Is it only gay men who understand the concept of So Bad It’s Good?

Take the Literary Review, a small, upper-class British journal that gives out what it calls “the most dreaded award in literature” — the Bad Sex in Fiction prize.

Each year the current crop of first-rate novels are scanned, offending passages that make the short list are published in the magazine, and then at a ceremony, the winner is announced.

A celebrity hands out the award — Mick Jagger, Sting and the particularly appropriate Courtney Love have all taken turns at the podium — and, in keeping with the spirit of the thing, the trophy is a kitschy objet d’art that in its vague, abstract way resembles a couple, as they say, “in congress.” They being the Literary Lions of Great Britain’s Critical Establishment — or at least the ones plying their trade at the Literary Review.

Everyone has a good laugh at the expense of the author, who, of course, being a swell guy or gal, shows up (only Tom Wolfe refused). The designated victim gives an archly witty speech to show he is not as bad as all that and then chuckles along with the backstabbing quips like an amiable but, alas, drooling hunchback of Notre Dame being carried through the streets as the King of the Idiots. Sharp elbows are everywhere in evidence as hilarity cascades through the peanut gallery.

All in fun then — except, oddly, not to the Literary Review. Behind the cozy smugness of the ceremony, the journal seems quite taken with its role as fiction censor. One suspects that scores are being settled. The stated reason for giving the prize — “To draw attention to the crude, tasteless, often perfunctory use of redundant passages of sexual description in the modern novel, and to discourage it.” — has about it the sound of Orwell’s “boot stamping down on a human face forever,” his master metaphor in 1984.

What then is actually going on here? That was the question the New York Times asked when it first covered the ceremony in 1998. Was the award, they wondered, “an honest attempt to root out bad writing?”:

Or an indulgence of the well-known upper-class English distaste for excess in any form — the cast of mind that finds naked emotion, well, you know, embarrassing?

It is a fact of English journalism that the well-born, conservative, moral right wing has the best prose style. The Daily Telegraph and The Spectator, the organs of the press in which [the editor Auberon Waugh, son of famed Brideshead Revisited author, Evelyn Waugh] regularly displays his formidable ironic gifts, are not the places to find much enthusiasm for feminism, single motherhood, gay rights or anybody of the psychotherapeutic persuasion.

(We need only remind our readers that Brideshead Revisited has a gay subplot and that Evelyn Waugh based much of it on his own homosexual liaisons at Oxford. Also, the novelist could whip out a passage of purple prose himself, most memorably when recounting the steamy “bliss” that could be found between “narrow loins.” Strange son, then, for such a light-in-the-wingtips father.)

To everyone except the Literary Review staff, the annual prize ceremony seems no more than an excuse for an open bar and some drive-by snobbery on the order of My Good Taste Can Beat Up Your Good Taste.

The fact is, and everyone except the Literary Review seems to know this, the award itself is a pious fraud:

For starters, truly bad writing — the kind worthy of the name — could never rise to the level of winning any sort of prize. Bad writing is thoroughly dull and anonymous. It is distinguished by nothing. It is odorless, colorless, invisible. And bad sex writing is especially empty, full of shopworn profanities that no longer register as anything but lame attempts at hotness, like the gauche foreigners in checkered pants that peopled the Wild and Crazy Guy skits on Saturday Night Live.

Standards of excellence, no matter how subversive, manage to apply. Each year, as it turns out, the award goes to a sex description that is not simply awful but magnificently so. In other words, so bad it’s good — which is to say, not bad at all, but wonderful, marvelous: A fabulous backfire.

Something — attention Literary Review jury members — to be treasured, not scorned.

Here for, instance, is our favorite of this year’s bad-sex candidates. (It didn’t win, unfortunately; the award was given out just a few hours ago, on November 27, to the late Norman Mailer.) The passage comes from a high-brow bit of Sci-Fi by Jeanette Winterson called The Stone Gods:

Why am I embarrassed about taking off my clothes in front of a robot? I pull the dress over my head like a schoolgirl, untie my hair, and sit down. She is smiling, just a little bit, as though she knows her effect.

To calm myself down and appear in control I reverse the problem. “Spike, you’re a robot, but why are you such a drop-dead gorgeous robot? I mean, is it necessary to be the most sophisticated machine ever built and to look like a movie star?”

