Dirty, Sexy Words

John Updike, writing awful sex scenes since 1968 (photo courtesy of NHPR)

As I write this column, NaNoWriMo is in its final countdown and November novelists everywhere are scrambling to complete their 50,000 words and pass the finish line by midnight on the 30th. The result of this achievement may mean only that they’ve proven to themselves that intense creative output can be achieved in a short period of time, but the really important thing to be aware of is this: Literally thousands of sex scenes have been written this month in order to boost these novelists’ word counts.

Personally, I think I’ve written about five different sex scenes in this year’s novel – fewer than usual, but I tend to think of this as cheating. I mean, if you write about sex for a living, isn’t it more noble a goal not to write sex scenes? Or, if not noble, then at least more difficult?

For me, sex scenes are the easy part of writing. For whatever reason, dirty descriptions just seem to flow the same way I imagine my characters lubing up partners’ cocks or twiddling their twats. It may not always be brilliant prose (especially since most of my sex scenes have been written in the heat of passion, turning me on and then being re-read as I jerk myself off), but it’s simple, straightforward writing. It’s easy to fill a page when you’re describing something that comes naturally.

So when I discovered that a British publication called the Literary Review awards a yearly prize called Bad Sex in Fiction, I wasn’t really surprised. After all, there’s plenty of bad erotica out there, and it’s not as though prominent authors are exempt. In fact, many otherwise brilliant writers seem to stumble through sex scenes, making you wish they’d just left them out entirely. Bad sex scenes are nothing like bad sex; indeed, sometimes they are much more painful.

This year’s winner is Rachel Johnson, who was nominated for scenes from her recently novel, entitled Shire Hell. When asked about this dubious honour, Johnson told The Guardian that she was “not feeling remotely grumpy about it,” and in fact noted that any attention paid to her work was, in her opinion, good publicity.

So what the heck did she write about sex to win an award for bad writing?! According to The Guardian, she was “singled out for her novel’s slew of animal metaphors” that included comparisons of fingers to moths and tongues to cats slurping back cream. Apparently, however, the most disturbing image was Johnson’s decision to have the heroine “grab [a man's penis], to put him, now angrily slapping against both [their] bellies, inside.”

To be quite honest, this image doesn’t live up to the shock value I was imagining. Indeed, Lifetime Achievement Award-winner John Updike’s passage from his recent book, The Widows of Eastwick, is far more graphic. Here is a selection:

“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.”

Ick. Not only am I now picturing an old, balding, fat Jack Nicholson cumming on Cher’s plastic face, but I’m also shuddering over the way men seem to view blowjobs in general. Nice work, Updike.

The ironic thing is that although there is an award for bad sex writing, there are actually no awards in existence for good sex writing (at least not in the realm of fiction), although the Times’ writer Belle de Jour recently took a stab at naming her own créme de la créme. On the list were a few of the usual suspects (Anaïs Nin, Vladimir Nabokov, John Donne), as well as a few unusual selections like Jean Auel’s Clan of the Cave Bear and Reverend C. A. Johns’ 1905 biology textbook Flowers of the Field.

Perhaps most notably absent from her list are the erotic poetry and song lyrics of Leonard Cohen. After all, what discerning woman can resist a few lines from I’m Your Man?

In addition to these selections, I’d also add a few passages I’ve found erotic, despite – or perhaps because of – their inclusion in generally non-erotic writing. Rawi Hage’s IMPAC Award-winning novel Cockroach, for instance, offers this tantalizing line suggesting dirty deeds to come: “I stole some of his letters, thinking that later I would sit on my bed and smoke a joint and read his love life and I would get even higher with the smell of ink and the faint scent of her fingers’ residue in every line.”

Another unexpectedly erotic bit I happen to adore is much too long to quote, but suffice it to say that I doubt Henry Rollins ends up on most women’s list of sexy writing. After all, this is the guy who wrote books called Solipsist and Pissing in the Gene Pool.

In any event, erotic writing is everywhere out there – I encourage you all to send me snippets of the fiction you’ve found that turns your crank. Nominations for the Best Sex Awards can be sent to me at lroberts [at] hour.ca.