The British know their sex... which is why they're also qualified to judge the 2008 Bad Sex in Fiction Awards. And this ain't "bad sex" that appears "in fiction." It's bad sex writing from some of the great novels of the year, including John Updike's Witches of Eastwick sequel...
Updike takes the year's Lifetime Achievement Award, while the year's top honoree is Rachel Johnson, sister of London Mayor Boris (what's up with these conservatives, like Bill O'Reilly and Scooter Libby, not knowing how to write sex? Wait, nevermind, we know the answer.)
Based on a cursory search of these books for sex scenes, we found this one from Updike's latest:
She said nothing then, her lovely mouth otherwise engaged, until he
came, all over her face. She had gagged, and moved him outside her
lips, rubbing his spurting glans across her cheeks and chin. God, she was antique, but here they were. Her face gleamed
with his jism in the spotty light of the motel room, there on the far
end of East Beach, within sound of the sea.
In a Guardian interview, Johnson is a good sport, while the article's author points out some passages that might have caught the committee's attention:
Johnson was singled out for her novel's slew of animal metaphors,
including comparing her male protagonist's "light fingers" to "a moth
caught inside a lampshade", and his tongue to "a cat lapping up a dish
of cream so as not to miss a single drop". Literary Review deputy
editor Tom Fleming was also disturbed by the heroine's "grab, to put
him, now angrily slapping against both our bellies, inside".
Just for laughs, here's the 2007 winner, by our good buddy, now deceased, Norman Mailer:
'Are you alright?' she cried out as he lay beside her, his breath going
in and out with a rasp that sounded as terrible as the last winds of
their lost children.
'All right. Yes. No,' he said. Then she was on
him. She did not know if this would resuscitate him or end him, but the
same spite, sharp as a needle, that had come to her after Fanni's death
was in her again. Fanni had told her once what to do. So Klara turned
head to foot, and put her most unmentionable part down on his
hard-breathing nose and mouth, and took his old battering ram into her
lips. Uncle was now as soft as a coil of excrement. She sucked on him
nonetheless with an avidity that could come only from the Evil One -
that she knew. From there, the impulse had come. So now they both had
their heads at the wrong end, and the Evil One was there. He had never
been so close before.
The Hound began to come to life. Right in her
mouth. it surprised her. Alois had been so limp. But now he was a man
again! His mouth lathered with her sap, he turned around and embraced
her face with all the passion of his own lips and face, ready at last
to grind into her with the Hound, drive it into her piety.
It's enough to turn you off having sex, let alone just reading about it.
Related:
