I write this post with a heavy heart.
The Literary Review reports that its would-be judges of the Bad Sex in Fiction Award 2020 have decided, after difficult deliberation, to cancel the prize for this year.
Their rationale: “The judges felt that the public had been subjected to too many bad things this year to justify exposing it to bad sex as well. They warned, however, that the cancellation of the 2020 awards should not be taken as a licence to write bad sex.”
While the intentions are merciful, I can say only–Alas! Crap! Come on, now! And other expressions of dismay.
The award is, after all, one of my best chances each year to sample some literary sex writing.
“But, T.C.,” you say, attempting to offer comfort, “isn’t that literary sex writing you’re now deprived of…bad?”
Well…sometimes.
And sometimes not.
Literature and sex are matters of highly personal taste. Put them together, and what one reader finds abysmal might leave another wondering where she can find the rest of the book.
So put me on the record: I’ve quite enjoyed some of the entries to the Bad Sex in Fiction Awards.
Not the Morrisey one with the barrel-rolling breasts, of course. But…well, here’s the entire 48-minute episode of Smutty Storytelling where my cohost Betina Cipher and I discovered many (not all!) of the samples actually worked for us.
[In the interests of full disclosure, I must confess: when I tracked down the full books the nominated entries came from, I often enjoyed the books…but not as much, or in the same way, as the sex snippets seemed to promise. In fact, some of the sex turned out disappointing or boring in context. I had imagined surrounding erotic scenes for the excerpts, but it turned out the authors’ imaginations were rather different from mine.]
And on the other hand, perhaps I should be glad to see this “Award” stymied for a year. Because I don’t share its goal–“to draw attention to the crude, tasteless, often perfunctory use of redundant passages of sexual description in the modern novel, and to discourage it.”
That last, bolded part in particular.
Don’t get me wrong, I hate tasteless sex. But one person’s tasteless is, well, very much to another’s taste. I’ve read and rejected what must easily be over a hundred “crude” sex scenes for the New Smut Project’s anthologies. And yet I’m sure some people might find my own writing crude, what with its frank talk of nipples and cunts and asses and people moaning as things are done to any of the preceding.
While I’ve cringed at my share of Bad Sex nominees, having read some of the entire books I don’t know if those sex scenes could justly be called perfunctory, and whatever their problems are, I really don’t think they’re “redundant.” The problem is often too much originality rather than too little. I’m wary overall of the idea that sex is gratuitous to write about.
And is that even the goal of the Bad Sex in Fiction Awards? Confusion abounds–“honored” nominee Susan Choi wondered: “Is the award for bad sex writing? For good writing about bad sex? For making good people feel bad about sex? I can’t help but think it might widen my audience.”
Her interviewer continues: “She notes that the main difficulty of writing about sex ‘is the way people react to the fact that you’ve done so!’ “
Well said. For the record, without knowing it was nominated, I read Choi’s novel–My Education–and loved it. Especially the sex parts. Raven Leilani, author of the recent and widely acclaimed Luster and no slouch herself in the good writing department, agrees, considering it some of the best sex she’s ever read.
(It may not be tangential that Choi’s heroine is a bisexual woman, and her apparently controversial sex scenes involve raw, sticky, uninhibited expressions of lust with another woman. Uncomfortable to some? I’m certain. But not in a way that makes it bad.)
We can’t control people’s reactions to the sex we write, or to the fact that we write about sex at all. Though it’s probably predictable that “bulbous salutation”s, competitive vaginas, billiard-rack testes, and the word “cum” will cause cringing. For that matter, as the article linked in the previous sentence also observes, one of the reactions, post-cringe, may be to go out and write about sex better–the New Smut Project grew out of a series of conversations with my co-editor Alex Freeman that began with us reading and analyzing that year’s crop of Bad Sex nominees.
We observed two failure modes that might be instructive:
First, some of the sex involved treating one partner (usually the woman) like a blow-up doll, or at the very least as some obviously fictional construct. When Jonathan Grimwood wrote of how his narrator’s “fingers found both vineyards” and meditates on the respective vintages of the partner’s, ah, fore and aft passages, the fact that the lady’s reaction isn’t given (finding longer excerpts, I see she does eventually ‘shiver’ and ‘giggle with embarrassment’) create the bizarre mental image of her holding still for several sentences, patiently waiting out the analysis. It exacerbates the weirdness of the scene. And I mean, I’ve always found it surreal how women get forgotten in sex scenes. My partner observed how people will try to “Do sex at you” rather than “with you” and, yeah. Doing sex at someone is ridiculous. And the 2017 winner, which has a woman’s “face and vagina competing for my attention,” giving parts of her body more intention and autonomy than she has herself, is likewise–as the kids say–cringe.
On the flip side, some of the Bad Sex nominees–Susan Choi, as I mentioned, and I would argue Erri DeLuca as well–seemed to earn their “recognition” by writing a woman as too active in sex. To mainstream thinking, this is alien. DeLuca’s inexperienced young hero’s mindset is accurately depicted and, I’ll be frank, as a dominant woman I found his honest vulnerability and awe as his partner led the action to be quite, quite pleasant to read.
Given these patterns, maybe the ultimate lesson of these awards is what Julian Gough reports seeing on Twitter: “I’m never having sex with a straight man again.”
But no, that’s defeatist. I’d be the last to deny issues in many straight men’s sex game, but when DeLuca writes a (presumably straight?) man trying something different, he gets penalized too. And I don’t agree with the Tweeters that Gough needs to go on some kind of register. I find his case quite moving as he considers:
“So why do we write sex when we know it is risky? Because leaving sex out of fiction falsifies our picture of humanity. If fiction can’t address life’s most difficult, complex and interesting areas, then why write or read it?
“This is why I find the Bad sex award, at this point in its history, in bad faith. Its basic premise – that authors are adding unnecessary and lazy sex to increase sales – is not just wrong, it’s the reverse of the truth. The award very deliberately avoids shortlisting actual pornography or erotica and instead targets authors who are trying to be honest about desire and sex, however distasteful the results may be. It deliberately and successfully encourages the worst, and dumbest, misreading of fiction; the conflating of authors with their characters in order to publicly shame them.”
Again, well said! (It makes one wonder why these nominees of supposedly “bad sex” are so eloquent when they write about sex in fiction.) And I am an author of actual erotica, one who believes erotica is also a place to be honest about desire–while certainly not meaning all desires I depict are my own or that the characters are myself playing dress-up. Sexuality, sensuality, pleasure are part of our humanity (including ace people, whose capacity for intimacy and pleasure may be expressed in other ways–and who not infrequently, in my experience, enjoy reading erotic fiction). Erotica engages with and honors this fact.
And because these things called “sex” are so close to our humanity, it seems even more important to write sex well.
But to bring well-written sex into fiction, you must run the risk of receiving a Bad Sex in Fiction Award.
Albeit not this year.
My final disappointment related to this award is that I’ve never been able to see its trophy, of which the Wikipedia description–“a ‘semi-abstract trophy representing sex in the 1950s’, depicting a naked woman draped over an open book”–tantalizes.
Oh, well. For now, I have some good sex to read and write about. I hope you have the same!