Donald Clarke: Bad Sex Award – the agony and the ecstasy

Don't you hate people who go on about how much sexier films and books were when their creators were still forbidden from being sexy? You know how the argument goes: "Grace Kelly looking sideways at Jimmy Stewart does more for me than all this horrible humping and pumping in these dreadful modern films. The promiscuous shell-collecting in Jane Austen really gets my juices flowing." And so on.

Such statements are often preceded by the disingenuous phrase, "I'm no prude, but . . . " File that with the equally untrustworthy "I'm no racist, but . . . "

I probably am a prude, so I’m allowed to suggest there may be something in this creaky argument.

Which brings us to the Bad Sex Award. Since 1993, the Literary Review has drawn up a shortlist of the queasiest descriptions of lubricious recreation. Expect dire euphemisms such as "veined python", "moist purse" and "lubricious recreation". Previous holders of the title have included AA Gill, Norman Mailer and Ben Okri.

Spoilt for targets

It goes without saying that Morrissey is among this year’s finalists.

List of the Lost

, the unhappy Mancunian’s debut novel,

[ received the worst reviews ever handed out to a novel that failed to include incitement to genocide ]

or explanations of how to make a dirty bomb.

Many critics, spoilt for targets, failed to find space for commentary on his half-mast eroticism. The former Smiths vocalist writes of one character’s “bulbous salutation extenuating his excitement as it whacked and smacked its way into every muscle of Eliza’s body except for the otherwise central zone”. The “bulbous salutation” is bad enough. But the “otherwise central zone” is beyond baffling.

Erica Jong – author of Fear of Flying – also made it onto the starting grid. We won't quote the highlighted excerpt in a family newspaper, but we can tell you it features less evasive language than that used by the former Smith. George Pelecanos, screenwriter for The Wire, and Tomas Espedal, a distinguished Norwegian novelist, will be among those hoping not to convert a nomination into a win.

The organisers wryly noted that they had briefly considered the British prime minster's alleged pig-fancying in Michael Ashcroft and Isabel Oakeshott's Call Me Dave, but had ruled the passage ineligible. "That assertion was so flimsily corroborated as to resemble fiction," the judges said. "But, regrettably, the biographers displayed insufficient literary brio to merit serious consideration."

Continental types almost certainly regard the Bad Sex Award as a very English business. A nation raised on overdone vegetables and ritual caning plays out its habitual sexual repression in print. Something like that. It is, nonetheless, worth wondering why there isn’t a Bad Violence Award or a Bad Food Prize.

The truth is almost all writing about sex seems "bad" when taken out of context; indeed, most still feels that way when encountered in its proper place. Few acknowledged classics fail to falter when limbs become damply entangled. Mervyn Griffith-Jones, prosecutor in the Lady Chatterley trial, received much opprobrium for his dusty language, but I really wouldn't want my wife or servants to read that stuff about "the springing of his seed in her" or "curve of her crouching loins".

There seems no happy balance in writing about sex. The prose is either too clinical (medical terms for body parts) or too archly poetic (“swelling shoots of reified desire” and so forth). Too often, hitherto disciplined language breaks down into a panicked striving for effect.

Much the same is true of cinema. Think of those sequences in which hands clutch silk sheets while soft-jazz saxophones wail sleazy accompaniment. There is an extraordinary amount of explicit sex in Gaspar Noé's Love, released this week, but once the novelty wears off, it becomes only marginally less ludicrous than that in the average high-end soap opera.

Weird solemnity

The problem is not with the writers or film-makers; it is with the readers and viewers. As Mr Spock demonstrated in

Amok Time

, a classic episode of

Star Trek

, nothing turns rational beings into lunatics and idiots

[ like the suggestion of sexual congress ]

. Think back to that time in school when the unfortunate science teacher had to address “human reproduction”. Rather than collapsing into giggles, most students embraced a weird solemnity as they attempted to seem serious and mature.

Forget it. However hard you try, your audience will turn a bit funny when they happen upon your carefully wrought sex scenes. Consider a scandalous line from Radclyffe Hall's novel The Well of Loneliness. "And that night they were not parted." Now there's some good writing about sex.