I’VE got a sneaking admiration for the nominees in the Literary Review’s Bad Sex award. Every time this annual smut-shame comes round, it occurs to me that these authors must be made of daring stuff, willing to risk the stocks and being pelted with metaphorical rotten cabbages for popping the occasional paragraph of graphic sex into their tales.
Think of Morrissey, who won last year's award for his debut novel's description of a couple who “playfully bit and pulled at each other in a dangerous and clamorous rollercoaster coil of sexually violent rotation with Eliza’s breasts barrel-rolled across Ezra’s howling mouth”. Or former Blue Peter Presenter Janet Ellis, nominated this year for a fairly agricultural scene in The Butcher’s Hook: “‘Anne,’ he says, stopping and looking down at me. I am pinned like wet washing with his peg. ‘Till now, I thought the sweetest sound I could ever hear was cows chewing grass. But this is better.’ He sways and we listen to the soft suck at the exact place we meet. Then I move and put all thoughts of livestock out of his head.”
These authors didn’t just write about sex, they threw themselves at the process with unruly abandon, as if taunting the award judges with their defiantly ridiculous metaphors. Good on them.
Of course, it’s hard to judge the tone of the Bad Sex Awards. Is it a priggish and puerile joke? An ironic celebration of the erotic in literature? A guide to all the best naughty bits in this year's novels? A genius bit of publicity that keeps an otherwise small publication in the headlines? In some ways it’s all of these things.
The Literary Review’s award, many people will point out, is not about bad sex but bad writing. The nominated authors are guilty, a spokesperson recently explained, of "overwriting, with mixed metaphors, uncomfortable similes, or becoming so hyperbolic they strain credulity”.
Taking yourself too seriously is another danger: "You can detect a little bit of preciousness on the part of the author when he – and it’s normally a he – gets to the deed itself,” added the spokesperson.
This year's nominees include Ethan Canin, whose A Doubter’s Almanac likened sex to "a brisk tennis game or a summer track meet", as well as Robert Seethaler, Gayle Forman and Tom Connolly.
Jonathan Safran Foer just missed out on a nomination, according to the organisers, for the following line in his novel Here I Am: “He jerked off with the determination of someone within sight of Everest’s summit, having lost all his friends and Sherpas, having run out of supplemental oxygen, but preferring death to failure.”
I can't help feeling this isn't just about bad sex writing – it's about any sex writing. The internet may offer a tsunami of pornography but in literary novels, the subject is generally avoided. Write a few scenes, whether well or badly, and you’ve probably got a chance of being in the running.
I know how hard it is to write about sex even as a journalist. No matter how objective your approach, it constantly seems as if you are revealing something about yourself, for which you will be judged and possibly shamed. Fiction-writing, clearly, is worse. There’s no hiding place. Readers think you must have either done this stuff, or at very least fantasised about it. A great many writers, naturally, decide simply not to go there.
So I was cheered when Janet Ellis used a Guardian column to defend her sex scenes, writing: “I didn’t let imaginary hecklers get in the way of what I wanted to write, or worry someone who’d watched me [on Blue Peter] when they were a child would suffer the trauma of finding out I was a grown woman after all.”
Most authors don’t take their nomination so well – though many do see the advantages in terms of publicity. Morrisey didn’t turn up for the awards and declared them a “repulsive horror”. Rowan Somerville, winner of the 2010 award for his novel The Shape Of Her – "Like a lepidopterist mounting a tough-skinned insect with a too blunt pin he screwed himself into her" – did attend, but described the ceremony as having “an atmosphere of bullying peculiar to public schools”.
I wonder if the judges picked Ellis’s book partly because her status as a former Blue Peter presenter,creates its own set of headlines. After all, the Bad Sex Awards seem to be less about actual bad writing than big publicity, hence their frequent poking fun at politicians and real-life public figures. This year the judges singled out Donald Trump and his “locker room” talk, even though his genuinely offensive "grab them by the p****" comments had to be discounted because the award "only covers fiction".
We live, Jon Ronson, wrote in his book So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed, in a culture preoccupied with humiliation. Some targets are truly worthy of such mockery, but many are not. Trump deserves his rotten cabbages and more, particularly because they are prompted by real life, not fiction. But an author with a mildly groan-worthy agricultural sex metaphor, merits little more than a smile, and possibly an encouraging cheer.
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