The bad sex awards can go fuck themselves

I flew in to a wet Seattle from sunny Las Vegas today, minus lots of dollars (due to food/drink not gambling), and plus a stuffy head cold. Not my most fun flight ever. Matters didn’t improve when I booted up my laptop and spotted a bunch of articles on the Bad Sex in Fiction Award. I can’t express how much I hate that prize and the attitude of those associated with it.

It doesn’t get a lot of play in the US, but it’s widely covered in certain segments of the UK press. They love the excuse to publish sexually explicit quotes from the nominees and snigger about them. If you’ve never heard of it before the stated rationale is…

to draw attention to the crude, tasteless, often perfunctory use of redundant passages of sexual description in the modern novel, and to discourage it

As far as I can tell this means picking on writing that actually tries to detail the physical act of sex, rather than coyly drifting the camera towards the bedroom curtains as the lovers embrace on the bed. There’s certainly an excess of amusing metaphors, strained similes and overly ornate prose in some of the nominees, but little that matches their stated criteria. You can read a sample from this years winner here. I’m not particularly a fan, but really? That’s the best bad sex writing they could find? They should get out more.

The whole exercise strikes me as puritanical and condescending. If they had any guts they’d publish a Good Sex in Fiction Award for particularly interesting, stimulating and relevant sexual descriptions. That would at least be constructive. Unfortunately praising something as complex and revealing as sexual writing is personally exposing, so I doubt these prudish jackasses will ever do something that risky.

I’ve no idea what the appropriate image to accompany this post should be. So I’ll switch it around and publish something that looks like particularly good sex. Or at least something very clearly being enjoyed by at least one of the participants.

Mirror shot
I found this on the Desire and Devotion tumblr.

Author: paltego

See the 'about' page if you really want to know about me.

2 thoughts on “The bad sex awards can go fuck themselves”

  1. I dunno, paltego–on one hand, I think that it’s fun to have a laugh at literary passages (or any art) that is unintentionally hilarious. And bad sex writing, with facepalm metaphors and whatnot, is pretty funny. I think Philip Roth, in particular, does quite a job with it.

    Where I agree with you is the pretty nasty tone of Award’s rationale. “Crude and tasteless” is just mean, and who made them the Supreme Court of Good Taste? And how could sex be in ‘good taste’ or ‘bad taste’ anyhow?

    The “discouraging” bit is rude too. Thanks, Mother, I’ve been discouraged. Ugh.

    1. I’ve no real objection to laughing at unintentional hilarious art. It’s the singling out of sex that bugs me. I think there’s an underlying puritanism and prudishness to it, while at the same time they love the sniggering and press attention they manage to attract. If they wanted to improve the quality of writing about sex they should reward the good stuff (but I think they’re too cowardly to do that). Punishing the bad stuff just encourages people not to write about it at all.

      Having read some of the past winners, I’ve never found any of the sex scenes crude, tasteless or redundant. Just occasionally amusing. I suspect they ignore the rationale, and simply pick on any famous authors writing explicitly about sex. That ensures they’ll always get good headlines and attract people to the event. I have to admit it is kind of funny when someone like Philip Roth writes something facepalm bad about sex. But really, there’s so much worse stuff out there if you’re genuinely looking for bad writing in modern novels.

      -paltego

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