She answers simply: “They thought I would be good for the boys on the mission.”

“So you had sex with spacemen for three years?”

“Yes. I used up three silicon-lined vaginas.”

Second runner up, Gary Shteyngart for Absurdistan:

Her vagina was all that, as they say in the urban media — a powerful ethnic muscle scented by bitter melon, the breezes of the local sea, and the sweaty needs of a tiny nation trying to breed itself into a future. Was it especially hairy? Good Lord, yes it was. Mountains of kinkiness black as the night above the Serengeti with paprika shoots at the edges: the pubic hair alone must have clocked in at half a kilo…

With honorable mention to Will, a fictional autobiography of the young Shakespeare, by Christopher Rush. Though even the Literary Review admits the novel is “beautifully written,” some of the passages challenges their uptight sense of propriety. We — being the dick-centric dick hounds that we are — are inescapably drawn to this bit of aubergine poetry:

Anne Hathaway’s cow-milking fingers, cradling my balls in her almond palm, now took pity on the poor anguished erection, and in the infinite agony of her desire, guided it to the quick of the wound. At the same time I searched wildly with the fingers of my left hand, groping blind as Cyclops, found the pulpy furred wetness, parted the old lips of time and slipped my middle finger into the sancta sanctorum. It welcomed me with soft sucking sounds, syllables older than language …

I clung like a mariner to her heaving haunches, the deep keel of her backbone dipping and lifting through July, through the green surge of growth … Our vessel ran shuddering onto the rocks, a wave of wetness ran through us, the air was rent with screams and I became aware that the bank on which we lay drenched and grounded was journey’s end, love’s end, the very sea-mark of our utmost sail.

Nurse, get me a compress!

As you must have surmised, only serious literature qualifies for the award — writing that either through its tone or the author’s pedigree aspires to greatest, to intellectual heft. So forget porn and romance novels and the sort of clunky potboilers sold at airports: Mere crudeness won’t cut it at the Bad Sex in Fiction Awards.

Even inspired crudeness, like the kind that came to life in the girl-sploitation films of the 50’s which adorn this page, has been blunted by age and so is disqualified — though, obviously, the winning passage must fish from the same malarial swamp, reeling in stranger and stranger bottom-feeders from the humid depths.

A brief survey of some past candidates for the uncoveted prize will be instructive — and hilarious — here:

From a thoughtful novel about a man with a permanent erection, The Enormity of the Tragedy by Quim Monzo:

She felt the cylinder rod of his plunger. Tried to work up a precise rhythm. Felt the sand sticking to her knees through her trousers. She and Lluis-Albert were all there was in the world; she swallowed him centimetre by centimetre (whenever a wave hit the beach) and then immediately let it go centimetre by centimetre (as each wave retreated).

From Fan Tan by Marlon Brando (who got the idea when he was filming a movie) and Donald Cammell (who turned Brando’s treatment into a novel)

“Oh, Lord,” he cried out. “I’m a-comin’!”

She could not answer. It is the one drawback of fellatio as conscientious as hers that it eliminates the chance for small talk and poetry alike. But nothing is exactly perfect in this life, and for Annie Doultry the delicate but firm pressure on his rear parts was in perfect harmony with the eruption of his cock. He came and he came — we are dealing with a hero here. At one point his lover backed away to inspect the unaltered gush of it, like a plumber saying to a customer, “Don’t blame me. This water supply will stop when the dam’s empty.”

From Winkler by Giles Coren

And he came hard in her mouth and his dick jumped around and rattled on her teeth and he blacked out and she took his dick out of her mouth and lifted herself from his face and whipped the pillow away and he gasped and glugged at the air, and he came again so hard that his dick wrenched out of her hand and a shot of it hit him straight in the eye and stung like nothing he’d ever had in there, and he yelled with the pain, but the yell could have been anything, and as she grabbed at his dick, which was leaping around like a shower dropped in an empty bath, she scratched his back deeply with the nails of both hands and he shot three more times, in thick stripes on her chest. Like Zorro.

And finally, we leave you on this very British note, from The First Casualty by Ben Elton.

And so they made love together in the pouring rain, with Nurse Murray emitting a stream of girlish exclamations which seemed to indicate that she was enjoying herself. “Gosh”, “Golly” and, as things moved towards a conclusion, even “Tally ho!”

Tally hooo!