It sells itself as "Britain’s most dreaded literary prize”: every winter the London-based Literary Review’s Bad Sex Award is conferred upon the author who is deemed to have penned the worst sex scene of the past year. The aim of the prize – established by the magazine’s former editor, Auberon Waugh, in 1993 – is 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.” I’m sure I’m not the first to point out how quintessentially English this accolade is: on the one hand it politely but firmly tows the, "No sex, please, we’re British,” line; while also indulging the more lascivious side of our national sexual character. This is displayed in the spirit of the awards’ annual party, where shortlisted passages are performed aloud to much hilarity.
The Literary Review might claim it wants to do away with superfluous explicit descriptions but as we all know, sex sells. You’ve only got to look at the huge popularity of EL James’ Fifty Shades of Grey trilogy, which has been translated into 51 languages and sold more than 100 million copies worldwide since the first volume was published in 2011 – to see the proof. But this phenomenon is hardly new. Following the now infamous Lady Chatterley’s Lover trial in 1960, DH Lawrence’s publishers Penguin sold an incredible three million copies of the previously banned book in a mere three months.
As was the case with many books banned in the UK, copies of Lady Chatterley’s Lover had been printed on the continent, out of reach of British prudery. Discerning English readers with the necessary means could travel to Paris to purchase the works of taboo authors such as Henry Miller, James Joyce, Vladimir Nabokov and Radclyffe Hall, copies of whose lesbian classic The Well of Loneliness were burnt following its obscenity trial in 1928. The decidedly chaste nod to the fact that the female lovers went to bed together – "that night they were not divided” – incited particular outrage in court.
Country matters
Censorship of sexual content was an accepted part of the British literary landscape in the early half of the 20th Century. Evelyn Waugh’s 1930 novel Vile Bodies, for example, begins with the anti-hero Adam’s return to England from France. When asked whether he has anything to declare, Adam innocently explains that his suitcase holds nothing but old clothes and books. "Books, eh?” replies the Customs’ man suspiciously. "And what sort of books, may I ask?”:
One by one he took the books out and piled them on the counter. A copy of Dante excited his especial disgust. "French, eh?" he said. "I guessed as much, and pretty dirty, too, I shouldn’t wonder. Now just you wait while I look up these here books" – how he said it! – "in my list. Particularly against books the Home Secretary is. If we can’t stamp out literature in the country, we can at least stop its being brought in from outside."
France, of course, has long had a reputation for its erotic literature. Titillating Gallic titles include Georges Bataille’s Story of the Eye (1928); Pauline Réage’s Story of O (1954); the works of Anaïs Nin; Baise-Moi by Virginie Despentes (1999); and most recently, Millet’s autobiographical The Sexual Life of Catherine M (2002). Henry Miller might have been an American national, but his novel Tropic of Cancer (1934) and other sexually explicit writings found publication in France long before the United States.
The French, it is widely acknowledged, exude a glamorous sexuality that the rest of us can only dream about, and the same can be said of their writing. Baise-Moi – the tale of two female friends on a murder and sex rampage, which is often described as a pornographic version of Thelma and Louise – heralded a new wave of ultra-graphic sex writing that suited the rise of third wave feminism. By comparison, Charlotte Roche’s 2008 sexually explicit novel Feuchtgebiele (later translated into English as Wetlands), summed up what one might call a more Germanic – ie frank and uninhibited – attitude to bodily functions.
"I wanted to write about the ugly parts of the human body… I created a heroine that has a totally creative attitude towards her body – someone who has never even heard that women are supposedly smelly between their legs. A real free spirit,” Roche told the New York Times in an interview in 2009, in which the interviewer, paraphrasing Roche, describes Wetlands as "a feminist manifesto about society’s oppressive standards of female beauty and hygiene, a new literature of female empowerment.”
Women on top?
British authors such as Helen Walsh, Zoe Pilger and Emma Jane Unsworth have also written about modern, sexually adventurous women. Walsh’s first novel Brass (2004) was a no-holds-barred female-led drug-fuelled sex adventure that featured a girl-on-girl rape scene, and her most recent novel The Lemon Grove is the story of a 40-something married mother’s affair with her teenage daughter’s boyfriend – a memorable sex scene featuring foreplay involving a fridge full of ham saw her nominated for this year’s Bad Sex Award. This year also saw both Pilger and Unsworth publish their own contemporary Brass-esque novels featuring 20-something protagonists in Eat My Heart Out and Animals respectively.
