Previous winners of the Bad Sex in Fiction Award have included A.A. Gill, Giles Coren, Norman Mailer, and Morrissey.
The aim of the awards, hosted by The Literary Review, is to highlight ‘crude, tasteless, often perfunctory use of redundant passages of sexual description in the modern novel, and to discourage it’.
In our eyes, however, it is simply to have a good old laugh at the hilarious ways some people describe the sexual experience.
This year, the awards have made history, as two authors have been the lucky winners of the prize, for their separate – but equally cringe-inducing – sex scenes.
Didier Decoin was one of those winners, his book The Office of Gardens and Pond, which includes the howler:
Katsuro moaned as a bulge formed beneath the material of his kimono, a bulge that Miyuki seized, kneaded, massaged, squashed and crushed.
With the fondling, Katsuro’s penis and testicles became one single mound that rolled around beneath the grip of her hand. Miyuki felt as though she was manipulating a small monkey that was curling up its paws.
The other recipient was British novelist John Harvey and his novel Pax. Here’s a little snippet of his sexual imaginings:
She was burning hot and the heat was in him. He looked down on her perfect black slenderness. Her eyes were ravenous. Like his own they were fire and desire.
More than torrid, more than tropical: they too were riding the Equator. They embraced as if with violent holding they could weld the two of them one.
The judges said of the prizewinners: ‘We tried voting, but it didn’t work. We tried again. Ultimately there was no separating the winners. Faced with two unpalatable contenders, we found ourselves unable to choose between them. We believe the British public will recognise our plight.’
They weren’t the only writers to be panned by the Literary Review’s team of judges.
Among the other shortlisted books were The River Capture by Mary Costello, with this sentence highlighted:
He clung to her, crying, and then made love to her and went far inside her and she begged him to go deeper and, no longer afraid of injuring her, he went deep in mind and body, among crowded organ cavities, past the contours of her lungs and liver, and, shimmying past her heart, he felt her perfection.
City of Girls by Elizabeth Gilbert was shortlisted for this:
Then I screamed as though I were being run over by a train, and that long arm of his was reaching up again to palm my mouth, and I bit into his hand the way a wounded soldier bites on a bullet.
As was Dominic Smith’s The Electric Hotel for the following sentence:
The actual lovemaking was a series of cryptic clues and concealed pleasures. A sensual treasure hunt. She asked for something, then changed her mind. He made adjustments and calibrations, awaited further instruction.
If authors are to believed, sex is simply biting each other, mashing into each other’s genitals with no spatial awareness whatsoever, and gyrating all over each other’s souls until you both orgasm and fall in love at the same time.
Perhaps they’d be better off being realistic about the queefs, creaky beds, and quickies in silence so next door don’t hear through the paper-thin walls.
But that wouldn’t have much poetry to it at all, would it?
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source https://metro.co.uk/2019/12/03/bad-sex-fiction-award-announced-sex-scenes-incredibly-cringeworthy-11260982/
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