Stick it in your orifice of choice in a suitably tasteless manner.

This is an excellent rebuttal of the the censorship-and-stifling-of-creativity-dressed-up-as-humorous-literary-concern that is the Bad Sex Awards. I've been very uncomfortable with the concept of the BSA for a long time, as you probably know if you follow me on Twitter and/or Tumblr. The Bad Sex Awards appear to take little account of the context of a 'bad' sex scene (if the sex being described seems less than stellar, or the character doing the describing does so in an off-putting manner, might that not tell us something about the character/s and/or what's happening to them, rather than automatically being grounds to point and sneer at the author?); and it raises all the usual points about the sort of people who spend their lives knocking down others' efforts instead of actually doing something worthwhile themselves:



Particularly worryingly, suggestions have begun to surface that it might be better to tone down or omit your sex scenes in order to avoid attention from the likes of the BSA committee - and that's what I meant by censorship and stifling. I think that's tragic - makes me want to play Prince Charming at top volume:


"Ridicule is nothing to be scared of..."

My other concerns with the Bad Sex Awards are summed up beautifully in these extracts from the article I linked at the top of this post (which is definitely worth reading in detail):

In the words of its founder, Auberon Waugh, the "prize" is for "redundant passages of sexual description in the modern novel" – a perfectly reasonable notion in itself but one that seems to have become confused. What exactly is "redundant"? It seems to me that anything that grapples head on with the sexual act can be considered so.

And this leads to a wider concern of mine: prudishness. There is something peculiarly and pitiably British about tittering along in the audience at the Bad Sex awards as hammed up actors make a mockery of earnest authors' attempts to render the mystique of the sexual experience. Certainly, it's a laugh. And granted, bad sex in fiction lends itself to parody and hilarity more than the depiction of most other parts of life. But I think this says as much about readers as it does about writers. After all, shouldn't sex be a part of fiction just as much as it is a part of life?

In a sense, my question is: what is good sex in fiction as opposed to mere pornography? (Which also leads me to ask: does good fiction suddenly stop becoming good if it's arousing?)

I've said it before and I'll say it again - ALL fiction is gratuitous, so why clutch our pearls over one element of it in particular? Sheer bloody prudishness. I suggest that any future winners of the BSA should publicly rejoice, because their winning proves that they were not cowed into giving their work a Puritan makeover; nor intimidated by those who style themselves as authorities on what constitutes 'good' art. One thing you do need for good sex (metaphorically and in some cases literally) is balls.