It seems near impossible to be a woman writing about sex without having some kind of feminist agenda foisted on your work. Perhaps this is because much sex writing has ridden the wave of the sexual revolution, often reflecting the political climate of the time. In 1973, the American author Erica Jong published her semi-autobiographical novel Fear of Flying, becoming something of an icon for second wave feminists with her frank portrayal of female sexual desire and fantasy of the "zipless fuck”: not just a perfect sexual encounter, but, more importantly, one "free of ulterior motives.”
The late ’70s and early ’80s saw the rise of the "bonkbuster” as a surge of shoulder pad and stiletto-wearing women stormed the boardroom – and the bedroom. For many, Shirley Conran’s Lace (1982) defined the era, but as she tells BBC Culture, the book began life as a sex manual. "I thought a book was needed for teenage girls,” she explains. "I can’t tell you what the ignorance was at that time about sex. The average Englishman thought that the clitoris was a Greek hotel, and women were too shy, or they felt too intimidated or too inferior to tell a man what they wanted in bed.”
What finally convinced her to write the novel was an interview she conducted with a female "sex doctor superb” who bafflingly claimed that the clitoris was a conduit for urine. "If this was what the top people were saying – a woman who’s supposed to be an authority – I thought I’d better start at the bottom.” And so began 18 months of interviewing real women about the details of their sex lives – something one didn’t discuss with one’s girlfriends, let alone strangers. Given that all the sex scenes in Lace are thus based on real-life encounters, she takes issue with me when I describe the novel as "raunchy”. "I think it’s very straightforward,” she argues.
Male authors are "desperately self-conscious and so no good at writing about sex,” Conran insists when I ask her why she thinks female writers seem to get more attention than their male counterparts when it comes to sexually explicit prose. American author Nicholson Baker is perhaps the exception who proves the rule, though. He’s a man more than happy to describe his writing as "raunchy” – see his 2011 collection of interlinked stories House of Holes: A Book of Raunch, set in an adults-only fantasy theme park full of specially designed pleasure-giving amusement rides.
This vision pretty much sums up his attitude to erotica: "The old rule of literary erotica was that it had to be dark and unhappy, to show that it wasn’t porn – no, thank you,” he tells me. "Make it weird, make it fun, make it naked.” And indeed, Baker’s erotica is witty and playful, but also always thoughtful.
"When I wrote Vox [his 1992 novel about phone sex],” he explains, "I was conscious of the desire to open up the literary scene and allow the characters room to be uncertain and hopeful and, if possible, honest about their foibles. How can you get two people to tell the truth about their daily lives while they’re having sex? Have them talk on the phone.”
The book begins with the now much-overused line, "What are you wearing?” – an addition to the language of seduction he’s rather proud to have popularised. But what’s it like to actually sit down and write about sex; to put something in words that we’re taught to mostly keep private? "When I’m writing a sex scene,” he explains, "I can’t imagine why anyone would want to write about anything else. Sex is huge. Nudity is amazing. That’s the fundamental fact, and the joy is trying to find some new way of curving words so that they cling to the crotch of life.”
‘Real sex’
Monique Roffey, the award-winning fiction writer who also penned a mid-life sex memoir, With the Kisses of His Mouth (2011), expresses a similar sentiment. "Writing a sex scene is like writing any other scene” she tells me. "Close your eyes, visualise. Open your eyes. Write down what’s going on. Who put what where. To write from what you really know is key. I think sex scenes which fail are often ones written from naïve and unfulfilled erotic dreams or a kind of vanilla sex soap opera a writer may have in his or her head.”
Real sex seems to be the key here. "Titillating porno sex isn’t at all interesting to me,” Roffey continues. "I want to read something that will move, mesmerise and maybe even arouse me, make me think, make me sad or happy... A sex scene should be integral to the bigger narrative of any novel. I am interested in sex because it is a big part of the human condition. I want to read sex I recognise, tender, awkward, sexy, weird sex.”
Sex taken out of context is embarrassing and farcical, often unbelievable. This is one of the complaints often voiced about pornography: the absence of narrative. Thus each and every one of the sex scenes read out loud at the Bad Sex Award each year is a contender for the prize, but put them in the context of the larger story being told and the tone changes completely. That the Brits have gone from banning books for their explicit content to merely ridiculing them can surely be seen as progress though; something of a happy ending, even.
(BBC)
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