, marketed through fear and aspiration. Sunscreen is sold with golden families running down beaches in slow motion. Lube hides in euphemisms about “comfort” and “connection,” terrified to show what it’s really for. Both remind us of the same thing: we’re animals trying to outwit our own bodies, one squirt at a time.

The Joke on Us

The real paradox is that neither sunscreen nor lube changes who we are. They just make the ride less brutal. One saves you from cancer, the other from carpet burn. One delays decay, the other pretends to enhance connection. Both are proof that humans will buy anything if it promises us control — over time, over pain, over nature, over death.

Next time you’re at the pharmacy, staring at SPF 50 and a bottle of KY, don’t laugh at the absurdity. Recognise it. These are the tools of our survival kit. Protection and pleasure. The twin engines of being human.

Everything else is just branding.