In Defence of Bad Sex
Source: New Statesman
Tuesday, November 26, 2013
The Bad Sex Awards are not as exciting as they sound. Personally, I rather like the idea of a ceremony at which the great and good can be rewarded for selfless works with the talentless fumble or sub-standard quickie of their choice. But the Literary Review’s annual competition for the worst piece of erotic writing in fiction, whose 20th shortlist has just been announced, is something altogether more priggish. Pleasant as it is to point and laugh at other people’s intimate fantasies, there’s something about this spot on the critics’ calendar that makes the skin creep – and it’s not just the eye-watering descriptions of what two people can get up to with one piece of ripe French cheese.
It’s a very British censoriousness, this sort of smut-shaming. The Bad Sex Awards were established in 1993 “to draw attention to the crude, badly written, often perfunctory use of redundant passages of sexual description in the modern novel, and to discourage it”. There are a number of reasons why the whole thing makes me queasy.
First, it’s so dated. Scanning through the episodes of hay-twitching and “morphinergic mechanisms splutter[ing] into life,” in this year’s crop of entries, I got the urge to take the editorial staff of the Literary Review by the hands and introduce them, as gently as possible, to the internet. There, on fan fiction sites and messageboards whose printed pages would fill whole libraries, they will find as much weird and woeful erotic writing as their fussy little minds can imagine.
Why would I want to sneer at the indelicate phrasing of another Hampstead duvet novel when I can open my laptop and access reams of smutty stories – some of which, like EL James’s Fifty Shades of Grey, end up as paperback bestsellers –whose anatomical detail is that much more speculative?
Secondly, many of the passages of “bad sex” selected for public mockery are, in fact, rather well-written descriptions of sex that happens to be fumbly and awkward. In real life, that’s what a lot of sex tends to be, especially at major plot points.
Here are some of the things that occur in the shortlisted “bad sex” passages: two young people worry if God will judge them for bunking up. A man is overwhelmed by sensation during intercourse and starts having weird minor hallucinations. A woman attempts awkward dirty talk involving her own breasts.
All of these are things that actually happen, and it behooves us to imagine that art and literature can describe the many worlds of human lust, pain and emotion that do not take place in soft focus, with billowing white sheets and smooth jazz playing in the background.
I would like to put in a word for wonky sex writing, both as art and instruction. I don’t know about you but I rarely find passages of sexual description “redundant” in otherwise bloodless books. In fact, a surprising number of the modern novels in my possession happen to fall open at redundant passages of sexual description, almost as if those pages have been read and reread just to check how perfunctory they are – especially the volumes I owned as a randy, bookish teenager. So, I’d like to thank all of those novelists and sleazy science-fiction writers who braved a turn in the critical stocks to share their visions with me and my fellow lonely nerds.
More than half a century since the end of the Chatterley ban, “high” culture still reaches for its smelling salts at the least whiff of sauce. The squeamish sensibilities that produce the Bad Sex Awards have, in common with commercially produced pornography, the assumption that there is an objective scale by which the goodness or badness of sex may be judged, and a standard script from which one ought not to deviate.
The reality, of course, is that one person’s mediocre, embarrassing shag is another person’s idea of bliss on a stick – but you only get to find that out after a few gauche encounters with other people’s “morphinergic mechanisms”.
Priggishness may yet do to literature what pornography has done to cinema – namely, to widen the gap between sexual content and everything else. Over the past decade, as racy videos have become freely available online, mainstream movies have become substantially less explicit. An 18 rating is no longer the draw it once was. Nobody needs to go to the cinema to see a pair of breasts any more and it is more lucrative for most directors to keep it chaste for a lower age-rating. The result is an increasing divide between sex and the rest of culture: airbrushed limbs and choreographed grinding are permissible but the truly explicit stuff must be kept out of the mainstream, banished to its own shady realm where we can access it with the proper degree of shame and self-hatred.
This is how we arrive at a situation where, as has been exhaustively observed, boys and girls are learning about sexuality from violent, repetitive misogynist porn and nowhere else. Ignorance and censoriousness breed violence and suffering. They prevent us from talking about danger and desire with anything like honesty; they replace learning and creativity with a semi-secret sexual script that we wall off from the rest of society so that it grows up weird and stilted.
The truth is that bad sex is not nipple slips and weird cheese scenes. It’s not clunky metaphor made clumsy flesh. Bad sex is ignorance, abuse and trauma. Bad sex is what happens when we believe that talking about sex is “redundant” and writing about it is “crude”. It’s what happens when sexuality becomes a shameful, angry place at the forbidden centre of culture, where all the angst and hate and gendered pain is enacted on the bodies of others. Ritual humiliation and fear of humiliation are still part of the modern erotic script – and that’s what makes really bad sex.
Laurie Penny is a contributing editor of the New Statesman.
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