Bad Sex with Bad Writers by Nerve.com
You wouldn’t think it would be difficult to write humorously about bad sex, but you’d be wrong. I mean, I expected to read about truly bad, possibly even horrifying sexual encounters, given the title of Nerve.com‘s book, Bad Sex: We Did It, So You Won’t Have To. Even so, I have to wonder why the editors of this accomplished sex website couldn’t have dug up a few more decent writers, or at least people who have some sense of how to write a short story.
If you want funny stories about good sex gone wrong, this isn’t the place to find them. Moving from harmless tales of college naïveté towards the ultimate destination of self-love (is this really the logical ending point for a collection of stories about bad sex?), the anthology’s authors describe fantasies both denied and destroyed, the horrors of infidelity, and many inappropriate partners. Some of the selections chalk the bad sex up to overuse of drugs and/or alcohol, but at least some of the writers imply that a portion of the blame for these tales of woe lies on their own shoulders.
Some of the tales, like Henry Sutton’s “Treading Water in the Mediterranean,” seem particularly pointless. What is the bad sex we are meant to empathize with? Sure, the description of Sutton’s then-girlfriend as being slathered in both mosquito repellant and sunscreen strikes us as unappetizing, but is the sex only bad because of that? In this story, the sex itself doesn’t seem bad at all; instead, it’s the relationship that fails to live up to expectations—not at all what we perverts are looking for! While the story does fall under the section titled “Sexual Ambivalence,” one must wonder why this designation would even be included in a bad sex anthology that is mysteriously lacking in stories that result in bodily injury and/or trips to the hospital.
And isn’t that, after all, what we really want from a book like this? Will you ever recover from having your penis or vagina monstrously manhandled by an inexperienced lover? How long did it take the doctor to remove the foreign object from your rectum? These are the types of questions the book should have at least attempted to address, but instead it relies on dull themes of shame, self-loathing and drug addiction in an attempt to warn readers away from engaging in so-called bad sex.
We did it, so you don’t have to? More like “we did it, and nobody cares.” If these are meant to be cautionary tales for a new generation of sexual athletes and uninhibited young adults, there’s something seriously askew in Nerve’s conception of what we young adults are looking for in our sexual relationships. It’s not that these stories are particularly traumatizing. It’s more that, ultimately, the reader doesn’t sympathize with these writers, and doesn’t feel compelled to acknowledge their supposed embarrassment or guilt over these encounters. Instead, we’re left wondering where the humour is in these situations, and why we should care that they’ve happened to a bunch of neurotic New Yorkers.
For more sex books from Nerve.com, check out Chronicle Books.
Comments
By Amelia Gray on May 17th, 2010 at 11:59 pm
Drug Addiction will not only ruin your body but it would also mess up your life.:*’